By Alan Keyes
Monday, May 14, 2007
Abraham Lincoln described the American Constitution as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." He recognized the sovereignty of the people as the essential characteristic of republican self-government.
The people exercise this sovereignty through periodic elections, in which they choose their representatives -- the legislators and magistrates who make and carry out the laws. Obviously, the reality of the people's sovereignty depends on the integrity of the elections, that is, on whether or not they represent a true choice by the people.
If their choice is decided by fraud or deceit, or preemptively determined by some other means, the exercise of sovereign power passes to the successful deceivers and manipulators, whoever they may be. In this event, the outward appearance of elections is simply a way of procuring the people's submission to the will of their actual rulers, which they more readily offer on account of the delusion that this will is the result of their own decision.
Now, everyone easily recognizes that a fraudulent election is not a free election. In the same way, they see through the sham of elections such as those held in the old Soviet Union, when a clique of Communist Party moguls decided who would be allowed to run for office. Those who limit the choices effectively determine the choice. Officials chosen in such elections may claim to represent the people who voted for them, but in fact true power rests with those who control access to the political arena.
At first glance, contemporary American elections seem free enough. In most cases, there appear to be uniform requirements for formal ballot access so that anyone with a modicum of information and support can run for office. In reality, however, the mere fact that someone's name appears on the ballot is no guarantee that his or her candidacy will appear as such to the electorate. On election day, some candidates will be generally known to the voters, while others will be candidates in name only, meaningless and insignificant.
The difference between the one and the other depends entirely on perceptions created and manipulated by two supposedly distinct but essentially identical factors: media and money. When it comes to so-called "paid media," their identity is undeniable. Though media pundits pretend to decry the vast importance of money in our political process, the trail of their tears leads directly to the bank.
Candidates spend the bulk of the money they raise on political advertising. We should see this as an obvious conflict of interest, since it gives the media outlets good reason to promote the candidates with the most money to spend on their services. Of course, we're supposed to believe that their editorial judgments are never corrupted by this self-interest. To encourage this belief, they promote the fiction that the so-called news media represents an independent source of political information.
Given the structure of the dominant media outlets in America today, it's hard to understand why this supposed claim of independence is still taken seriously. The broadcast media derives its resources almost entirely from advertising dollars. Those dollars depend on audiences gathered primarily by means of the entertainment value of its broadcasts, with the result that even the so-called news programs are more about entertainment than information.
The key to entertainment is of course to offer people immediate gratification -- to pique short-term interest by titillating the most accessible passions, including vicarious satisfaction of lust and greed and some relief from boredom. In general, this means that the so-called information media, including the elements that are supposed to provide political information, are part of the entertainment industry, and generally share its leftist and "politically correct" values and prejudices.
But even apart from this cultural bias, the entertainment imperative drives people in the media to present content in certain ways. They are governed primarily by the need to attract and hold their audience in the short term, not by any respect for the content or purpose of the information they convey. In fact, information is now more the by-product than the goal of their activity.
What is most important for our present reflection, however, is that the goal of the dominant entertainment imperative is simply to make money. Behind the glib pretense of reporting the "news," we find the venal reality that selects, packages, and where necessary distorts or even fabricates events in pursuit of greater readership, a higher audience share, or the quarter hour ratings that drive up TV advertising revenue.
Our concern here isn't just the biases, distortions, and fabrications that result from this profit motive. It's the fact that the news and information media share the profit-oriented priorities of the business world, along with the materialistic predilections that often characterize life and ambition in the corporate sector.
The ideological materialism of the left combines with this corporate materialism to produce a cultural environment that denigrates moral ideas and spiritual considerations even when they are essential to understanding people and events. Money is quietly accepted as the measure of all things, and anyone unwilling to sell their soul for this commodity is quietly despised for a fool, or feared as a living reproach against those whose main source of pride is that they sold out at a high price. (The latter not only derive income from their six and seven figure salaries, but from charging large speaking fees affordable mainly to corporate clients. It's ironic that public officials and candidates are required to divulge such sources of income, but influential media officials are not. If it's a source of possible corruption in one case, why not in the other?)
Thus whether directly, on account of the revenues from paid political advertising, or indirectly due to the domination of the entertainment culture, money power dominates the media. It's important to note, however, that the main reason this domination concerns me is not the possibility of media bias in favor of this or that corporate or other moneyed special interest. Rather, it's the fact that the money-oriented mindset favors a materialistic world view, one in which moral principles and values are secondary, or of no more than personal significance.
Besides engendering quiet contempt for candidates without fat campaign accounts, this also tends to produce contemptuous attitudes toward any understanding of issues that isn't based on materialism in some guise. Thus, so-called economic issues (jobs, welfare, Social Security) are regarded as appropriately political -- while moral issues (abortion, maintaining the moral basis for family life, for education, for liberty) are dismissed or denigrated as merely personal matters that don't belong in the political arena.
In addition, when discussing economic issues, money expenditure becomes the sole rubric of sincere concern, even when the problems being dealt with have a fundamental moral component that money cannot address.
For example, the breakdown of the family structure in poor urban communities leads to poverty, crime, mental and physical health problems for children, poor school performance, and a host of other problems. Years of government spending programs have made these problems worse, at least in part because the programs have discouraged marriage and facilitated irresponsible behavior in other ways. Despite these facts, the materialist mindset rejects discussion of the need to restore individual responsibility through approaches that emphasize faith and morals.
Border security offers another example. The materialists want us to see the issue of illegal immigration as simply a matter of economic aspiration -- good-hearted people seeking a better life for themselves in the United States by taking jobs that American citizens won't do. People are simply factors of production, to be exploited by employers seeking cheap labor to protect their profit margins.
But what about the millions of abortions that contribute to the prospect of a labor shortage? What of the impact of large communities of people with no allegiance to American constitutional values and moral principles? What of the far-reaching risks involved in having a long border we make no real effort to secure? Does it make sense to risk the lives of Americans fighting terrorist elements in Baghdad while letting them slip across our border without so much as a challenge?
Most issues involve questions that cannot be addressed by money or the administrative control of material things. Yet the materialist mindset that dominates the de facto screening process for candidates for public office eliminates or denigrates anyone who takes such questions seriously.
Unfortunately, the damage done is not just to a few individuals, but to the people as a whole, who end up on election day with no choices that represent their shared principles, their common sense of right and wrong, and of the importance of faith, family, and moral identity. As we settle for a choice of candidates that has less and less to do with our moral identity, we end up with officials who cannot understand or articulate the moral dimension of the challenges we face, and who therefore cannot represent or sustain the moral courage needed to deal with them.
Whether it's a national disaster like Hurricane Katrina, or a challenge to our national security like terrorism, such moral courage is indispensable to our survival as a free people. Perhaps a little more consideration of leadership failures in these vital areas will help us to understand this better.
The 2008 presidential election cycle is well under way, hurried along by decisions of more populous states like New York and California to move their primaries to February 5, 2008...
Because our understanding of politics has been corrupted, we cannot discuss what threatens our political sovereignty until we free ourselves from the effects of that corruption. It's as if we are looking at our political life through lenses or panes of glass that obscure and distort everything we see, including the nature of our own actions...
2007 Alan Keyes
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