‘Their idols are silver and gold…’
I’ve been enjoying Raj Patel’s new book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System. In the midst of discussing the power food corporations have over governments, he says the following:
When agribusiness gives money to politicians, it sometimes buys politicians themselves. ‘Dwayne Andreas just owns me,’ confessed Robert Strauss, a board member of Archer Daniels Midland, and a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 1985. ‘But I mean that in a nice way.’
For his part, Andreas thinks of political donations as tithing: ‘I consider politics to be just like the church,’ he confessed. It’s a helpful analogy. If the benign, silent and ultimate authority in the Church is the Almighty, what is His analogue in politics? The analogue would need to be something that can’t speak for itself, that breeds interpreters to speak and truck on its behalf and that, ultimately, commands absolute allegiance from all those concerned, to the extent that any criticism of the entity absolutely prohibits membership of the broader community of politics. Let us call it ‘the national interest’. The national interest has no self-evident form or substance, but it has its high priests and oracles, to whom a tithe can secure a more favourable dispensation. And as with the medieval grace of the Almighty, the national interest has tended to bestow itself on the rich, rather than the poor. (pp. 112-113)
Now obviously I don’t think God is like that; but it seems hard for me to deny that “national interest” is an idol, and a quite potent one in today’s political climate. Sad that some Christians don’t recognize this while secular thinkers see it clearly…
I think the problem is that in too many places too many people fuse nationalism with religion. If people weave the two of them together, it’s hard to hold the “national interest” up for criticism without looking like you are taking a swipe at your religion. It’s fascinating that after WWI, the Imperial War Graves Commission chose a cross inlaid with a sword as a symbol to commemorate the fallen. Of course it’s less tacky than the billboard I found here: http://civitatedei.wordpress.com/2008/02/13/defining-we/
This shows that we need transparency in government. Any donations to politicians, political parties or special advocacy groups should be publicly accessible for free. (Oddly enough, that was the reason that the McCain-Feingold act passed in the States. It was easier for the politicians to increase the complexity of campaign donations rather than make them transparent.)
Matthew, I think the problem is structural. The process to nominate and then elect candidates in the United States is far too drawn out. That requires massive amounts of money. There is simply no way around it, you need to have a year or two of expensive ad buys, stickers, signs, buses, etc. Along as that situation persists, candidates will be beholden to wealthy special interests.
Additionally, in Canada and in most other Western democracies the typical riding or district for lower-house members (assuming a bicameral legislature) is fairly close to 100,000. In the US it is 650,000-700,000. Individual representatives have correspondingly larger campaign costs.
For all that the American system does well (and it does do many things well) there are also significant problems with it.
Structural problems may well exist. If so, they are not the same in importance as transparency problems. Sure campaign costs are a problem, but how would one go about solving them without first dealing with transparency issues?