Image: blog.timesunion.com,  

The May 13 New York Times feature “Sunday Dialogue: Making Taxation Fairer” included some intelligent suggestions on the topic, but what struck me was a deeper current of pessimism that girded the entire discussion.  The pessimism percolated up to the article subhead, “Readers offer ideas for tax reform but doubt it will happen.” One of these readers, David Berman, of New York, wrote two remarkable sentences that deserve a life beyond a letter.

            He wrote:

What we are now living through is a crisis of counterreformation, in which the corrosive influence of money in our politics, made quasi-legitimate by the Supreme Court’s catastrophic decision in Citizens United, has made the government more responsive to the donor than to the voter. It has made the democracy nearly moot.

Is democracy “nearly moot,” and if so what should we do about it?  Does “the corrosive influence of money in our politics” render our votes nearly meaningless?  It is difficult to conclude that democracy is anything but degraded by the fact that Congress, and many state legislatures, are “more responsive to the donor than to the voter.”  Common Cause has been saying that for a generation.  Berman is largely correct. It is worse now, and it has been quasi-legitimized by Citizen’s United.

            The funny thing is that Citizen’s United was decided by a Supreme Court that was legitimized by the imprimatur of the ballot box.  Elect a president, get a justice.  So we can be pretty sure democracy is not entirely moot, even as its secondary effects degrade democracy.  The cure for Citizen’s United is more democracy, real democracy of the type that decides close elections.  Yet the perception that democracy is nearly moot serves in large part to suppress participation in the democratic process.

            That isn’t to say that dissatisfied citizens aren’t free to take to the streets and vote and contribute to grassroots campaigns that at minimum stand a snowball’s chance in Hell.  What a nearly moot democracy needs, in short, is more democracy.

            The Tea Party has to a large degree made the Old Republican Party “nearly moot,” while returning to its paleoconservative roots of the 19^th Century and, more precisely, the populist right of the 1930s.  It seeks to prove that democracy is not nearly moot by attempting to use the vote to dismantle government.  You see it in so-called Republican candidates who say things like “the Constitution authorizes government to just two things,” whatever they happen to think those two things are.  That’s the Tea Party at work attempting to prove that democracy is not nearly moot.

            Thomas Jefferson and H.L. Mencken both said we get the government we deserve. That sentiment is truer than many who hate government would care to admit.  We deserve to have our electoral muscle trumped by corrosive money because we allow it.  But we have moved too far from a defensible balance of what is called free speech toward an outcome, either way, of bought and sold politicians. Many despair of ever righting the ship of state.  That fear makes sense in the present political moment.

            The letter writers in the Sunday Dialogue exercise were pointing out that we have moved beyond gridlock, beyond existential paralysis, to the capture of government, zombie government.  Without swift boatloads of money you cannot run for high office, period.

            John O. Fox, author of “10 Tax Questions the Candidates Don’t Want You to Ask,” whose initial letter kicked off the dialogue, wrote a follow-up stating, “Trillions of dollars of debt pile up because Congress refuses to require Americans to pay for the programs they want or the wars we fight.”  And we seem, at all costs, incapable of settling the big questions with any alacrity.

            Yet, city councils, county boards, and sometimes even state legislatures, prevail, against heavy odds, to solve some of our problems.  That, too, is democracy. It’s not nearly moot.

            On the other hand, Citizen’s United perfectly suits the needs of one-percenters like billionaire Joe Ricketts and Big  Frackers like Continental Resources Inc., whose CEO Harold Hamm recently became Mitt Romney's top energy adviser, contributing $985,000 to a Super Pac supporting him.  We have little to no defense against that in the aggregate.  In the end, you rarely beat Big Money.  I am concerned that we will not until things get much worse.  Like in Greece.

            Mr. Fox doesn’t say that’s were we are heading, but he says that income taxes must rise after the 2012 presidential election as the economy  continues to recover, assuming it continues to recover.  Of course he’s right that taxes must rise.  We’re facing a mountain of deficit and debt.  He says that the middle class will eventually have to shoulder part of that burden no matter what.  But wait, if the Republicans win that’s impossible.  Is this, I wonder, how we will find our way to Greece, as the debt incurred to fund the government, including the stimulus commitments made during the recession, spiral out of control because we simply refuse to pay?

            Anyone with half a brain knows the federal government doesn’t just do two things, whatever they are.  And anyone with half a brain knows that you can’t address the debt we have accumulated by cuts alone.

            The tragedy of democratic rule is that it is so reactive.  Things have to get really bad before they get any better, if they get better. So what do we do about our nearly moot democracy?  To some extent, we do what we have always done:  we throw the bums out.  And, as our financial crisis begins to spiral out of control—as it might given sufficient paralysis and legislative degradation—we will attempt eleventh-hour Grecian Formula fixes.  But it would be so nice, just once, if we could muster the resolve to diminish the corrosive effects of big money through responsible regulation.  Of course, it seems that in order to do that, we will have to wait out the bums already on the Supreme Court, the bums who took their seats as an indirect result of nearly moot democracy in action.