Why are We Going Unhinged?

“If the Democratic Party—the only party that still supports democratic values and at least tries to solve problems—can muster the discipline and the will, it can run in 2022 and 2024 on ending the stranglehold of unhinged, minority rule.”—Jennifer Rubin, “Our gun epidemic is a symptom of our broken democracy,” Washington Post, May 25, 2022.

I’ve read no better and more succinct description of what ails our democracy than Rubin’s column quoted above. It’s well worth a read. But it focuses on the “what,” not the “why.”

All by itself, the “what” is a catastrophe. A substantial fraction of American voters believes absolutely loopy things. Among them are that: (1) the last election was stolen, (2) there was massive electoral fraud in the widest and fairest casting of ballots in US history; (3) global warming is a hoax; (4) Covid-19 is not so bad, more like a mild flu; (5) the mRNA vaccines, although among the safest and most effective in medical history, are more dangerous than Covid-19; (6) those vaccines contain microchips to invade your privacy; (7) there is a conspiracy among left-leaning politicians to “import” people of color to “replace” non-Hispanic whites; (8) kindergartens and grammar schools are teaching kids critical race theory (a law-school subject) and “grooming” them for alternative sexual identities and (9) politicians want to take guns away from law-abiding people to impose greater control and destroy freedom.

Not every right-wing voter believes these things, and not even every radical right-winger believes all of them. But far too many individuals believe at least one or more to call our national society sane.

And I won’t even mention the conspiracy theories about Satanic pedophile rings or Jewish space lasers (for which there’s now even a sardonic shoulder patch). The notion that yet more guns, carried by yet more untrained people yet more freely and secretly, will somehow stem our rising tide of gun massacres, is just another in this long list of irrational beliefs tending toward Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

That’s the “what.”

Something seems to be driving Americans literally crazy, all at once. Could it be something like the lead in ancient Rome’s drinking water, which produced a succession of crazy emperors, including Nero, Caligula and Commodus? The Roman Emperors and elite drank water from lead pipes, while ordinary people drank water from clean concrete fountains. So Roman society decayed from the top. Here, in contrast, it seems to be decaying from the bottom, although far too many politicians foment and encourage the insanity. Maybe it’s a side effect of all those endocrine disruptors and other dicey plastics (BPA, PFAS, etc.) that we American produce and use far more than any other nation.

But one thing is sure: we can’t fix our epidemic of insanity until we know what’s causing it. Otherwise, we’ll just be playing a game of whack-a-mole with each new paranoid fantasy, denial of reality and conspiracy theory that comes up. So far, we have no reason to believe that the creativity and imagination of the human mind are failing, or that political operatives and PR mavens will somehow run out of false and crazy ideas.

So it’s about time to shift our focus from the “what” to the “why.” Why are so many people believing so many crazy things that just aren’t so, and why are our so-called “leaders” tolerating, encouraging and even fomenting the insanity? For a nation that rose to greatness as a global power by relying on practical thinking, science and technology, our current toleration for insanity hardly seems characteristic.

Chronology is not causation. But it may help to consider beginnings. When did things start to go south for us? If you think about it, you’ll probably come up with the same answer I did: a little over a decade ago.

In 2009, we had a new President named Obama. The nation breathed hope for positive change. In 2010, Obamacare became law, and millions more could see a doctor without financial distress. In May 2011, Obama sent a team of Navy Seals that killed Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9/11. That feat had eluded us for over eleven years, including both terms of George W. Bush as president.

So things seemed to be going pretty well as recently as ten years ago. They were going so well that, I speculated, Americans would start seeing Barack Obama as “One of Us,” despite his odd name, skin color, and Kenyan father.

Then something hit the fan. In short order, Republicans began scorched-Earth opposition to Obamacare, trying to repeal it (with nothing to replace it) over fifty times. The “birther” lie that Obama isn’t an American rose out of the cesspool of fringe politics. A lifelong grifter and showman named Donald Trump picked it up. Somehow, this same showman—with zero political experience and marked tendencies to lie, cheat and incite hate—became the next president of the United States.

Many of the very same working people who had voted for Obama voted for the showman. In short order came our new president’s love affairs with Putin and Kim, the biggest tax cuts for the rich in recent history, his attempt to extort a foreign leader (now the hero of Ukraine), his loss and refusal to accept it, the Big Lie that he really had won, the January 6 insurrection, and two impeachment trials that he did win. Now the Grand Old Party is in apparent thrall to a man who seems to value only personal fealty to himself as cult leader.

How did this all happen? How did the hopeful, practical, problem-solving America of only a decade or so ago decay into the sordid, irrational, superstitious mess we see today? I have a theory, so bear with me.

In 2010, the Supreme Court decided the case of Citizens United v. Federal Election Committee. A lot has been written about how wrong-headed, impractical and downright evil this decision was. But to my knowledge, few have touched the nub of the matter.

In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are “persons” and so enjoy plenary rights under the First Amendment. It therefore stuck down statutory restrictions on how much money corporate businesses can donate to political campaigns.

But though corporations may be persons in the eyes of the law, they most definitely are not people. Corporations have no biological bodies, no consciences, no philosophies of life, no brains, no hearts, no blood, and no personalities. They are legal abstractions, except insofar as they reflect the will of their officers, directors and shareholders.

But therein lies the rub. Corporations exist for one purpose only: to make money for shareholders.

Early twentieth-century judges so ruled, and nothing in the interim has debunked that notion—at least not the feckless and unenforceable recent white paper of The Business Roundtable. If an officer or director of a corporation cannot make a profit, or cannot make as much of a profit as a rival, he or she will soon be out.

Profit is the prime directive of these “persons.” It’s the fundamental cause of virtually everything they do. So what’s the effect? What do corporate bosses actually do as they apply this prime directive, exploiting the Supreme-Court-given right to spend money on politics without limit?

First of all, bosses want to lower taxes. That’s practically a prime directive in itself, because taxes come directly out of corporate bottom lines.

Corporate bosses also want to reduce regulation. This do so no matter how socially, medically, and practically necessary or beneficial a regulation may be. Why? Because regulation costs money. It costs money to oppose regulatory proposals through lobbying and lawsuits. It costs money to comply with regulations once adopted. It costs money just to understand and apply the rules. Regulations invariably lower profits and distract management from its primary task: conceiving, making and selling goods and services for a profit.

So there you have it. Sometimes corporate bosses support political initiatives irrespective of profit, such as diversifying the workforce. Sometime they realize that government initiatives can make their business easier and increase its profit, as in the case of improved transportation infrastructure. But these are exceptions to the rule, often on the bosses’ personal initiatives. And they are ever subject to scrutiny from other officers, directors and shareholders for their impact on profit.

The routinely dismal fate of non-management shareholder initiatives at annual meetings tells the tale. Most die aborning. Why? Institutional investors hold most of the shares of public companies today, and they are interested in profit, not social progress or doing extraneous good. Often institutional shareholders don’t even care precisely what the firms whose stock they hold do, make or sell, as long as they make money.

How does this scenario corrupt and cheapen American politics? The answer is as simple as cause and effect. The prime corporate directives are to cut taxes and regulations, so any means to that end is fair game. Whatever pols can get people to believe, whatever fervor or hate they can incite, is unimportant, as long as the pols get elected and “represent the people” by voting to cut taxes and regulations. For corporations, so-called “small government” is not just something abstractly desirable, as it was to our King-obsessed Founders. It’s pretty much the whole ball game.

Take abortion, for example. For about four decades, Republicans have demagogued the issue to get “pro-lifers” on their side. While some corporate bosses may be evangelicals or Catholics and may act out of personal conviction, it’s now cliché that a dominant majority of our people supports abortion with sensible restrictions. There’s no reason to suppose that corporate bosses as a class are substantially different in their views.

So why do many big corporations support candidates who rabidly oppose abortion, when their officers and directors are, by and large, wealthier, better educated and more sophisticated than the average voter, and therefore less likely to view medical/social issues from a fundamentalist perspective? The answer is clear: they support rabid pro-life candidates if and as long as they toe the Republican line against taxes and regulation.

Gun control is similar. How many highly-educated, workaholic corporate bosses do you think are gun fanatics? How many do you think spend their rare free moments at the shooting range or hunting, as compared to golfing, watching professional sports, dining out, or going to concerts, theater, movies or the opera?

Someone should take a survey. But I’d be willing to wager that the average corporate CEO, CFO, COO or active director cares as much about the ability to own an automatic weapon or to carry a concealed weapon on the street as he or she does about critical race theory or Jewish space lasers. What does raise his or her professional interest intensely is any attempt to raise taxes or impose regulations that will adversely affect the business he or she devotes nearly every waking hour to.

So here’s how Citizens United actually works in practice. Corporate businesses make money by developing, making and selling goods and services to every one of us. They sell us everything from banking and insurance to iPhones, cars, trucks, travel and vacations.

All of this, in theory, has nothing to do with politics. But the amount of money corporations make is huge. According to our own Bureau of Economic Analysis, the grand total of US adjusted corporate profit for calendar year 2021 was $ 11.2 trillion. And that’s just from domestic industries, not their foreign manufacturing. It’s also profit, not revenue. So in theory every penny of it is available for bosses to spend on political candidates of their choice. By removing all government-imposed limits on political donations by corporations, Citizens United made around $11.2 trillion available annually for corporations to spend on politics.

Citizens United removed all external, government restraints on corporate giving to pols. But what internal restraints might there be? Suppose a corporate CEO proposed giving $ 1 million to a candidate or organization, for example, to restrict immigration or find a cure for cancer. Unless those initiatives had something to do with the corporation’s business, other officers, directors and shareholders would no doubt object. A shareholder “gadfly” might even introduce a resolution at the annual meeting to prohibit such an expenditure, and the resolution might pass because the expense would be outside the scope of the corporation’s operations. In contrast, a lobbying or political expense to reduce taxes or regulation is never outside the scope of the corporation's operations because, if successful, it would improve the corporation’s bottom line.

Thus Citizens United has one direct effect and two indirect ones. First, it directly encourages corporations, collectively, to spend what’s arguably the biggest single pot of money outside the US Treasury on political donations to cut taxes and regulation. Second, it indirectly discourages corporations from making similar expenses on anything else that doesn’t directly affect the corporation’s operations. Finally, Citizens United encourages corporate bosses to ignore how political leaders reach the goals of reducing taxes and regulations, as long as they get there.

Anyway, aren’t letting contractors and donees do things their own way part of the code of business people in general? The end result is to encourage pols and organizations, with real money, to drive voters crazy as long as they support “smaller government,” without regard to any deleterious effects on society, education or popular contact with reality.

The effect is the same for any nonsense or distraction that promotes lower taxes and less regulation, however crazy it may seem. Think that a man or woman running a multinational corporation doesn’t know that no one teaches critical race theory in grammar schools? that no teacher is “grooming” toddlers to become gay, bisexual, transexual, or “non-binary”? Think that these highly educated, international sophisticates are worried that people of color are going to replace the white race in America? when they often hire non-white people deliberately for the skills they have? Yet with their corporate campaign dollars, they support candidates who spew these lies and nonsense in service of their primary goals: cutting taxes and regulation.

What inspired this blog post was a WaPo article about Elise Stefanik, a New York Congresswoman. She’s also the third-ranking Republican in the House. Yet in her campaign advertisements, she reported invoked, if not endorsed, the “great replacement theory”—that Democrats and others are importing people of color to replace whites. After she did this, no less than twenty- two prestigious American corporations reportedly donated to her campaign through PACs.

The corporate donors included luminaries like UBS Americas, Price Waterhouse Coopers (accountants and consultants, for God’s sake), Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, GAP, UPS, Federal Express, General Motors, Pfizer and Walgreens. The total amount they contributed to Stefanik was $144,000.

Think about that. According census projections, non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the US by 2045. So right now, they and the rest of us are nearing parity in numbers. If you wanted to undermine and weaken our nation and our people in a hurry, what better way than to turn two huge groups of roughly equal size against each other, based on nothing more than their identity. Divide and conquer: it’s a strategy as old as Caesar.

I’ll bet Putin wishes he’d thought of this first. Right now, he’s probably ordering his troll farms to work overtime to incite the “great replacement” dissension, with all hands on deck.

So why are a “who’s who” of great American corporations doing Putin’s work with their campaign contributions? Are they racists who subscribe to the “great replacement theory” just like denizens of the extreme white-supremacist fringe? Not hardly. They’re wealthy, highly-educated sophisticates at the top of their games and at the top of our American social order.

So why do they support this garbage? Apparently, they just don’t care. They may not even notice. All they care about is cutting taxes and regulations.

If a candidate supports that—as most, if not all, of Republicans do—the corporate bosses just don’t care what else he or she says or does to get elected. They’ll even support someone like Stefanik with one hand while, with the other, they give liberally to causes like racial justice, no doubt in part for the charitable deductions. (These very same corporations reportedly did just that.)

So there you have Citizens United in a nutshell. Our Supreme Court gave corporations unlimited rights of free speech like people. But they’re not people.

Real people care about a lot of things, including work, family, education, health, community, worship, social peace, and country. Corporations care only about profit. So as long as a pol is for cutting taxes and regulations, he or she can get corporate money by telling lies, fomenting hate, inciting insurrection, and making voters believe utter nonsense. If this is “leadership,” it’s the kind once ascribed to the Devil.

Of course the corporations who hand out the money have accomplices in our nation’s decline. Social media have made it far easier than ever before to promulgate lies, hate, disinformation and confusion. But social media themselves could not survive without the corporate and political advertising that is busy driving our people mad. They feed upon each other.

In all of the Supreme Court’s history, there is only one decision, in my view, with an equally catastrophic effect on our nation as a whole. It was Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). There the Court decided that a fugitive slave, as a Black man, had no rights under the American Constitution and so could be forced back into bondage, even from a “free” state.

That decision was catastrophic for innumerable reasons. At an abstract level, it contradicted our Founding credo (in our Declaration, not the Constitution), that “all men are created equal.” It undermined the Enlightenment’s notion of universal human rights on which our nation was Founded. But it also had a terrible practical effect: it made the Civil War inevitable.

By forcing Abolitionists in “free states” to return fugitive slaves or face punishment, it denied freedom not just to slaves themselves, but to everyone in so-called “free” states. After Dred Scott, nowhere in America could citizens act on slavery as their consciences bid. There was really no such thing as a “free” state. The “states rights” of slaveholding Southerners trumped both Northerners’ consciences and “free” states’ rights.

In effect, the slaveholding South had told the North and West: “our way of life will prevail, and you will help us maintain it, however abhorrent or immoral you may think it.” And the US Supreme Court had gone along. At that point, war was the only possible outcome; the South starting it was just a fluke of history.

Citizens United was and is similarly catastrophic, and it’s not easy to see a political way out. Amending the Constitution to restrain corporate influence on politics is politically impossible, and packing the Supreme Court or restricting its jurisdiction (as the Constitution permits) is only slightly less so.

Consumer boycotts may have their place, but their scope is limited. Take a look at the list of corporate sponsors of Stefanik in the WaPo piece. High on the list are a huge bank, a multinational accounting firm, an Internet-entertainment conglomerate, a multinational tobacco company, General Motors, and two big delivery services (UPS and Federal Express).

As I look at this list of twenty-two corporations that supported Stefanik’s campaign, I see only one that I patronize directly: Home Depot. I use UPS and Federal Express indirectly when firms like Amazon send me things, but I don’t usually have any control over the delivery service. Anyway, is DHL an alternative? My wife gets her Internet from Comcast, but what’s the alternative? We switched from AT&T because it was much worse in her area, basically dysfunctional.

So what could I do? I could cut up my Home Depot credit card, send the pieces by registered mail to Home Depot’s CEO, and explain why I plan henceforth to buy my home improvement supplies from Lowe’s, Amazon, or the few local hardware stores that support my community. I could close my letter with a ringing sentence: “At the end of the day, I’d rather fail to improve my home than destroy my country, as your political contributions are helping to do.”

But the best, most eloquent letter from a single customer would have little effect. The only thing that might motivate change is an organized boycott. And that would have to come from people with experience and skill in organizing. I have none.

The crux of the matter is that corporations are replacing government, worldwide, as the source of goods, services and the benefits of life, and therefore of economic power. I have written on this general topic here (on the upside) and here (on the downside). The saving grace of “corporate rule” is that corporations have to take people’s real needs into account when they sell their goods and services. When they make political contributions, they don’t have to, and they generally don’t.

That was the fatal flaw of Citizens United, and it may yet destroy our democracy. The only antidotes that I can see now are collective action by citizens, customers, unionized employees, and political activists and reporters who expose corporate support for extremists, nihilists and haters.


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