Expository Essay

Money and Politics is like Bread and Butter….NOT

Climate change is lining up well with the disintegration of the American political climate. As global warming ravages the planet extreme partisan views polarize America further and further apart. Because in a democracy politicians win by appealing to the most voters, politicians have begun to cater to these polarizing American political views. From the erudite liberal hipster sipping his five dollar coffee to the religious conservative farmer American politicians must choose how to sell themselves and decide which subset of the population is worth winning over. Political psychology has become an interdisciplinary academic field that aims to understand political behavior from a psychological perspective. It makes sense to have a field dedicated to understanding this branch of psychology because politicians have a unique duty to change the way they act to please their citizens. The American political process becomes corrupted at the point where politicians are no longer elected public servants but instead tabula rasa suits whom money holds complete control over.

Preliminary research into the current state of the American political process suggests that

recent surge in political money is a result of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in 2010. Kristin Sullivan of the Connecticut General Assembly sums the decision up well writing “the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions have the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment” (Sullivan). The court extended this “same political speech rights” to mean inordinate amounts of campaign funding are also permitted. The Citizens United decision makes the government less responsive to the people living in this country because of an influx of money from independent expenditures. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the total amount spent during Federal elections increased from 5.2 billion in 2008 to 6 billion in 2012 with independent expenditures increasing from 146 million to a little over a billion, more than accounting for the change (Center for Responsive Politics). This increase is particularly daunting because it highlights the funding increase in one year; what could come thiry, or one hundred years down the road is scary to say the least.

Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig explains, “The framers intended Congress to be ‘dependent upon the People alone.’ But the private funding of public campaigns has bred within Congress a second, and conflicting, dependency. That conflicting dependency directs their focus more and more toward the challenge of raising money” (Lessig). This dependency weakens our governmental institutions which is definitionally institutional corruption. An additional problem with the flow of money into democratic elections is voter turnout. According to the Brennan Center, 80 percent of Americans disapprove of the Citizens United decision. This opposition is bipartisan; disapproval percentage registers in the high seventies to low eighties for both parties. The Brennan Center goes on to explain that 70 percent of Americans believe Super PAC spending will lead to corruption and according to that same study, 1 in 4 Americans said that they were less likely to vote. To make it worse, these numbers were statistically significantly higher among minorities compared to whites (Brennan Center).

The ramifications of increased campaign spending are quite visible in the 2016 presidential election which is forecasted to be the most money saturated one yet. Ben Carson, retired neurosurgeon gone Tea Party poster boy, raised 13.5 million dollars in the first round of funding in 2014 before he announced that he was even considering running for president (Time). This means that now when enough powerful Americans, likely White business men, get together and say “we like this person” they can essentially force them to run. Carson has explicitly stated that he doesn’t have much skin in the game when it comes to being president; he feels obligated to run because so many people gave him stupendous sums of money to run on their behalf. Carson is a one of the few preeminent black neurosurgeons most well known for performing the first surgery to separate siamese twins conjoined at the head. It his infamous story, of growing up impoverished in Detroit and becoming rich, that political funders cling to (Carson 20). Money corrupts politics by allowing those with it to delegate who runs, however what’s worse is that money lets the rich construct their politicians. “Constructing” a politician happens when there is money floating around to be awarded and politicians change who they are to win the rich over. Something clearly doesn’t add up when Ben Carson, a man who relied heavily on public programs growing up, has a campaign platform rooted in extreme spending cuts (Carson 91).

The democratic process relies on voters endorsing candidates they trust to act in the best interest of the United States. Of course, that “best interest” is up for debate and that is why there are competing political ideologies. The problem with money saturating the democratic process is that a vote is no longer an endorsement of a set of ideas; instead, a vote is increasingly the product of campaign financing and may become solely a marker of wealth in the future.

Works Cited

"The 2012 Election: Our Price Tag (Finally) for the Whole Ball of Wax." Opensecrets RSS. Center for Responsive Politics, 13 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 May 2015.

Altman, Alex. "Ben Carson: The GOP's Accidental Candidate for President." Time. Time, 4 May 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.

Carson, Ben, and Cecil Murphey. Gifted Hands. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990. Print.

Lessig, Lawrence. "Democracy After Citizens United." Boston Review. N.p., 9 Sept. 2010. Web. 22 May 2015.

"National Survey: Super PACs, Corruption, and Democracy | Brennan Center for Justice." Brennan Center for Justice. Brennan Center, 24 Apr. 2012. Web. 22 May 2015.

Sullivan, Kristen. "SUMMARY OF CITIZENS UNITED V. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION." SUMMARY OF CITIZENS UNITED V. FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION. Connecticut General Assembly, 2 Mar. 2012. Web. 19 May 2015.