It was always elegiac in tone, a tribute to those who, win or lose, sought elected office. I honored the way they sacrificed hours, days, months and even years of their lives and those of their families so they could speak for others and shine a light on sights that otherwise might go unseen.
That seemed to me to be the essence of representative self-government—this willingness on the part of ordinary people to accept responsibility for interests larger and more varied than their own.
I loved writing that column.
It made me feel good about this country and better about politics. Crafting it reminded me that, however short of our aspirations our execution might fall, we still were trying to do something noble.
That we were, to use Abraham Lincoln’s own elegiac phrase, “the last best hope of earth.”
But I can’t write that column now.
Our political campaigns have become too mean—too amoral—for me to say anything nice about them. It is as if we have forgotten entirely how to consult “the better angels of our nature,” to rely on Lincoln once again.
Almost every campaign now seeks not to elevate its own candidate but instead to destroy the opposition. Each escalation of unadulterated nastiness serves as its own justification for still greater toxicity as each political salvo further corrodes both our public discourse and the very notion that can govern ourselves.
When Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate to be Ohio’s next governor, released an ad that exploited the sexual assaults and other abuse his Democratic opponent, Dr. Amy Acton, endured as a child, there was outrage.
But little surprise.
We have been on our way to this point through a lot of campaigns and over many, many years.
As much as I would love to blame this painful disintegration of our public culture on the candidates and their staffs alone, they are more products of the trend than the cause.
Put another way, we have been getting more and more sewer-level candidates such as Ramaswamy because we work within a system that rewards and promotes them.
A large part of the problem is the obscene amount of money flowing into our campaigns. One individual—Elon Musk, another moral and ethical quagmire—is pouring close to a half-billion dollars into this election cycle.
Much of that cash is the infamous “dark money” made both possible and famous by a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding campaign donations, a series that culminated with the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010.
The overall thrust of these rulings has been that money is speech and therefore entitled to First Amendment protection—but with one important caveat.
These expenditures are supposedly independent—I may deal with the question of just how independent they really are in a future column—and they cannot endorse a candidate.
But suppose you are a person of great wealth who wants to influence the outcome of an election and you cannot legally promote the candidacy of the person you want to see win. Is there another option for you?
There is.
If you cannot endorse your chosen candidate, you’re not helpless. You can denigrate and demean your candidate’s opponent to destroy the other campaign’s plausibility.
Negative campaigning always has been part of American life. A stream of vitriol has run through our elections since the days of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
But, thanks to Citizens United, that stream has become a constant flood.
I understand the reasoning behind the position that money is speech—namely, that people should be able to do what they want with their own money and that limiting how they spend it abridges rights of free expression.
That is one way to look at it.
The other is that these decisions mean that Musk, the world’s first trillionaire, has more First Amendment rights than the people of the 44 states that have smaller net worths than he does.
Because our system asserts that he has more rights, we have turned our public square into a cesspool and urged the slimiest creatures to crawl out and run for office.
The saddest thing is that we did this to ourselves by elevating abstract principle over concrete reality.
Man, I do miss writing those feel-good columns.
