The next president of the United States will confront a virulent jihadist threat, mounting effects of climate change, and an economy becoming ever more unequal.
We’re going to need an especially wise and able leader.
Yet our process for choosing that person is a circus, and
several leading candidates are clowns.
How have we come to this?
First, anyone with enough ego and money can now run for
president.
This wasn’t always the case. Political parties used to sift
through possible candidates and winnow the field.
Now the parties play almost no role. Anyone with some very
wealthy friends can set up a Super PAC. According to a recent New York Times
investigation, half the money to finance the 2016 election so far has come from
just 158 families.
Or if you’re a billionaire, you can finance your own campaign.
And if you’re sufficiently outlandish, outrageous, and
outspoken, a lot of your publicity will be free.
Since he announced his
candidacy last June, Trump hasn’t spent any money at all on television advertising.
Second, candidates can now get away with saying just about anything about their qualifications or personal history, even if it’s a boldface lie.
This wasn’t always the case, either. The media used to
scrutinize what candidates told the public about themselves.
A media expose could bring a candidacy to a sudden halt (as it
did in 1988 for Gary Hart, who had urged reporters to follow him if they didn’t
believe his claims of monogamy).
But when today’s media expose a candidates lies, there seems to
be no consequence. Carson’s poll numbers didn’t budge after revelations he had
made up his admission to West Point.
The media also used to evaluate candidates’ policy proposals,
and those evaluations influenced voters.
Now the media’s judgments are largely shrugged off. Trump says
he’d “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, round up all undocumented
immigrants in the United States and send them home, and erect a wall along the
entire U.S.-Mexican border.
Editors and columnists find these proposals ludicrous but that
doesn’t seem to matter.
Fiorina says she’ll stop Planned Parenthood from “harvesting”
the brains of fully formed fetuses. She insists she saw an undercover video of
the organization about to do so.
The media haven’t found any such video but no one seems to care.
Third and finally, candidates can now use hatred and bigotry to
gain support.
Years ago respected opinion leaders stood up to this sort of
demagoguery and brought down the bigots.
In the 1950s, the eminent commentator Edward R. Murrow revealed
Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy to be a dangerous incendiary, thereby helping
put an end to McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.
In the 1960s, religious leaders and university presidents
condemned Alabama Governor George C. Wallace and other segregationist zealots –
thereby moving the rest of America toward integration, civil rights, and voting
rights.
But when today’s presidential candidates say Muslim refugees
shouldn’t be allowed into America, no Muslim should ever be president, and
undocumented workers from Mexico are murderers, they get away with it.
Paradoxically, at a time when the stakes are especially high for
who becomes the next president, we have a free-for-all politics in which anyone
can become a candidate, put together as much funding as they need, claim
anything about themselves no matter how truthful, advance any proposal no
matter how absurd, and get away bigotry without being held accountable.
Why? Americans have stopped trusting the mediating institutions
that used to filter and scrutinize potential leaders on behalf of the rest of
us.
Political parties are now widely disdained.
Many Americans now consider the “mainstream media” biased.
And no opinion leader any longer commands enough broad-based
respect to influence a majority of the public.
A growing number of Americans have become convinced the entire
system is rigged – including the major parties, the media, and anyone honored
by the establishment.
So now it’s just the candidates and the public, without anything
in between.
Which means electoral success depends mainly on showmanship and
self-promotion.
Telling the truth and advancing sound policies are less
important than trending on social media.
Being reasonable is less useful than gaining attention.
Offering rational argument is less advantageous than racking up
ratings.
Such circus politics may be fun to watch, but it’s profoundly
dangerous for America and the world.
We might, after all, elect one of the clowns.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor’s Professor of
Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at
the Blum Center for Developing Economies, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet
secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including
the best sellers “Aftershock, “The Work of Nations," and"Beyond
Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine
and chairman of Common Cause. His film, INEQUALITY FOR ALL is available on
Netflix, iTunes, Amazon. His new book, "SAVING CAPITALISM: For the Many,
Not the Few" is out 9/29.
