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11. Principalities and Powers: Battling for a New Constitution and a New Politics
- The University of Alabama Press
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• eleven • Principalities and Powers Battling for a New Constitution and a New Politics Alabama politics is a mess, an embarrassment to ethical men and women who run for office, a disgrace to the state’s people, a hog-trough of corruption where it seems that holding public office is an apprenticeship for the state penitentiary. Alabamians ridicule influencepeddling in Chicago and Illinois, when in fact those guys are pikers compared to our unworthies in Alabama. Citizens who agree on nothing else overwhelmingly affirm that they are disgusted with the state’s political leadership. Amid all the hokum about “Alabama values,” corruption seems to be our most persistent shared political value. Perhaps someone, somewhere once read Plato’s dictum that philosopher-kings must combine public power with “virtuous knowledge ,” but if so, the wisdom has long been forgotten. The problem, of course, is how to change either the pig or the pigpen. Conversion , either secular or religious, can change the nature of the pig, but Alabama politicians generally don’t convert until they are indicted. Lots of reform movements have focused on changing the pen, but to no avail. Whether among Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives, men or women, rural or urban, old or young, black or white, the miasma of political corruption never seems to dissipate. battling for new constitution and new politics 277 That is not entirely the fault of the people who hold office. Many of them are better than the structures in which they function. In a state with some of the nation’s weakest ethics laws, no restrictions on transfers of campaign contributions from one political action committee (PAC) to another, and the costliest supreme court races in the nation, elected officials take office with a large, dead, smelly, albatross slung around their necks. All this is no new revelation. Alabama’s political system failed its citizens long ago. But the ghost of Halloween did not deposit our elected officials in the middle of a pumpkin patch on October 31 to be discovered the next morning by the people. Citizens in various jurisdictions elect them. Like most American politicians, once elected, they are virtually never defeated. Many newspaper editors and political scientists complain that Alabama deserves politicians as good as its people. But in a democracy, the people either get what they want in officeholders or the least bad of several candidates. The larger issue then is why citizens are so easily misled and ill-served by the people they elect. There are lots of answers to that question. Poor education is a good starting place. If Alabama voters demanded the right to recall politicians who betray trust, they could have it. Instead, they give credence to the red-herring rationalization of a lunatic fringe of fearmongers. I saw it happen in the A+ meetings, and the phenomenon reappeared in the battle over constitutional reform. Even to repeat the arguments (as I certainly intend to do), makes the state and its voters appear stupid. Citizens elsewhere scratch their heads, wondering why essentially decent people could be completely hornswoggled by such transparent absurdity. Standing behind the lunatic fringe were malevolent special interests who are not taken in for a moment by the outlandish charges of the minions they so lavishly fund. For them, the issue was quite simple: how to protect their wealth from higher taxes and which buttons to push to make citizens forget their longterm interests on behalf of immediate gratification. Most of the buttons were marked “race,” “religion,” and “taxes.” For ordinary people, black and white, who were just moving inside the magic circle of middle-class economic security, fear of losing the first home they had ever owned or the private academy where they sent their kids to school, made them easy prey to demagogues and fearmongers with much greater wealth to protect. Despite piles of statistics showing Alabamians the lowest-taxed Americans and America the third-lowest taxed of any industrialized nation, citizens deluded themselves into believing that they were “taxed to [18.222.182.105] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 21:03 GMT) 278 chapter 11 death.” As a result, to be elected in Alabama required little more than fealty to “Alabama values” (cultural religion) and “no new taxes.” Voters, easily seduced by simplistic platitudes, seldom engaged substantive issues. In some sense, then, Alabamians received what they deserved—low taxes, poor schools, a ravished environment, polluted water, inferior state services, a declining future in a high-tech, globalized economy, and...