One way to measure our current state of “total politics” is to look at the economics of our presidential campaigns. In the 1980 presidential election, spending by Republicans and Democrats combined totaled $60 million dollars ($190 million today when adjusted for inflation). In this year’s presidential election, advertising alone is projected to reach $7 billion, in itself a 37-times increase in spending. According to the Federal Election Commission, presidential candidates spent $2.3 billion from Jan. 1, 2019, through March 31, 2020.
The military-industrial complex fed off the U.S.-Soviet Cold War conflict in much the same way the political-industrial complex feeds off the left-right conflict. If the military-industrial complex led us into a paradigm of perpetual wars with little hope of victory and no end in sight (Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq), then the political-industrial complex has led us into a paradigm of perpetual campaigns in which our political class needs divisive issues to fight over more than it needs solutions to the issues themselves — crucial issues like gun control, immigration and health care.
What can we do?
Worthy initiatives like ranked-choice voting and gerrymandering reform may help; however, the first step is for each of us simply to become aware of the ways our passions are being inflamed and manipulated for profit and how the political-industrial complex feeds off our basest fears of one another. Our experiment in democracy has worked when it appeals to the best in us, as opposed to the worst.
Eisenhower knew this, and it was that instinct in each of us that he appealed to as he closed his farewell address: “Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.”
And if we do become a community of dreadful fear and hate?
In the Cold War, failure meant mutually assured destruction through nuclear war. It was an outcome that, fortunately, never arrived, though it’s instructive that Eisenhower’s farewell address came a little less than two years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest humanity has ever come to nuclear annihilation.
Today, we sit on a different sort of precipice as the American body politic hurtles toward the 2020 election. Both sides are laying groundwork to contest the result. Are we entering an era where we hold elections in a nation so hopelessly divided that neither side is willing to accept defeat? In a democracy, that is the truest form of mutually assured destruction.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.