In May, Governor Green signed Act 11. The new law bars corporations and other “artificial persons” from spending money to influence our elections. Senator Jarrett Keohokalole, the bill’s champion, put the principle plainly: “The foundation of our democracy is that political power belongs to the people.”
The senator is right. In a democracy, political power does belong to the people. The law takes effect next July. The question then will be whether the people are prepared to hold the power that belongs to them.
Distrust of money in Hawaiʻi politics is earned. Within recent memory, legislators took bribes while in office and went to federal prison for it.
Campaign donations and paid political ads can look like bribery one step removed. The bill’s advocates reason that the state creates corporations, so the state may define their limits — including keeping their money out of our elections.
There’s a curious mix of paternalism and optimism among these “good government” advocates. On one hand, they believe voters are foolish enough to be swayed by whoever spends the most on ads. On the other hand, they suggest these same voters will govern themselves well if only the megaphones of money are taken away. But the men who founded this country assumed something closer to the opposite.
The founders read ancient history, many of them in the original Greek and Latin. They took man’s bent toward self-interest as the starting fact of politics. They built restraints to match: separated powers, staggered terms, courts insulated from the crowd.
What they founded was not a democracy but a republic, with something of the old orders built in. They gave us a President who serves like an elected king and a Senate meant to act as a natural aristocracy. Only the House was handed directly to the people, but true democracy was limited by property qualifications and racial discrimination. And the vote for the President was mediated by the Electoral College.
John Adams wrote that our Constitution was made “only for a moral and religious people.” That is why the founding generation cared so much about education. Their education was not mere job training. It was a liberal education, from the Latin word for freedom. Its purpose was to teach a man to rule himself before he presumed to rule others. Students learned history, languages, philosophy, rhetoric. And crowning it all, they studied theology — the knowledge of God.
The old colleges existed for this. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton began as schools for ministers. So did Lahainaluna, founded in 1831 to train teachers and ministers. It is often called the oldest high school west of the Rockies.
I have a friend who did everything right, as modern education counts rightness: elite prep school, Ivy League college, Harvard for law. A few years into practice, over coffee, he told me he had just read Plato’s allegory of the cave for the first time. In the allegory, prisoners sit chained in the dark, watching shadows move across a wall, believing the shadows are the world. One prisoner is freed and dragged up into the sunlight, where at first he can see nothing at all.
My friend liked the story. He read it as a story about other people. He had escaped the cave, he figured, and could now see how everyone else’s beliefs were shadows cast by the culture. What escaped him was the allegory’s caution. The freed prisoner is blinded twice — once going up into the light, and once coming back down into the dark. A man fresh out of the cave should let his eyes adjust before appointing himself liberator.
Plato knew there was a sun outside the cave. He did not know the light of Christ. Neither did my friend.
My friend is not unusual. He is the product of our “best” schools.
Many parents run their children on the treadmill that formed my friend. They choose the right preschool feeding the right prep school feeding the right college. Along the way, they mistake the résumé for the education.
David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, now advises candidates to spend several hours every day producing content. They must churn out clips for platforms where a viewer’s attention lasts a few seconds.
Plouffe is not corrupting the voters. He is describing them. And the rising political class on the left and right spends its days performing for cameras rather than governing.
A people that can be moved by a 10-second clip is not a people prepared for self-rule. And a people that rewards its leaders for making such clips deserves the leaders it elects.
The freedom we already have tells the same story. We are free to gamble on our phones, free to consume pornography without limit, free to leave a marriage for no reason at all, free to hand our children a screen so we can look at our own. These are freedoms that can be enjoyed in a prison cell. The chains are still on. They have simply been made comfortable.
Act 11 may well do what it promises. But no act of the legislature can form a soul, and the legislature should not be blamed for failing at work that was never assigned to it.
The work of reform belongs to the Lord, and it happens in families, churches, and schools. It happens as parents bring real books to the table and read them aloud. It happens in congregations that still teach the faith rather than assume it. It happens in a handful of schools, here and elsewhere, trying to recover the education that Yale and Lahainaluna were built for. The state guards the boundary of the field. But it cannot make anything grow there.
Next July, Hawaiʻi will remove corporate money from its elections. But it will leave the voters exactly as it found them. The good government advocates who backed this reform will find that removing corporate money from politics won’t cure what ails us. The rot is much deeper than a few campaign ads.
The American founders knew where the reformation of a people comes from, and it was never the legislature. Freedom worthy of the name begins when the prisoner meets the one who made the sun.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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