(Excerpted from "Climate Of Denial" by Al Gore, published in the 7/7/11 issue of Rolling Stone.)
The "public square" that gave birth to America has been transformed. The conversation that matters most to the shaping of the "public mind" now takes place on television.
Unlike access to the public square of early America, access to television requires large amounts of money. Thomas Paine could walk out his front door in Philadelphia and find a dozen competing, low-cost print shops within blocks of his home. Today, if he traveled to the nearest TV station or to the headquarters of Comcast and tried to deliver his ideas to the American people, he'd be laughed off the premises. The public square that used to be a commons has been re-feudalized, and the gatekeepers charge large rents for the privilege of communicating to the people over the only medium that really affects their thinking. "Citizens" are now referred to as "consumers" or "the audience".
Of course, the only reliable sources from which such large sums can be raised continuously are business lobbies. Organized labor struggles to compete, and individuals are limited by law to making small contributions. The recent deregulation of unlimited -- and secret -- donations by wealthy corporations has made the imbalance even worse.
In the new ecology of political discourse, special-interest contributors of the large sums of money now required for the privilege of addressing voters are not squeamish about asking for the quo they expect to get in return for their quid.
As a result, the concerns of the wealthiest individuals and corporations routinely trump those of average Americans and small businesses. A couple examples from a long list: eliminating the inheritance tax paid by the wealthiest one percent of families is considered a much higher priority than addressing the suffering of the long-term unemployed; Wall Street's desire to engage in legalized gambling with trillions of dollars in "derivatives" was considered way more important than protecting the integrity of the financial system and the interests of middle-income home buyers.
Meanwhile, almost every group organized to promote and protect the "public interest" has been backpedaling and is on the defensive.
The "conversation of democracy" has become so deeply dysfunctional that our ability to make intelligent collective decisions has been seriously impaired.