JAMES BENNET

Not since the gilded age has our politics been opened so wide to corporate contribution and donations from secret sources.

History’s pendulum is now swinging back toward the day when political finances were only lightly regulated.

The battle is over the most basic ideas of our democracy; at stake,--according to both sides—is either the revitalization of politics, or its final capture by the powerful.

Our politics has more than one kind of incumbent. There are the officeholders, and there are the people and corporations that have already made it in America, that want to protect and enlarge the advantages that they get from them.

All Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.

Our politics has more than one kind of incumbent. There are the officeholders, and there are the people and corporations that have already made it in America, that want to protect and enlarge the advantages that they get from them.

History’s pendulum is now swinging back toward the day when political finances were only lightly regulated.

The battle is over the most basic ideas of our democracy; at stake,--according to both sides—is either the revitalization of politics, or its final capture by the powerful.

Not since the gilded age has our politics been opened so wide to corporate contribution and donations from secret sources.

All Americans can now relax in homogeneous spaces where they hear plenty of speech but nothing that might confound them. Whatever objectionable ideas or information they do encounter will arrive safely filtered through the congenial viewpoint of their chosen cable-news channel, social-media group, newspaper or Substack writer. They can duck the work of hearing alien arguments and sharpening their own ideas or even adjusting them—the kind of work that turns diversity in a pluralistic democracy into a source of resilience rather than a fatally fissiparous weakness.