You Can't be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America

(Editor's note: John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of You Can't be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America from Melville House Publishing. AlterNet's Democracy editor Steven Rosenfeld spoke to him about political realities in the Obama age, including what activists need to do after Election Day).

AlterNet: Rick MacArthur, in You Can't Be President: The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America, you go through a long list of barriers to political participation and answer the question why you can't be president, or at least why you can't be president so easily. What prompted you to write this book?

JRM: Well, actually, it was a French publisher who asked me to explain American democracy to the French in an election year. So once I got that in my head, I started looking into it and thought, 'You know, I don't think Americans really understand American democracy.' So I went and found an American publisher so they would also publish it. But at first I thought of explaining it to a foreign audience that knew nothing about America. And the more I looked into it and the more I thought about it, I got the idea that Americans themselves didn't understand what the barriers were. That they had been so conditioned from childhood to thinking anybody could be president, and this year even more so, because a half-African candidate looks like he's going to get elected. It proves that anybody can become president.

The phrase 'you can't become president' stands in for a lot of different things, not just you can't be president of the United States, but also you can't be well-educated if you go to a lousy public school. If you're poor, you can't change social classes very easily. In fact, it's very difficult and very rare to change social and economic classes in the United States. You have less consumer choice than you think. You don't have unlimited choice, which is one of the major points that people make about how great American democracy is -- that consumer choice is part and parcel of that. Democracy itself, voting, is a kind of consumer choice. So I wanted to debunk the old saw that anybody could be president, but as I said, I started out thinking I was talking to foreigners only. And then I realized there were a lot of things that I didn't think my fellow Americans understood.

AlterNet: When did we become a nation of political amnesiacs, if that's the right word?

JRM: Partly, it's the two parties themselves. They perpetrate or perpetuate a lot of the myths because it serves their purposes of remaining in power. The statistics that got the French publisher most interested in me doing the book were the re-election rates, which are astonishing. And they are getting worse, where you have 99 percent of incumbents getting re-elected in 2006 -- 99 percent -- and even in 1994, when the (Newt) Gingrich (Republican) revolution hit, it was still 91 percent re-election rates for (congressional) incumbents. For state legislatures, it was something like 93 percent, according to this academic study across 50 states.

So the two parties encourage the amnesia and encourage people to think there was never anything but a two-party system in the United States. And this is the best of all possible worlds. The media contributes to it, because the media doesn't really challenge the party structure. They don't give the third party candidates much airtime. You don't see Ralph Nader or Bob Barr at McCain-Obama debates and that is for a reason. They want to limit the choice so they can hold onto power more effectively.

I don't blame Americans for being poorly educated. Americans are instinctively more aware than what is wrong than some people would think. It's just that they don't have the means with which to talk about it. There's no forum for this.