The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office

The words of Adlai Stevenson I, though spoken in the modern age, resound with the gravity of the ancients: “The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal—that you can gather votes like box tops—is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.” In this cry, Stevenson laments the cheapening of democracy, reduced from sacred duty to commercial spectacle. Leaders, he warns, must not be packaged like goods upon a shelf, adorned with bright slogans and jingles, sold to the people as though governance were but another bargain in the marketplace.

The ancients would have shuddered at such a vision. For in Athens, the cradle of democracy, the citizen was entrusted with the weight of judgment, expected to listen, to deliberate, to discern character and virtue. To treat elections as mere marketing would have been an abomination, for it strips the citizen of reason and the leader of dignity. Stevenson’s metaphor of cereal and box tops unmasks this decline—where campaigns appeal not to thought but to appetite, not to principle but to desire for entertainment.

Consider the story of the Roman Republic in its later years. Candidates for office, once chosen for their service and virtue, began to win votes by bread and circuses. They flattered the people with games, spectacles, and empty promises. Like merchants of popularity, they gathered support not with truth but with glitter. This erosion of dignity led, step by step, to the fall of the Republic and the rise of emperors. Stevenson’s warning is the same: when elections become commodities, the soul of liberty is endangered.

His words also strike at the heart of citizenship. For if leaders are sold like wares, then citizens become mere consumers, passive buyers of images rather than active seekers of justice. The dignity of self-government lies in discernment, in the hard work of understanding issues and weighing character. To gather votes as though they were coupons dishonors both the leader and the led, and it transforms democracy into parody.

Let the generations remember: democracy is not a market stall, nor are its leaders cereal boxes upon a shelf. It is a covenant between the governed and those who govern, demanding integrity, wisdom, and sacrifice. Stevenson’s words are a torch lifted against the darkness of spectacle and deceit, reminding us that the true measure of leadership is not how well one is sold, but how faithfully one serves. If democracy is to endure, it must never be merchandised, but honored as the noblest work of free men and women.