The Art of Accountability

Integrity and accountability are in short supply these days. Fortunately, the tools in society’s toolbox for instilling honesty and integrity include familiar means of positively re-enforcing and elevating examples of our better selves (thank you, Alfred Nobel). But we’re members of a species (and an order) with a strong negativity bias, so let us not forget the impact of negative re-enforcement; there we have laws and objective investigative journalistic reporting (thank you, Reveal).

Cards Against Democracy joins a proud tradition of artists who ethically use the power of art and illustration to document, sometimes with seering ridicule, wrong choices and wrong behavior. We would like to think that our caricatures deliver some measure of negative re-enforcement faster than the law (and the IRS) can catch up with evil-doers. We would also posit that the way we present ideas (compared to text alone) is probably given to perception at deeper, more emotional levels of cognition.

Our hope is that Cards Against Democracy  will in some small way instill a culture of accountability by holding up “Hate’s 108” to face themselves in the mirror -and to face the withering gaze of History. Thank you for sharing our work and thereby helping to nudge society’s pendulum from bigotry toward equality; from lies and treachery toward integrity; and from dictatorship toward freedom.