According to research by Professors Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, the richest 400 Americans enjoy more than 22,000 times the political power of the average member of the bottom 90% of the country.
How can this be, you may ask? One word: money.
With the way our current campaign finance system is structured, candidates running for office need money, and a lot of it, to conduct viable and successful campaigns. Significant funds are needed for staff, television advertising, polling, political consultants, social media promotion, phone banks, texting and email campaigns, and more. It’s not always the case that the winning candidate is the biggest spender, but there’s unfortunately no getting around the fact that, far more often than not, they are.
What this means is that you essentially need to be rubber-stamped by wealthy donors like us in order to run for office. This became even more true after the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision, which ultimately greenlit the birth of Super PACs that accept unlimited contributions from millionaires and billionaires to fund their political advertising activities. And as donors spend more and more in elections, fewer and fewer candidates without big money behind them have what it takes to compete on equal footing.
After candidates win elections, they naturally do their wealthy donors’ bidding in office. This is largely because donors are very good at backing candidates that closely share their views, but it’s also because they enjoy special access to elected officials. Politicians spend so much time speaking with donors and hearing about their problems and concerns – and so little time talking with their average constituents – that they have a very distorted sense of what things actually deserve legislative energy and attention. And just in case any of them start questioning their dogma, some of the wealthiest donors have funded a huge network of “think tanks,” artificial activism groups with no real grassroots backing, and other political institutions to provide slanted intellectual backing and public disinformation campaigns to support policies that protect their interests.
“I don’t want candidates spending their evenings at swanky law firms rubbing elbows with a smattering of wealthy people like me and my friends – especially if we won’t even be their constituents! Instead, I want candidates to spend their time among everyday people, listening and learning about what action really needs to be taken to improve lives.”
The Supreme Court Justices that ruled in the majority on Citizens United equated spending money in elections with free speech. We couldn’t disagree more: from our experience, we know that money is power, not speech. We all have the right to spend money to promote our favorite candidates, but the reality is that only wealthy people like us have the resources to actually exercise that right. The end result is that wealthy donors’ “speech” drowns out everyone else’s, and voters go to the polls only having heard about millionaires and billionaires’ preferred candidates.
The situation with money in politics has become so bad that America is looking less and less like a democratic republic and more and more like an oligarchy, which is a form of government in which a small handful of people, typically wealthy and corrupt, rule.
To fully achieve the Founding Fathers’ ambitious principle of “one person, one vote” and reduce political inequality in America, there are many steps that lawmakers can and should take. They should reform our campaign finance system to dilute the influence of money in politics by, among other things, passing a Constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and working to move the US to a publicly funded campaign finance system. They should also work to safeguard the right to vote by pushing back against cumbersome voting restrictions and gerrymandering attempts.
The late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis once said, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” We need to heed his word and end the domination of large fortunes in our politics if we want to save our country from descending further into oligarchy.
Spread the power!
