Dollarocracy (5 page)

Understood this way, the fact that tens of millions of poor and working-class Americans still vote is a testament to just how deep-seated democratic ideals are in this nation.

In discussing what ails American elections, we must recognize the structural challenges that go beyond money and media. For example, the two-party system itself contributes a good deal to political disengagement. The two parties have rigged the system—in a manner that has nothing to do with the U.S. Constitution—so that it is virtually impossible to launch a credible third party.
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This means, as former Republican governor of New Mexico and 2012 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson put it, that in American elections many—perhaps most—Americans “cast their votes for a candidate who doesn't really reflect their views.”
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Indeed, polling tells us that there are about as many “independents” as there are Democrats or Republicans, and the ranks of the politically unaffiliated are swelling. Pundits suggest that these folks are “swing voters,” bouncing back and forth between the big parties. But tens of millions of Americans swing out of the process altogether. They are not having a hard time choosing between the Democrats and the Republicans. They've made their choice: they don't like either major party. But they have nowhere else to go.

The two parties also gerrymander (draw district boundaries) so that most congressional and legislative districts are one-party estates and only a minority are competitive, except in rare landslide years.
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In 2012, Democrats received 500,000
more
votes in House races than Republicans did, but thanks to aggressive redistricting following the 2010 election and effective targeting of spending by Karl Rove and others, the Republicans maintained a whopping landslide-caliber 34-seat advantage.
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Why? “The Republican Party has a significant structural advantage in U.S. House elections,” explained FairVote's Rob Richie and Devin McCarthy. “That advantage was the most important reason why the GOP kept a comfortable majority of 54% of seats in the House despite Democratic candidates having an overall 4% advantage in voter preference over their Republican opponents.”
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Following the 2012 election, Mark Karlin explained the extraordinarily undemocratic consequences of modern gerrymandering, when a single party can draw the district lines with the aid of sophisticated datasets:

           
Take Pennsylvania, for instance, the Democrats received 2,710,827 votes for congressional candidates; the Republicans, 2,642,952. Although it was a slim victory, the Dems won the popular vote in Pennsylvania as far as electing representatives to Congress.

                
Astonishingly, however, due to gerrymandering from the Tea Party tsunami election of 2010, which left the Pennsylvania legislature and governor in full control of the GOP, only 5 Democratic reps to Congress were elected in 2012, while the Republicans will send 13 reps to DC!
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“In a normal democracy,”
The Economist
observed, “voters choose their representatives. In America, it is rapidly becoming the other way around.”
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As a rule, more than 90 percent of House members are in districts that have been gerrymandered to be “safe seats.” They rarely face a tough reelection battle, despite the strong generic unpopularity of Congress. In many states, the only federal races that are remotely in play are hyperexpensive statewide contests for Senate seats, where gerrymandering is impossible. And at the presidential level, there remains the Electoral College, which effectively renders moot the votes of the vast majority of citizens who do not live in a shrinking number of “swing” states.
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With so little competition, it is logical to ask, why do the wealthy care so much about elections? The answer, of course, is that elections are of singular importance because they remain the one brief shining moment when everyone
in our political system is closest to being equal. They provide the fleeting moment when we can hope that the person earning minimum wage scrubbing toilets on the graveyard shift has the exact same power as Bill Gates, the heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, or the CEO of Goldman Sachs. They are the one moment when the people can theoretically go in a different direction and reform society to the liking of a majority. For those wealthy and corporate interests that dominate the American political economy, elections are the one direct threat to their dominance of government and policymaking. Minimizing the capacity of elections to damage their privileges is of the utmost importance.

Elections take on greater significance because the rest of our democratic life has been so diminished.

We can gain some sense of how hollowed out American democracy has become by looking at the ways in which the notion of voting has changed. In democratic theory, and in more successful democracies, voting is a given, the ante to admission to the life of a free person and a citizen. As Thomas Jefferson put it, merely voting for representatives is far from sufficient. “Every day,” he wrote, a citizen must be a “participator in the government of affairs.”
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Today the act of voting is the epitome of civic engagement, and once the election has past, citizens are invited to return to their couches while the wealthy and privileged resume their central role in guiding the government and its policies, mostly in the dark. This, the contemporary American practice, is what political scientists politely call a “weak democracy.”

The wealthy well understand that democracy poses the great existential—and potentially practical—threat to extreme economic inequality. There is nothing new about this conflict. Indeed, the core problem was understood at the very beginning of democracy in Athens some 2,500 years ago. “Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers,” Aristotle observed in his
Politics
. “If liberty and equality are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons share alike in government to the utmost.”
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This prospect has always horrified those with immense amounts of property; in Greece and later in Rome the powerful were able to quash existing variants of democratic rule.
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In the United States, this conflict is a story as old as the nation itself. If there is one constant in the history of the American experiment, it is the struggle over the question placed at its founding by the author of the Declaration
of Independence. Which would these United States be? Democracy or plutocracy? And as the United States became a corporate capitalist economy, the ruling elite became defined increasingly in terms of money wealth, or as a Dollarocracy. The battle to establish a credible system of “one person, one vote” instead of “one dollar, one vote” has been a running theme in American history. The stakes have always been the same: the less democratic our elections, the more corrupt and irresponsible our governance.

The tension between democracy and plutocracy from the beginning has revolved around the franchise: who is permitted to vote and who is not. The framers of the Constitution—many of whom had considerable property holdings and were upper class—struggled to balance their desire for a republic that could prevent the tyranny of a monarch on the one hand with their concern on the other about excessive popular rule in a society where the poor constituted a majority and would likely challenge the prerogatives of property owners. Although Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine forcefully advocated universal male suffrage, theirs was a minority position. Even for white males alone, James Madison was dubious about universal suffrage, while John Adams was downright hostile. If men without property could vote, Adams stated, “an immediate revolution would ensue.”
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John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was hardly outside the mainstream when he stated—in what could be regarded as Dollarocracy's guiding principle—that “those who own the country ought to govern it.” This was a recurring battle. At the founding of the Republic, members of Congress were chosen by a tiny elite of the wealthy, white, and male. An epic contest for Virginia's Fifth Congressional District seat in the first Congress of the United States pitted the man who would be the fourth president, James Madison, against the man who would be the fifth president, James Monroe. Yet it attracted barely 2,000 voters.
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The definitional presidential election of 1800, between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, was decided by a total of 68,000 voters in a country where the census of that year counted a population of 5.3 million. Even those who voted found themselves frequently disenfranchised, as in 1800 when the legislatures of Georgia, Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
and Pennsylvania rejected the popular vote and simply appointed representatives to the Electoral College.
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And the constrained and convoluted processes of selecting House members and presidents stood out as marvels of democratic enterprise when compared to the selection of senators, which was entirely by legislative fiat in a process defined by bribes, backroom deals, intimidation, and a fair measure of physical violence.

By 1824, for example, nearly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, only 27 percent of voting-age white males cast ballots in the presidential race.
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Requirements that white men own property in order to cast ballots remained on the books in many states at that point. The rules would change radically in the subsequent decades, but universal adult suffrage did not become the rule until the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Even as the franchise has been extended, however, the nation's economy increasingly has come to be dominated by large national and multinational corporations and wealthy individuals. Thus, the tension between democracy and plutocracy has continued to be influenced by the power of money. Reform has come in fits and starts. Andrew Jackson broke the patterns of a paternal elite that handed the presidency from one wealthy family to the next: of the first six presidents, three were neighbors from the plantation country around Charlottesville, Virginia (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe), and two were father and son (the Adamses of Quincy, Massachusetts). Jackson beat an Adams, John Quincy, in 1828, and then had to battle the Bank of the United States, which spent an unprecedented $40,000 to try to defeat him in 1832.
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The seventh president beat the latter challenge by establishing a patronage system that filled government posts with political allies, who showed their appreciation by kicking back campaign money.

The wealthy made their comeback in the 1850s, when a Pennsylvania railroad and banking magnate named Simon Cameron came up with the “Pennsylvania Idea,” a model for financing campaigns that encouraged banks and large corporations to steer a portion of their profits toward the project of maintaining Republican control of the state legislature. With that control, Cameron was able to have himself and his son named to the U.S. Senate (in an era when senators were selected by legislators rather than the people), to
draw election district lines, to guide the selection of members of the Electoral College, and to eventually position himself to become Lincoln's first secretary of war. Cameron was so crooked that he was soon bounced from the Lincoln administration, but he quickly engineered his return to the Senate, where he brought a measure of realism to that chamber's deliberations by suggesting that “an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”
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Cameron and his generation of corporate contributors bought plenty of top-shelf candidates.

In 1873, as the rot of what came to be described as the “Gilded Age” was becoming evident, the incoming chief justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court, Edward Ryan, told the graduating class of the University of Wisconsin Law School that “the accumulation of wealth [is] the handmaiden of disaster” for all civilizations. He further asserted that the democratic promise of a revolution launched almost a century earlier was being squandered by those who failed to recognize that economic liberty—freedom from want, a level playing field, a fair distribution of the wealth—was the essential underpinning of political freedom.

“There is looming up a new dark power,” Ryan warned. “The accumulation of individual wealth seems to be greater than it has been since the downfall of the Roman Empire. The enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economic conquest only, but for political power,” the aging patriot declared. “For the first time in our politics money is taking the field of organized power. The question will arise, and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate wealth?”
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The targets of Ryan's attack were the robber barons, who ran wild in the Gilded Age and made presidents, senators, governors, and mayors their errand boys. William Vanderbilt famously declared, “The public be damned!” His father, Cornelius, is reputed to have mused, “What do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?”
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The Gilded Age's political “genius,” the man who connected corporate dollars to political dominance, was Mark Hanna of Ohio. “There are two things that are important in politics,” the legendary Republican
kingmaker explained in 1895. “The first is money and I can't remember what the other one is.”
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Hanna, a hero of Karl Rove, has come to symbolize the politics of that age. But his abuses were a symptom of the broader disease.