Dollarocracy (8 page)

As we explain in
Chapter 3
, a future Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, provided corporate America with a plan of action. The organizations spawned by this new corporate campaign for power would spend hundreds of millions, eventually tens of billions, of dollars to shift the political culture dramatically to the right and undo the gains of the preceding fifty years. Organized labor, business's nemesis, would lose much of the status and strength it had gained during the New Deal era and then seemed to solidify during the Truman and Eisenhower years. By the 1990s, corporations and their congressional hirelings would be passing free-trade deals, deregulating whole industries, and eliminating Glass-Steagall protections against banking industry abuses. As Warren Buffett acknowledged when he looked back across the years in which the son of a Republican congressman from Omaha became a billionaire, “There's class warfare, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”
⁶⁸

To win the war, the dollarcrats did not merely champion their own agenda. They also demonized any and all who might question it. Nader became Public Enemy No. 1 for the champions of Dollarocracy, if only because job one for the dollarcrats was to eliminate the notion of the government as a progressive force on behalf of an informed and engaged citizenry. (Job two was to eliminate the notion among the young of public service as a worthy career goal.) In the 1970s, the corporate community organized to limit or terminate Nader's influence and, by extension, the myriad of activist groups that he, along with the women's, student, labor, and civil rights movements, had inspired to influence public policy by grassroots organizing.
⁶⁹

When President Jimmy Carter began to organize his administration, he consulted with Nader and appointed Naderites to top positions. By the 1980s, the corporate campaign had succeeded to such an extent that Nader and his fellow reformers were cast into the wilderness, as there was no place for their work under Dollarocracy. Nader turned to the next stage of his career as a prophetic voice against corruption and corporate power and as a periodic presidential protest candidate. He was sometimes referred to as “bitter.” But it was not bitterness that motivated the man; it was anger at the obscuring of America's democratic vistas. That anger would come to be shared by millions of Americans who recognized that they were losing more than elections. They were losing democracy itself.

Since the 1970s, money has become extremely well organized as a political force, while the great mass of nonwealthy people has lost much of its organizational capacity to influence politics. The result has been the rise of Dollarocracy. The Republican Party effectively purged its liberals and then the few remaining moderates, becoming by the 1990s a political home for the Dollarocracy.
⁷⁰
There was no longer any room in the Grand Old Party for reform. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who once had advocated for meaningful campaign finance rules, became the leading champion of money in politics.
⁷¹
And the refusal of McConnell and his kind to compromise on issues of concern to corporations did not isolate the GOP. It created a new pole in politics to which an unsettling number of Democrats were attracted. To be sure, there were, and are, Democrats who refuse to play by the rules of the money-and-media election complex. But they reside on the margins of the party, not at its core and certainly not at the top.

The most powerful Democrats may still talk a populist line, especially as Election Day approaches. But when it comes time to govern, too many of them choose to switch rather than fight. The party of Franklin Roosevelt has come with each ensuing election to sound more and more like the party of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. “New Democrats” such as Bill Clinton, who presented themselves as determinedly probusiness, came to dominate the party in the 1990s. Clinton taught his fellow Democrats to “triangulate”: moving to the right in order to appeal to corporate interests while keeping a working-class and liberal voting base because the base had no alternative and was terrified by the extreme social conservatism and market fundamentalism of the Republicans.

The die was cast. Democrats would compete with Republicans for the middle rather than seek to expand the electorate by mobilizing poor people and people of color with “Rainbow Coalition”–style mass mobilization. The Reverend Jesse Jackson and some of his labor allies tried throughout the 1980s and 1990s to sell the Democratic Party on mobilization strategies and the progressive populist approaches that would inspire and empower them. But this was an exercise in frustration.

By 2002, political observers were noting that “today neither party makes much effort to mobilize the tens of millions of poorer and less well educated Americans who are not currently part of the electorate.”
⁷²
A whole consultant
class rose up to tell Democratic politicians that the only way to win was to tack to the middle, or even the right, especially on economic issues. “For the life of me, I can't figure out why progressives listen to consultants. Building movements, making progress on progressive issues—you have to talk to people, educate people, organize people,” says Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucuses with Democrats but rarely takes advice from anyone in Washington.
⁷³

Barack Obama's 2008 campaign broke the pattern to some extent, especially when it came to the demographics of a winning coalition, by exciting young people and African Americans to turn out in higher numbers for a candidate who seemed to promise not just historic progress but also “change we can believe in.” When the change did not materialize, however, all that was left was a tired, centrist, and business-friendly Democratic Party that could not reenergize the base in 2010 and that prevailed in 2012 largely by scaring the wits out of Americans who did not expect much from the Democrats but were genuinely frightened by Republicans who threatened Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This was lesser-evilism raised to high art. Dollarocracy perfected. “The Republican Party is accurately defined as a party that looks out for the interests of the very wealthy,” wrote former
New York Times
columnist Bob Herbert. “The Democratic Party less so, but I think they look out for the interests of the wealthy, too, before they look out for the interests of working Americans.”
⁷⁴

Herbert nailed it. The dollarcrats had succeeded not by beating the Democrats but by subsuming them. Dollarcrats feared the Democratic Party's existing and potential voting base but were comfortable with the party's political leaders, whom the system had for all intents and purposes domesticated.

There were many elements to the corporate campaigns to remake American politics and governance launched in the 1970s. These included massively increasing lobbying activity; hectoring the news media to be more sympathetic to business, eventually creating procorporate news media; making universities more procorporate; creating think tanks and other venues to generate extensive public relations on the virtues of “free enterprise” and “markets” and the duplicity of anything that stood in their way; and getting the courts to be more friendly toward business concerns.
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But no area was of greater concern than rendering the election system more susceptible to business influence and more
likely to produce outcomes satisfactory to the wealthy. The confirmation that the project has succeeded came not in the overinflated rhetoric of the Republican Party but in the constrained and compromised language of the Democrats. If the point of refashioning the political process was to make it easier for corporations to call the shots, then this was the truest measure of success: a titular two-party system in which every debate revolved around which party was best for business.

To be sure, there remain real differences between the Republicans and the Democrats. They are stark on issues such as abortion rights and gay rights. And we do not seek to deny or diminish the distinctions. But corporations do not worry much about reproductive health or marriage equality. They worry about their bottom lines. And the bottom line of American politics has in recent decades come to reflect the demands of the wealthiest Americans and the corporations they control. The differences between Republicans and Democrats on issues of consequence to corporations are now matters of degree, not the deep distinction that is found on social issues. “The Obama position is: The super-rich have to pay a little more. The Romney position is: They don't have to pay anything,” said Thomas Ferguson. “That's it, folks, that's the party difference in American politics.”
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As the long 2012 campaign wore on, it became quite clear that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama despised each other. Yet one of the most common phrases when the two men debated policy was “I agree.”
⁷⁷

The people do not happen to agree. Poll after poll confirms that they prefer a far more potent politics, that they want a Democratic Party that will stand up to corporations, and that they would like the Republican Party to do the same. Ninety percent of Americans now agree that there's too much corporate money in politics, with a clear majority—51 percent—“strongly agreeing” with that statement.
⁷⁸

Nice sentiments and in a democracy we might expect that the system would reflect those values. Instead, under Dollarocracy, the electoral system works on entirely different principles, shaped and fueled by big money. To understand the depth of the crisis, it is time to take a look at what Dollarocracy has wrought: the election of 2012.

I don't cry when I lose. There's always a new hand coming up. I know in the long run we're going to win.

SHELDON ADELSON, DECEMBER 5, 2012

F
or the first time in the history of the United States, the 2012 campaign to elect a president was covered—for the most part—as a business story. That was fine by business, which had been newly freed by the Supreme Court's
Citizens United
decision to invest in the emerging market of American politics. That was fine by the politicians who could jet off to Vegas, have lunch with a billionaire casino mogul, and come away with “a $100 million investment” in the campaign.
¹
And that was just fine by American mainstream media, as most editors and publishers, hosts and programmers had long before accepted as gospel Calvin Coolidge's false premise that “after all, the chief business of the American people is business.”
²
Not citizenship. Not democratic engagement. Not justice. Not the construction of a shining city on a hill. Nor the illuminating of a light unto the nations. No need for any of that romantic mumbo jumbo. America was, as Coolidge famously suggested, all about “producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering.”
³

And if that was so, then, surely, every American story could be a business story: the Hollywood box office receipts could shape our culture, commodity prices could tell us all we need to know about eating, and the Christmas spirit could surely be got from reports on folks lining up Thanksgiving night for “Black Friday” shopping. Mr. Potter, not George Bailey, was triumphant. Donald Trump was right: it was all about “the art of the deal.”
⁴
So why not consider the competition for power as the biggest “deal” of all? Why not go all in on the fantasy that government should be “run like a business” and turn campaigns to control the government into the political equivalent of Trump's
The Apprentice?

Trump was certainly willing to oblige. The nation's most identifiable rich guy—with the possible exception, by campaign's end, of Mitt Romney—was the Hamlet of the 2012 melodrama, wrestling with the existential angst of a Republican presidential run. He jetted up to New Hampshire for an almost-announcement, ranted and raved about Barack Obama's birthplace on any Fox News show that would have him, published a manifesto
(Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again)
, and made major announcements via a Web site dubbed “Trump HQ.”
⁵
By April 2011, The Donald was leading in polls of likely Republican voters and running close to even with Obama.
⁶
A month later, Trump took himself out of the race, announcing, “I will not be running for president as much as I'd like to” because he was committed to a higher goal: preparing for the next season of his new NBC show,
Celebrity Apprentice
.
⁷
Within weeks, he was back in the news, saying of his almost-party, “If they pick a loser, I may very well run as an independent.”
⁸
That never happened. In fact, nothing about Trump—not even his planned moderation of a December 2011 debate among the actual Republican candidates just prior to the Iowa caucuses—happened.

Jon Stewart's
Daily Show
, Stephen Colbert's
Colbert Report
, and
The Onion
all recognized the absurdity of the Trump talk and treated the rich guy as a political punch line. Unfortunately, the joke was on the America people. Trump's ridiculous approach to politics, with its “birther” obsessions, fiscal fantasies, and talk about self-financing his campaign by pouring “a large chunk of his $270 million in liquid assets into a presidential bid,” was perfectly in synch with the 2012 Zeitgeist.
⁹
Except for the part about the $270 million. That would not have done the deal.