The Rise of the Donor Class
The class structure of American politics has never been clearer, argues Daniel Lazare
With Democrats facing catastrophe as long as Joe Biden insists on staying in the race, the mainstream press has begun saying the quiet part out loud. Voters may matter in the fall, but what counts now is money, money, money.
“Major Democratic Donors Ask Themselves: What to Do About Biden?” declared a New York Times headline two days after Biden’s disastrous debate performance — donors, that is, not the mass of ordinary citizens. “House Democrat joins donor discussion about replacing Biden on ballot,” a Washington Post headline added on July 8. “The Biden large-donor scene ... has been devastated since Mr. Biden’s debate performance two weeks ago,” a WaPo article said on July 11. “Inside the glitzy fundraiser where Biden lost George Clooney,” ran another WaPo headline on the 12th.
If you want to know whether Biden should stay or go, in other words, don’t ask people streaming out of a factory gate or hanging out on a Harlem stoop. Instead, ask Hollywood A-listers, Silicon Valley billionaires, and Wall Street investors looking to Biden to keep the party going. It’s their political system. The rest of us just live in it.
The class structure of American politics has never been clearer than since the great Democratic meltdown began on June 27. Politicians are paralyzed as pollsters read the tea leaves to figure out what’s going on. If Biden refuses to go, three things seem clear.
One is that Donald Trump will win, perhaps by a landslide. If so, another is that the victory will amount to an ex-post-facto vindication of the January 6 coup, a giant step toward mob rule and political dictatorship. The only elections Republicans regard as valid will be those Republicans win. A third is that if Republicans capture the House and Senate, which now seems likely, the path will be clear for Trump to implement a right-wing authoritarian program featuring savage crackdowns on migrants, crushing attacks on unions, and retribution for his many political enemies.
Democracy will go into a downward spiral. The U.S. system is already a mass of contradictions. One person-one equal vote is violated at every turn. A grossly unrepresentative Senate and a lifetime Supreme Court make a mockery of rational self-government. Accountability is nil thanks to a legislative process that is so convoluted and confused that members of Congress have a wealth of opportunities to hide their voting records from the citizens who supposedly count. Even worse is the amending clause set forth in Article V, which is so unresponsive as to render the growing mess essentially unfixable.
A gerrymandered House? Reform is impossible. Filibusters that allow 41 senators representing as little as 17 percent of the population to veto any and all legislation? Nothing can be done. An Electoral College that has twice overruled the popular vote since the year 2000? Ditto. Rising gun violence due to a “right to bear arms” that is effectively unchangeable? Ditto as well. “We the people” are prisoners of a dysfunctional system that they supposedly established and ordained.
But as bad as all this is, it’s worth keeping in mind some of the good things Americans still have. They still have elections, they can still freely speak their minds about the key issues of the day (as this blog illustrates), and they can still protest in the streets. But if Trump wins a second term, these will all come under attack.
If so, the effect is to underscore the role of bourgeois liberalism in a period of decline. Where liberals make a great show of fighting the ultra-right, their real function is to pave the way for its takeover. Examples abound. There’s King Victor Emmanuel III who opted to peacefully hand over power to Mussolini following the 1922 March on Rome. There is German President Paul von Hindenburg who handed Hitler the chancellorship on January 30, 1933, even though the Nazi Party were losing support at the polls. (Hindenburg thought he could use a weakened Nazi Party to rein in the Communists, whose own support was surging.) There is the slogan that the French right adopted in response to Léon Blum’s Popular Front in 1936-37: “Better Hitler than Blum.” It was an invitation to the Nazis to march into Paris and suppress an increasingly militant left, a request that Germany was happy to fulfill in June 1940.
Now we have something similar, which is a Democratic Party that is effectively surrendering by nominating an 81-year-old who is so obviously impaired that voters can be counted on to stay home in droves. Democrats may as well post a sign in the Oval Office reading, “Dear Donald: Welcome! Make yourself at home!!”
This is what a hollowed-out political system looks like. A number of factors are at work here. The most obvious is wealth polarization. The rich, simply put, have more power because they have more money. For example, a recent round-up by Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, noted that:
Since 1974, the U.S. Gini coefficient has risen from 0.353 to 0.415
Between 1970 and 2021, the top one percent’s share of national income nearly doubled from 10.7 to 19.1 percent.
Between 1978 and 2020, CEO pay rose more than 73 times faster than that of a typical worker.
On one hand, decades of political decline have allowed the rich to grab a greater and greater share of the economic pie. On the other, increased wealth flowing from a hypertrophied financial sector has enabled them to attack and undermine what little remains of political democracy so they can grab even more. Campaign funding and lobbying are two of the main tools available to the super-rich. Together, they have created a system in which capital has never ruled more openly.
Then there are the political parties. The two-party system, which dates from the 1860s, is by now the oldest such duopoly in the world. Yet the “Repocrats” are so politically backward and under-developed that they really aren’t parties in the first place. After all, a party in the final analysis is a group of citizens who get together to fight for a common cause — socialism, drug legalization, whatnot. But Republicans and Democrats are not citizens’ associations. They do not have rank-and-file members, and they have little by way of political programs. In 1996, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole dismissed the GOP platform out of hand: “I’m not bound by the platform. I probably agree with most everything in it, but I haven’t read it.” In 2020, the Republicans didn’t bother assembling a platform at all. Trump’s off-the-cuff ramblings were more than enough.
So if the Republicans and Democrats aren’t parties, what are they? The answers are various: mutual-aid societies for aspiring politicians, networks of privilege and corruption, socio-political milieus, or, better yet, glamorous venues in which people like George Clooney and Ashley Judd get to hobnob with Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, and others of that ilk. In Germany, members of the Sozialdemokratische Partei pay dues and debate policy at meetings of their party fraktion. In America, people stay home and watch it all on TV.
The U.S. is now in the midst of the greatest political crisis since the Great Depression or maybe even the Civil War. Politics are hanging by a thread as enervated Democratic elites consider conceding without a fight. But thanks to an antiquated political structure in which money rules, it’s a VIP affair that the mass of the population can only view from afar.