From The Lever on how we got here and what will happen if we don't change our politics.
This hit me because the last three months have been nothing but 50-100 phone dings per day wanting, begging, pleading about moneymoneymoney for this election. Even though I'd already spent thousands for battleground candidates (Allred lost, Brown lost, and now about Casey, who knows).
I just subscribed and am offering this as food for thought.
https://www.levernews.com/election-2024-how-billionaire-avengers-destroyed-democracy/
" ...Even as all of your screens told you otherwise, your remaining synapses detected that the parties, candidates, and donors used a mushroom cloud of money to convert an election into an auction, with almost nobody in the press or electorate asking what exactly was being sold. And when that happens — when one side’s billionaires outbid the other side’s billionaires in a clearance sale of a political contest — that’s not a defense of democracy. That’s burning the democracy village down while pretending you’re trying to save it.
This campaign certainly involved very real stakes. The Democrats offered voters vague promises to shield our few remaining rights and democratic institutions from the flames, plus an agenda of mildly progressive economic reforms. The Republicans offered an opportunity to ignite a new blaze of deregulation and authoritarianism to demolish the remnants of a government many see as unable — or unwilling — to address social problems.
An America dissatisfied with the economic status quo rejected the flimsy firewall and chose the blowtorch.
But even before the country selected its new White House occupant, the era of big-money politics was already enshrined by the transformation of this election into Billionaire: Endgame — a Marvel-esque battleground that was open only to billionaires, and that rendered the rest of us nearly powerless. It was a cinematic spectacle with an objective: limiting the horizon of policy possibility mostly to initiatives that either enhance — or at least do not fundamentally threaten — the financial and political power of the donor class that’s fleecing everyone else.
This is no accident: We’re living through the controlled, targeted burn envisioned by a 50-year scheme that you can learn about in our new award-winning audio series Master Plan. It was a plot sparked by a future Supreme Court justice’s corporate call-to-arms, and then flamethrowered into a bonfire through court rulings vaporizing campaign finance laws, incinerating anti-bribery statutes, and baking corruption into day-to-day politics.
The result: No matter what the public wants and no matter the outcome of elections, the oligarchs almost always win. They get a government that does little or nothing to address the crises those same oligarchs are profiting off of — a government in which “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” as summarized by Princeton researchers. [2014]
It doesn’t have to be this way. It is not a predetermined destiny. If enough of us decide that we no longer accept being the dog in the “This Is Fine” meme, things could change for the better, as they have in the past.
But if after the 2024 race, we do the opposite — if Republican voters take their victory as proof that it’s perfectly fine for billionaires to buy elections, and if Democratic voters take their loss as evidence that they merely have to find more billionaires for the next fight — then we’re sealing our fate...
Some media observers cast newspapers’ decisions to avoid presidential endorsements as Trump-prompted “anticipatory obedience” — a phenomenon in fascist regimes in which institutions remain quiet to try to avoid retribution from the reigning strongman. There’s probably something to that — but such anticipatory obedience extends way beyond just newspaper opinion pages. It defines the entire political system’s silence in the era of legalized corruption.
Think about the world around us.
Today, half of working-age Americans are struggling to afford health care, and nearly a third have medical debt. Nearly half of middle-aged Americans have zero retirement savings. More than a third of the country resides in locales with dangerous air pollution. Ten million kids live below the poverty line. Life expectancy in the United States trails other industrialized countries. Greenhouse gas emissions have hit their highest rate in history, as the livable ecosystem is showing signs of catastrophic collapse.
Taken together, we’re living through a whole new terrifying verse of We Didn’t Start The Fire, and yet none of these crises have been a significant theme in the election we just experienced. Indeed, as one New York Times headline put it: “The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Health Care.”
Why such silence? Because every politician running for national office knows that to center these issues in a campaign is to prompt the ire of the billionaires and corporations who can — and will — spend them into the ground.
This reticence is the real anticipatory obedience and the real democracy crisis — the one you couldn’t hear in the Democratic convention applause for “an actual billionaire,” the one obscured by the MAGA rally cheers for Musk, and the one drowned out by endless super PAC ads blasting through every screen in your life.
There are differences between the parties, and who won the election matters. Though Harris has been vague about her agenda, it was a safe bet that her administration would defend reproductive rights, protect some of the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on insurance industry predation, and recognize the existence of the climate crisis.
A new Trump administration will almost certainly try to do the opposite. Crypto donors will get crypto deregulation, oil donors will get climate deregulation, Wall Street donors will get financial deregulation — and much of the radical Project 2025 initiatives that Trump’s former staffers assembled will be pursued.
So yes, the outcome will be a hinge point in history — and if big-money politics is now normalized, the hinge will be more like a ratchet that moves only in one direction. Democrats will be pledge that the hinge merely is “not going back.” Republicans will promise another hinge swing to the hard right.
Perhaps that limited range would be acceptable in a society that had already built the basic infrastructure to meet human needs. But this is America in 2024, a place where health care, housing, retirement, and climate crises require a much bigger range of policy solutions — the kind of far-reaching initiatives we once saw during the New Deal. Those might be possible if we repeal Citizens United, force the disclosure of dark money spending, and publicly finance elections so that candidates can run for office without the need for legalized bribes from corporations and billionaires seeking legislative favors.
But in lieu of those reforms — and without voters in both parties organizing their politics around ending systemic corruption within their midst — then the master planners’ money politics is about to get even more aggressive.
Already, Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo — who received the largest dark money transfer in American history — is promising to use that cash for “infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment” and for recruiting into his movement “the folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society.” Meanwhile, Musk is promising to deploy his Trump-boosting super PAC in future elections and further down the ballot.
In the immediate aftermath of Trump declaring victory, much of the media chatter is focused on one question: Will whatever’s still left of democracy be saved?
But there’s just as big a question that must be asked.
If the blockbuster season of Billionaire: Endgame that we just lived through is now what we call “democracy” — then what exactly are we saving, and for whom?"
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