This business—this lamentation—of political paralysis while the things that can kill swathes of children in seconds continues to remain unaddressed, is gonna keep happening until we get wise to the consequences of accepting a privatized electoral system, where we throw money at politicians like they were pole dancers, and write checks to super-PACs like they were club-owners.
That’s what the latest gun violence/massacre says to me, and what it says about our political culture.
By using Money as a proxy for Speech, it becomes a convenient excuse to sever the link between the traditional notion of a political party, able to exercise a vetting capacity over the fitness and character of candidates seeking the imprimatur of a party endorsement. We’re not incentivizing excellence, and we're not incentivizing quality of representation, when we accept--without question--the replacement of 'speech' with Money. Money going to individual candidates. Which creates a system that attracts people willing to debase themselves for access to a casino arena of campaign cash, in order to benefit from a shortcut to people who think they deserve access to public power, and then meet the people with Wealth enough to make that happen.
Just look at the Republican response to the Uvalde massacre, where politicians like Ted Cruz and Gov Abbott can suggest the solution is more guns, in the form of armed guards in every school, with a straight face, while pretending that doing nothing isn’t also ‘politicization’ of a preventable tragedy.
If Wealth can fund the campaigns of individual candidates, what is a political party really for?
Nothing more than managing the logistics and coordinating the strategy for getting voters to the polls on Election Day. There's no leverage for the party to exercise any real control over the quality of candidates that can largely fund their own campaigns.
And Democrats, don’t fool yourselves. The Democratic donor class is more representative of the general public, and still demands accountability from Government and tries to hold out for quality-of-character in it’s campaign-funded public servants, but as a class they’re no less vulnerable to the convenience of access to Power, unfiltered by the perspective of institutional knowledge, history, or precedent that traditional political parties brought to it’s candidates. Ultimately, donor money decides who the candidates are, and the public ratifies those donor choices in elections. Or, if it’s a gerrymandered district, typically on the Republican side, it’s the donor choices in the primaries, since the election result is a foregone conclusion.
Yet, we lament the fact that the DNC can’t seem to message effectively, forgetting that the Party has no real leverage to get Democratic candidates to sign onto an effective, coherent, message. Witness the inability to get Sen’s Manchin and Sinema to sign on to legislative strategies that clear majorities of even their own voters wanted. This is what their Big Money/dark money donors paid for. To keep a political or moral consensus from affecting their ‘investment’ in making sure that change doesn’t happen if it can’t be on their terms.
The parties have simply been relegated to reading or conducting polls and fashioning policy that then gets poll-tested until more candidates can endorse it than won’t. People, even on the Left, send in their dollars, hear what they expect to hear, and become frustrated—as a denied majority—at their inability to overcome the structural advantages of a paralyzed, privatized, system that disincentivizes the opposition from joining a consensus on necessary change. Why should they? Republican donors aren’t agreeing to fund excellence in a Government or Democracy they don’t believe in, they’re agreeing on finding ways to vandalize Government to the point of irrelevance and/or cynicism. Or safe for Trumpism to take over.
Non-cooperation becomes a strategy in a polarized political environment, which is essentially what the Republican donor class, small-dollar and Big Money, are demanding. Money competes with other money. Only political parties cooperate, within their ranks, and ultimately with their rivals, for the sake of an Idea, of governance, and continuity of a system that must accept Loss as the price for the peaceful transfer of power.
That’s the trade-off between replacing Speech with Money. When private Money is involved as an investment in winning, it concedes Power far less willingly than when the public provides the financing for campaigns that both win and lose.
It is the public that willingly makes an investment in the peaceful transfer of power, not private capital.
Just as a bank might throw good money after bad, if it stands to lose more in the short term, than in the long term, private money has every incentive to test the limits of acceptable behavior, to keep pushing, for vindication of it’s initial investment strategy, when the goal is primarily to see a return-on-investment, rather than concede defeat on a battlefield providing access to Power.
In fact, in such an environment of freelancing, the power balance goes to the donors. Politicians on both sides end up becoming proxies for their Donors rather than accountable to all voters supporting a political party, and not just those that possess the Wealth to participate.
In a district, that might be a lot of small dollar donors, and at the state level, PACs and dark money take over the financing of political campaigns. Either way, American public representatives are masquerading not the ideas and ethics of a political organization, representing a political philosophy, and exercising institutional judgement on the fitness and character of party candidates, but the ideas and ethics of a Donor class that too often cares less about Government and more about access to Power.
That's what we're incentivizing, with our privatized political system. Not public servants, but the private purchase of Power. And, when it comes to gun safety, the disconnect between Donors, and the voting public, is killing our kids.