These days we too often accept the metric, and tend to define campaigns, and therefore equate ‘political’ success, in terms of ‘money raised’. How much was raised, from whom, and how fast. Where it’s being spent, and on what types of things. Breathless news reports compete for eyeballs by detailing which politicians, like racing jockeys, have a financial ‘leg up’ on their opponents in terms of a campaign ‘war chest’, with dollar figures substituting for training schedules and feed recipes.
I submit that we’ve paid a price, as an electorate, for allowing the media to define the ‘politics’ of our Republic too much in terms of campaign cash, and that in a 24/7/365 election ‘culture’ that is never allowed to end.
In fact, political campaigns, once a necessary function associated with a commitment to public service, has now morphed into it’s own form of specialized, concierge ‘industry’ — not unlike the tax prep industry, profiting handsomely from the complexity of IRS compliance with innumerable exceptions and tax breaks — which the media sector treats almost like a public subsidy it will never agree to lose without a fight.
Meanwhile, too many generations of Americans are of voting age who have never NOT associated fundraising and dollar signs with politics and political campaigns.
Is it any wonder then, that Trump’s grift is largely met with indifference, first and foremost due to it’s inherent — and conceptual — familiarity within the context of modern American ‘politics’, but also in terms of defining the nature of ‘participation’ in such a system away from real engagement with our government and the representatives we elect to manage that relationship, and toward a financial proxy that replaces citizenship and accountability, with Money influence that, as often as not, seeks remedies at odds with the greater Good?
I’m old enough to remember when American elections were time-limited. Looking back, it could be argued, more by bipartisan agreement as by any actual statute, but, given the fundraising restrictions that once existed in American electioneering, when an election ended, it was considered a breach of public etiquette to be seen paying for political advertising before an ‘election season’ began, which was usually within the 12 months between the November prior to the November of Election Day.
It might be hard for anyone under the age of 50 to remember, but at one time the path from fundraising, to primaries, to elections, was limited and distinct. Between those time limitations was when our representatives actually got to work on behalf of their constituents, to discuss, craft, and vote on legislation addressing the priorities the public were demanding to have addressed by placing their trust in their respective representatives. Needless to say, those days are long gone.
Today, American politics begins and ends with our prospective public servants — candidates for public office — vying for our trust in their seriousness toward public service, by having their hands out for Money. The only discernible difference these days, between a person begging on the street (or starting a GoFundMe campaign) and a prospective politician, is the quality of their clothing and how recent was their last shower or bath.
The act of donating Money to a campaign — by the average, non-wealthy voter — is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics. While anyone could write a paper check with a dollar amount and send it in to a campaign by regular mail, comparatively few voters did so until the 1990’s with the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web which made the act of donating as easy as the click of a mouse button.
However, we are led to believe, by the same clever legal scholars that insist on the peculiar notion that ‘Corporations are people’ with respect to 14A rights of personhood under the Constitution, that the donating, receiving, and spending of campaign donations should now be defined as being equivalent to protected Speech. ‘Given speech’ by the donor, and ‘received speech’ by the candidate. And, as with current absolutist notions of 1A public protections of ‘free speech’, inherently off limits to any substantive legislation limiting it’s movement from Donor to Candidate.
It has been said that the nadir of this transfer of private wealth into the American political system was reached in 2022, with the SCOTUS decision known as Cruz v FEC (2022), which held that any leftover campaign funds, can be treated by the candidate as regular income, if s/he chooses to do so, essentially removing the last distinction between campaign donations and outright bribery that had been the law under Section 304 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002.
Essentially, the spigot between private Money and public service is now completely open.
Depending on the amounts in question, and the desire for anonymity on behalf of the donor, only the proper IRS 501(c)(x) tax forms need be filed to keep everything nominally legal.
And even a failed candidate, thanks to Senator Cruz’s 2022 lawsuit, can keep whatever monies are left over.
That’s quite an invitation for money-making opportunities for the unscrupulous in our society, as anyone following the twists and turns of the fabulist George Santos, briefly the House rep for NY-3rd district, before being sentenced to 84 months in prison for wire fraud, among other indictments, has discovered to their chagrin.
Santos’ political demise came after it was revealed that he had fabricated much of his life story, leading to questions about how the political unknown had funded his winning campaign.
The now-36-year-old cast himself as a wealthy businessman who had graduated from top colleges, worked at prestigious Wall Street firms and held a valuable real estate portfolio. In truth, he was struggling financially and faced eviction.
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‘Money is Speech’ is at least as curious a concept as ‘corporations are People’. Because, looked at through the lens of Wealth, seeking access to the deliberations of citizen-legislators, once corporations have the personhood rights of human citizens, it isn’t much of a leap to designate Money is the only viable proxy for that type of ‘person’ to exercise ‘speech’ that doesn’t involve a corporate officer either making political statements for or against candidates for public office on behalf of the firm, bringing an unwanted 1A-complexity to questions of workplace partisanship; or, alternatively, simply accepting that public policy will henceforth be driven entirely by the private sector. The only way to obfuscate both those unpalatable realities in the service of public representation, was to create the veneer of ‘transparency’ by bureaucratizing the transfers of cash through the IRS.
Sure, ballots are still counted. But good luck trusting your representative’s campaign motives in a system ostensibly designed to demand a modicum of trust, that public power will not be abused in the name of the public, yet operated like a casino, replete with hidden financiers and using decks of marked cards to fleece an unsuspecting public.
What used to be a referendum on public service became a mere ratification of the most successful fundraisers a nation could find for an election cycle.
Almost by definition, under such a tautology as ‘Money is Speech’, we almost encourage potential public servants to misrepresent themselves to the public, to greater or lesser degrees, in the service of an anonymous private interest no modern political campaign can function without.
But the general public isn’t equipped — living their daily lives, and bombarded with political propaganda — to determine such degrees of fidelity to a public trust; to know what they’re really voting for when voting for a given candidate. We force the public to rely on nothing more than instinct to determine candidate ‘character’, since the notion of financial corruption has been erased in the name of Money-speech. Yet, they feel this mismatch, between rhetoric and reality, caused by a privatized electoral system, and experience the real-world policy consequences of that mismatch, election cycle after election cycle.
That breeds cynicism generally, and particularly with respect to concerns about abusing the public trust by engaging in private graft.
Yet, in today’s hyper-partisan environment, it’s too easy to dismiss such concerns as just more ‘ado about nothing new’.
And we wonder why Trump’s open corruption isn’t met with more public revulsion?
We have collectively, if inadvertently, normalized Money-influence in our politics and in our public policy, such as it is.
Without realizing it, we have put our votes — and therefore the purpose of our citizenship as Americans — up for sale to the highest bidder for private influence on public policy. Today, that idea is best personified by the person known as Elon Musk, by most measures the world’s wealthiest individual, allowed to bypass Congress and substantively change the nature of American government, carefully-crafted over the past century with the tabulated Consent of a plurality of generations of voters — consisting of Republicans and Democrats — without a single vote, Yea or Nay. That’s not Democracy. The fact that it can happen anyway means we’re already — in a real sense — no longer a Republic.
And that’s the real reason why Trump’s massive graft doesn’t register to a public long since conditioned to associate Dollars with public service.
