A cozy, ominous relationship
One of the fascinating, untold stories of the day is the saga of how Democrats began poaching Republicans’ corporate/oligarch donor base.
It’s a story of either how savvy Democrats are or how obtuse Republicans are. It can be told either way.
More convincingly yet, it can be told as a story of capitalist/corporatist grand master chess players deftly moving the pieces around the game board in their own interest.
In any case, while Republicans go on mouthing the familiar (and tiresome) free-market, pro-business pieties, Democrats have been banking ever larger donations from what was once the Republicans’ exclusive donor base — big business and capitalist oligarchs.
And Democrats themselves have succeeded in pulling this off while spouting the rhetoric of revolutionary Jacobins — although Democrats shrewdly prefer the term “transformational” to “revolutionary,” the latter not marketing well after the coercive wealth-sharing doctrines of Stalin, Mao and the like.
“Money is the mother’s milk of politics,” the legendary Democratic Party boss of California, Jesse Unruh, famously observed. Today we might go even further and say that money is the DNA of politics.
It used to be that Democrats never mentioned the word “wealth” without attaching the modifier “obscene” to it. Today, the Democratic line regarding the essential pecuniary nature of politics seems to follow the dictum laid down by the emperor Vespasian: “Pecunia non olet.” (Money does not stink.)
Indeed, the party’s treasurers and bookkeepers would tell you, were they to speak frankly, that money today has a positively alluring fragrance to it, forget what the old party populists like William Jennings Bryant once told you.
Today, “socialist” firebrands like Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez) provide the Democratic Party with orations exhorting various confiscatory schemes. Oddly unperturbed, gazillionaire oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and George Soros nonetheless go on providing the party with great, mounting heaps of moolah.
(Suspecting this state of affairs, many American yahoo Deplorables turned to the “creative destruction” of carnival-barker Donald Trump, who applied Joseph Schumpeter’s rule of economics to politics. But that’s a story for another time.)
For a peek behind the curtain at the all-important monetary numbers funding our politics today, let us turn to that priceless institution of democracy, the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. The center tracks the hundreds of millions of dollars sloshing around our political parties and system of governance.
It’s not just that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her tycoon husband are rocketing into ever higher financial strata via the propellant of a bulging stock portfolio. Their party — self-professed tribune of the toiling proletarian working stiff — is cleaning up too, though the working stiff isn’t.
Over the last three decades, five of the 10 biggest political donors — the fattest of fat cats — favored Democrats over Republicans.
These included the No. 1 and No. 2 fat-cat donors, hedge fund multibillionaire Tom Steyer’s Fahr LLC, and Republicanturned-Democrat financial mogul Michael Bloomberg and his Bloomberg LP empire.
The two donor sources’ empires favored the party with more than $600 million over the period. Another top-ten donor, RenTech, meanwhile, topped off the Democrat tank with nearly $90 million of contributions.
All through the 1990s and the first two decades of the new century, Democrats increasingly tapped into the capitalism pipeline, while, however, bemoaning no less than before the corrosive results of money on politics.
Microsoft, Amazon and even the Wall Street ogres, Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital, became munificent sources of revenues for the Democratic Party.
Fifteen of the nation’s 25 fattest fat-cat donors and 27 of the fattest 50 favored Democrats.
All the while, however, the Democratic Party retained virtual exclusive control of its labor union base, despite the party’s flirtations with the capitalist swains, especially capitalism’s social media and tech swells.
Turning a blind eye to these dalliances, unions continued to donate their entire wad, tens of millions in total, to the party over the three-decade period, 1990-2020, this despite the unions’ waning membership base and dwindling dues revenues.
Partly the shifting flow of business donations favoring Democrats reflected the major corporate players’ determination to hedge their bets, a prudent adjustment on their part.
The shift also reflected the reality that the corporate big guys were no longer reassured by the Republicans’ suck-up, rote hosannas to the wonders of free enterprise and limited government.
Among those who took to redistributing the donor beneficence to include the once-snubbed Democrats were such corporate plutocracies as JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Lockheed. Raytheon, Boeing, Honeywell, Verizon, Comcast and many others.
None of this is to suggest that the Grand Old Party meanwhile finds itself in such penury that it is forced to apply for food stamps or visit the soup kitchen. Not even remotely so. The GOP continues to have its plentiful wealthy benefactors, too, continues to be a leading voice — arguably, THE leading voice — for the lucky, affluent few.
The trend of the Democratic Party to cozy up to the corporate forces it has traditionally bad-mouthed at every opportunity is
in some respects a mixed blessing, in other respects a mixed curse.
Having diversified its politics portfolio, so to speak, the corporate plutocracy is perhaps better positioned now to moderate the Democratic Party’s tendency to indulge in moonbat reveries of money growing on trees, there for the easy harvesting and redistribution.
Having upped their investments in the party, the corporate plutocrats are able to pose the questions businesses routinely must ask themselves merely to survive: What’s the chances this or that proposed scheme is gonna work? What’s it gonna cost? How’s it gonna be paid for?
The party has long been accustomed to gliding over such questions while promising its constituencies ever larger pieces of the magic Big Rock Candy Mountain.
Businesses are not always a monolithic interest group. Different businesses and industries may on occasion have opposing interests. To the extent this is true, they tend to keep one another honest, to thwart preferential blandishments from government lawmakers and regulators.
The emerging alliance between government and business — as indicated by the increasing flow of corporate donor dollars to the Democratic Party, the party of government — undermines this longtime safeguard arrangement.
Business and government heretofore have had a mutually wary relationship. That wary relationship messily served the long-term public interest. This imperfect and often problematical relationship produced the most prosperous, and most equitable, big-nation economy in history.
The cozy arrangement now evolving between government and business has, if anything, intensified lately. Social media businesses have arrogated to themselves the authority to “edit” certain views into oblivion, an over-reaching power previously exercised by government censorship bullies.
In the pandemic — for better or worse, with yetto-be-seen long-term consequences — businesses have stepped in to impose authoritarian mandates as a favor to government. Meanwhile, government has granted Big Pharma sweeping liability protections and other phenomenally profitable vaccine subsidies.
A certain level of cooperation between government and business is, of course, desirable, but a certain level not. A cooperative arrangement between the two was, after all, the hallmark of fascist regimes in Europe, regimes that required a world war to dislodge them from power.
It’s an unsettling thought that both business and government may thrive from from a cozy relationship — as the example of China and Putin’s Russia seems to illustrate today. As for how liberty fares when business and government cozy up together, there’s again the instructive example of China and Russia in addition to the prewar fascist regimes of Europe.
Power, whether shared or delegated, has a potentially corrupting component. And when power does corrupt, is does so always — always — while professing innocent, even noble motives.
Equity must be attained. Existential threats, domestic and foreign, must be overcome. Hate speech must be silenced. Privilege must be reversed if the “wrong” cohorts are said to benefit from it; the bushes must be thrashed to scare off systemic/endemic/ ubiquitous/all-pervading discrimination — white supremacy, homophobia, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, among others. “Unscientific” views must be eradicated; “misinformation and disinformation” must be thwarted, and challenges to orthodoxy must be rooted out by “fact-checking” and by coercive cancellations of safe-space-violating speeches.
We are at war, at war with bugaboos, proliferating bugaboos. And you know what they say about war: Truth is always its first casualty. Truth shall set you free, say the Scriptures. But not, of course, if truth has been distorted beyond all recognition.