“The Bosses of the Senate,” J. Keppler, Puck, 1889.
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In the wee hours of the morning on Wednesday, November 6th, Donald Trump clinched a majority of electoral votes, guaranteeing him a second four-year term as president of the United States. His campaign hinged on the support of Americans who felt unheard and unrepresented by the government.
Mr. Trump ran a populist, anti-establishment campaign. Historically, a prerequisite for success with this kind of strategy is a dissatisfaction with the existing order amongst a large portion of the constituency. This can be seen in the political succession of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, whose supporters rallied under his anti-colonialist appeal for economic sovereignty, and in the ascension of the Nazi party during a period of hyper-inflation in interwar Germany. Thus, Trump’s successful campaign suggests that American voters are increasingly disillusioned with the Democratic Party, and with the broader political status quo.
Perhaps the chief accusation leveled by Trump supporters against the federal government is that the government doesn’t care about them, that it operates independently from the American people. This claim is far from baseless. Since the inception of the Republic, an elite minority has wielded outsized political power at the expense of the majority. During the Constitutional Convention, wealthy plantation owners influenced the framers to permit the continuation of slavery. Today, corporations and interest groups lobby politicians to loosen environmental regulations, lower corporate and individual income tax rates, and redirect government funds to the private sector.
To be clear, this country’s political system has always favored a wealthy minority by design. In the beginning, property-owning white men were the only ones granted the right of suffrage, explicitly excluding all other stakeholders from the democratic process. Importantly, this made the consolidation of political power entirely lawful. In American Plutocracy, Timothy K. Kuhner stresses the importance of the legality of this dynamic, stating, “It is one thing for wealth to control democracy as a matter of fact and quite another thing for it to achieve such power by right.” The former instance, observable in countries where corrupt governments accept bribes from outside organizations, i.e. the Mexican government and the various drug trafficking cartels, is fragile and susceptible to popular retaliation. In the latter instance, the political power imbalance is durably undergirded by a legal framework. As time went on, the abolitionist, suffrage, and civil rights movements guaranteed the legal right for every citizen to vote. This forced the elite to get creative in finding avenues to continue to consolidate political power. The new means are “subtle enough to avoid mass resistance but powerful enough to accomplish a similar degree of political exclusion.”
The privatization of political financing, consisting primarily of direct campaign contributions and expenditures by outside groups, is a key component of this new approach. Capitalizing on the persistent wealth disparity between the elite class and, well, everybody else, this tactic allows the rich to convert their economic power into political power.
Political action committees, known as PACs, are one vessel through which private money enters politics. These entities take donations from individuals and corporations, whose funds are then strategically allocated to campaigns to further their specific agendas. Over the past thirty years, the share of total campaign financing stemming from PACs has steadily increased. In 2024, 32.6% of direct funding for Republican representatives came from said entities, with only 14.9% coming from small individual contributions. Though many PACs, such as union PACs, represent working-class interests, many of the most active and influential PACs are funded primarily by corporations and wealthy stakeholders.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of conservative nonprofit group Citizens United in its legal challenge against the Federal Election Commission, decreeing that any private entity is entitled to unlimited “independent political spending” under the First Amendment right to free speech. In its wake, America bore witness to the emergence of an even more effective mechanism for money to infiltrate politics: the Super PAC. These organizations enjoy unrestricted cash flow, much of which comes from nonprofits such as 501(c)(4)s that are generally under no legal obligation to disclose their donors (a phenomenon known as dark money). As of November 15, 2024, 2,459 groups organized as Super PACs have reported total receipts of $4,294,207,112 and total independent expenditures of $2,728,202,953 in the 2023-2024 cycle.
Such spending power allows candidates backed by PACs and (unofficially) Super PACs to launch mass-media advertising campaigns to disseminate information about their platforms at an incontestable rate. Consequently, succession to political office, especially in federal positions such as Congress, is incredibly difficult without competitive, large-scale investment. Because individuals and grassroots PACs lack the funds to contend financially with large-scale, privately funded outside groups, the interests of smaller but better-funded constituencies are preponderant to those of the masses.
Big money is influencing politics more than ever. So what? Well, the interests of wealthy sects are diametrically opposed to popular interests. Prominent lobbying groups (who funnel money into PACs and Super PACs) include the National Rifle Association, whose interests lie in the deregulation and mass selling of deadly firearms, and the American Petroleum Institute, dedicated to delaying and preventing environmental policy that would adversely affect oil and gas company bottom lines. Dirty energy companies in particular are among the largest donors to Super PACs aligned with the Republican leaders in Congress. But it’s not just that. Every time the government has gone against the interests of the people, there is almost always a powerful lobbyist in the decision-maker’s ear. That includes the gradual lowering of the corporate tax rate, the fall of the inflation-adjusted minimum wage to lower than it was in the 1960s, and the ever-increasing gap between income and outcome among Americans.
A visible effect of the current system is Congress’ descent into partisan gridlock. Legal scholar and campaign reform advocate Lawrence Lessig stated that as long as members of Congress remain in the thrall of “the economy of influence”—when its members depend on private money to fund reelection campaigns—“no progress would be made” on any public-policy question. Legislators on both sides of the aisle are committed to appeasing their donor base, preferring to satisfy their private stakeholders over engaging in sensible bipartisan cooperation.
So, what can we do about this?
First and foremost, if we can recognize and accept that the status quo is categorically opposed to the representation of ordinary Americans in our democracy, the response must be to increase efforts in other means of political influence such as grassroots organizing and direct action. These methods have proven effective in the fight against the hegemonic control of politics throughout the history of this nation.
Second, we can look to our local and state governments for examples of feasible campaign reform. Take New York City and its Matching Funds System for example. In New York City Council elections, all grassroots donations are matched 8-1 by the city, which neutralizes candidates’ necessity for big money donors and promotes diversity of background—as well as legislative opinion. 34 out of 51 current city councilmen identify as non-white, and 3 are members of the Democratic Socialists of America Party.
Indeed, the concentration of political power is the gate behind which lies the concerted address of all social issues in America. Armed with the knowledge of how the system persists and how to push against it in a lawful manner, there is no reason that this generation of Americans cannot mobilize to weaken plutocratic power—or if we really want to, kick the door down all together.
