Campaign Finance Reform by Itself Won’t End Elite Control of Politics
Socialists can and should continue to fight to banish corporate money from elections. But Canada is a case study in the limits of campaign finance reform. We need more radical action to limit the power of the rich in politics.
Restricting the power of money to influence politics may be urgent and necessary, but it does little to alter the ideological preferences of those who traditionally staff the halls of power. (Getty Images)
In both his runs for the presidency, Bernie Sanders issued frequent battle cries for campaign finance reform. Absolutely nothing about this strategy was uncalled for and, if anything, Sanders’s loud and unapologetic attack on the power of organized money in American politics was long overdue from a major presidential candidate.
As virtually everyone without a Beltway area code seems to understand, the corrupting influence of wealth — from rich donors, from corporations, from Super PACs — corrodes American democracy and skews public policy toward the interests of the 1 percent. By any standard, in fact, the sheer amount of money in American elections is often difficult to comprehend: one estimate from the Center for Responsive Politics pegged the total cost of the 2020 cycle at some $14 billion. In 2018, less than one half of 1 percent of Americans contributed more than $200 — meaning that America’s disproportionately white, wealthy, and right-leaning donor class contributed well over half of all funding. Permissive, opaque, and tailor-made for the exorbitantly rich, there can be no doubt whatsoever that America’s campaign finance regime is a wild west that diminishes the power of the many for the benefit of a tiny few.
For Democrats in particular, this reality has long served as a useful pretext for why progressive legislation is so difficult to achieve. And, for what it’s worth, the excuse is not without a degree of truth. Want to contest a major election? More than anything else, a candidate needs money — and one who runs afoul of powerful lobbies, well-off individual donors, or corporate interests by supporting socialized medicine or wealth taxes is going to have a much harder time getting it. Even those who do get elected will soon find themselves pitted against the massive apparatus of lobbying, think tanks, and corporate communications that largely runs the show in Washington (though plenty of left-wing lawmakers are currently demonstrating the power of grassroots fundraising and legislative independence from corporate interests).
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