“Take It From an Actual Billionaire”

Elections have always been big-money affairs since the Supreme Court birthed its three horsemen of the billionaire apocalypse. Rulings turning cash into constitutionally protected speech (Buckley), extending those speech rights to corporations (Bellotti), and then pretending money is not a corrupting force (Citizens United) have made the electoral process a battle of super PACs and dark money groups using billions of dollars to hack our minds until we succumb to their voting demands.

But 2024 was something new. Just a few years after Bernie Sanders’s billionaire-bashing campaign almost won him the Democratic Party’s nomination, billionaires didn’t just quietly donate from the shadows. They dumped unprecedented amounts of cash into the election, and some of them deliberately jumped into the spotlight, turning billionaire status into a proud credential cheered on by both parties’ fans.

In all, a record $16 billion will have been spent on the federal election, much of it dark money from donors influencing the discourse from anonymity — and that’s just the money that’s traceable. A billion dollars of dark money was spent by outside groups, a tenfold increase since 2020. About a quarter billion dollars of the federal election spending we know about came directly from corporations — and half of that comes from the cryptocurrency donors demanding less regulatory scrutiny, even after the recent Sam Bankman-Fried crypto implosion seemed to foreshadow future crises and bailouts.

On the Republican side, a third of the money spent in support of the ticket came from billionaires, and Donald Trump openly solicited campaign cash with promises of legislative favors. This transactional politics was enshrined by Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, whose recent rulings immunized him from prosecution and legalized bribery.

Into this bacchanal stormed the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. He not only bankrolled a Trump-boosting super PAC and paid random voters $1 million, he made himself the public mascot of the campaign. At the same time, he angled for a White House job of shadow president — a perch that could give him the power to further enrich his corporate empire with more government contracts, fire government personnel scrutinizing his companies, and potentially provide him with the largest personalized tax gift in American history.

Musk portrayed himself as a defender of free speech — all while his social media platform was weaponized to preference the particular political speech he supports and drown out everyone else.

On the Democratic side, after donors anointed Kamala Harris her party’s nominee with no primary competition, $1 billion of campaign cash flooded into Democratic coffers, and hundreds of millions of dollars more flowed into shadowy super PACs from billionaires whose tech and Wall Street firms are bridling under regulatory scrutiny. Harris ended up being the first presidential candidate in history whose biggest source of financial support was anonymous dark money.

At the Democratic convention festooned with corporate logos, the national television audience was introduced to the new ticket with prime-time speeches from a former credit card industry CEO promising that “Kamala Harris understands that government must work in partnership with the business community”; a top Uber executive declaring that “I know she will fight for you”; and billionaire Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker bragging about inheriting a multibillion-dollar Hyatt hotel fortune to raucous applause from an audience overjoyed to have found its newest billionaire idol.

Meanwhile, the final weeks of the campaign were marked by Harris deploying billionaire Mark Cuban as the campaign’s top television surrogate — one of a group of billionaire donors demanding Harris fire their toughest regulator, Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan — and Harris obediently promising that she will be friendlier to big corporations than the current White House occupant.

The Unspeakable C-Word

Though the master planners spent fifty years securing the court rulings to make all of this graft and bribery legal, corruption this brazen still could have been a central topic of conversation in the election, considering how public it all was — and considering polls showing how rightly pissed off America is at the grifty state of our politics.

But that didn’t happen either. Since the last presidential election, talking about corruption too bluntly now runs the risk of reprisals.

In the 2020 Democratic primary, anti-corruption crusader and Bernie Sanders supporter Zephyr Teachout published an op-ed labeling Joe Biden’s donor-coddling record a “corruption problem” —  and in response the media portrayed her as a pariah, then Sanders sunk his own campaign by repudiating Teachout and lauding Biden.

In 2022, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke criticized GOP governor Greg Abbott for accepting money from a fossil fuel billionaire whose company profited off a Texas power outage — and O’Rourke was dragged into court and sued by that same billionaire.

And just a few months ago, after crypto billionaires spent Democratic representative Katie Porter into the ground in her US Senate bid, there was backlash not to that spending but instead to Porter declaring that “an onslaught of billionaires spending millions to rig this election.” Despite Porter making clear she wasn’t denying the election results and despite the indisputable truth that billionaire spending rigs the electoral process to favor pro-billionaire candidates, she was promptly cast as a deranged freak peddling Trumpish lies.

“No Democrat should be using that language,” said Porter’s Senate opponent Adam Schiff, in a scream-the-quiet-part-out-loud admission that this retaliatory psyop had a specific goal: censoring any vernacular that dares to link big-money politics to the intensifying democracy crisis the Democratic #Resistance purports to stand against.

And so, with the election discourse successfully sanitized, 2024’s celebration of corruption ensued on both sides. There was barely a peep of the righteous anti-corruption criticism that had once turned John McCain and Bernie Sanders into household names. Instead it was a fight-fire-with-fire war of attrition — the more money that was dropped into the election, the more each side celebrated a chance to firebomb the democracy into the voting outcome it wanted.

Of course, toward the end of the race, there was a fleeting chance for a wake-up call amid the thick fog of the money war. It came when the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post intervened to kill off their newspapers’ planned endorsements, and a film reviewing Trump’s problematic past was suppressed until just days before the election.

These moves made the implicit explicit, showing how corporations and billionaires are at the center of the democracy problem, not merely in buying elections but also in buying the machine that frames the entire political conversation. The controversies could have been a chance to finally admit that this Citizen Kane media ecosystem is a democracy problem and to encourage support for independent, non-billionaire media outlets. Instead elite media floated the idea of simply finding new, nicer billionaires to prop up the collapsing Fourth Estate.

And then came the virtue-signaling psyop: the New York Times–backed #WhyISubscribe tweet hashtag to try to shame readers into continuing to give their subscription money to the billionaires. No doubt there were many solidarity high-fives at the Washington Post’s invitation-only election night gala sponsored by crypto lobbyists — an event that makes the newspaper’s “democracy dies in darkness” motto seem like a boast rather than a warning.

Anticipatory Obedience

Some media observers cast newspapers’ decisions to avoid presidential endorsements as Trump-prompted “anticipatory obedience” — a phenomenon in fascist regimes in which institutions remain quiet to try to avoid retribution from the reigning strongman. There’s probably something to that — but such anticipatory obedience extends way beyond just newspaper opinion pages. It defines the entire political system’s silence in the era of legalized corruption.

Think about the world around us.

Today half of working-age Americans are struggling to afford health care, and nearly a third have medical debt. Nearly half of middle-aged Americans have zero retirement savings. More than a third of the country resides in locales with dangerous air pollution. Ten million kids live below the poverty line. Life expectancy in the United States trails other industrialized countries. Greenhouse gas emissions have hit their highest rate in history, as the livable ecosystem is showing signs of catastrophic collapse.

Taken together, we’re living through a whole new terrifying verse of “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” and yet none of these crises have been a significant theme in the election we just experienced. Indeed, as one New York Times headline put it, “The Campaign Issue That Isn’t: Health Care.”

Why such silence? Because every politician running for national office knows that to center these issues in a campaign is to prompt the ire of the billionaires and corporations who can — and will — spend them into the ground.

This reticence is the real anticipatory obedience and the real democracy crisis — the one you couldn’t hear in the Democratic convention applause for “an actual billionaire,” the one obscured by the MAGA rally cheers for Musk, and the one drowned out by endless super PAC ads blasting through every screen in your life.

There are differences between the parties, and who won the election matters. Though Harris has been vague about her agenda, it was a safe bet that her administration would defend reproductive rights, protect some of the Affordable Care Act’s restrictions on insurance industry predation, and recognize the existence of the climate crisis.

A new Trump administration will almost certainly try to do the opposite. Crypto donors will get crypto deregulation, oil donors will get climate deregulation, Wall Street donors will get financial deregulation — and much of the radical Project 2025 initiatives that Trump’s former staffers assembled will be pursued.

So yes, the outcome will be a hinge point in history — and if big-money politics is now normalized, the hinge will be more like a ratchet that moves only in one direction. Democrats will pledge that the hinge merely is “not going back.” Republicans will promise another hinge swing to the hard right.

Perhaps that limited range would be acceptable in a society that had already built the basic infrastructure to meet human needs. But this is America in 2024, a place where health care, housing, retirement, and climate crises require a much bigger range of policy solutions — the kind of far-reaching initiatives we once saw during the New Deal. Those might be possible if we repeal Citizens United, force the disclosure of dark money spending, and publicly finance elections so that candidates can run for office without the need for legalized bribes from corporations and billionaires seeking legislative favors.

But in lieu of those reforms — and without voters in both parties organizing their politics around ending systemic corruption within their midst — then the master planners’ money politics is about to get even more aggressive.

Already, Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo — who received the largest dark money transfer in American history — is promising to use that cash for “infiltrating the press, infiltrating entertainment” and for recruiting into his movement “the folks who have the greatest capability of entering into and helping to control the choke points of society.” Meanwhile, Musk is promising to deploy his Trump-boosting super PAC in future elections and further down the ballot.

In the immediate aftermath of Trump declaring victory, much of the media chatter is focused on one question: Will whatever’s still left of democracy be saved?

But there’s just as big a question that must be asked.

If the blockbuster season of “Billionaire: Endgame” that we just lived through is now what we call “democracy” — then what exactly are we saving, and for whom?