class warfare

E J Dionne in the Washington Post continues his discussion of campaign finance following the Citizens United decision. In his latest column he complains that "the 2010 election is turning into a class war." This strikes me as a totally naive statement. There has always been a class war: the US has tried again and again to deny and hide it, but it has always been there. It is to the benefit of the wealthy to deny it, and so they have. The Progressive Movement of the early 1900s gave the wealthy a way to obscure the issue, and this was the basis of most of the campaign reform legislation. Such legislation has served only to further hide the influence of the wealthy.

Typically Dionne himself tries to deny class war by presenting Obama as a supporter of the wealthy and the market system. Setting up Obama as a supporter of the wealthy leaves Dionne mystified as to why the wealthy would want to attack Democrats. Again, Dionne is being naive: Obama might say nice things about the free market, but the wealthy are not fooled. The wealthy want to control the government, and Obama and Democrats are an obstacle to this control.

Dionne then complains that the Supreme Court has peremptorily "swept away decades of restrictions on corporate spending to influence elections." I have mixed feelings about what the Supreme Court has done, preferring that the legislature make such decisions, but in fact what the Supreme Court did was possibly motivated by the reality that all of those restrictions on campaign finances has not been successful, and has instead distorted the political process.

Dionne talks in terms of corruption, but that term is a very slippery one, easily shading into simple political preferences rather than something criminal. Corruption is supposedly the use of undue or illegitimate influence, but who is to say what is undue? Corruption is buying influence, but if one has money, what else is one to do with it, how else is one to exert influence?

The counterweight to the use of money to gain influence in a democracy is the power of numbers at the voting booth. The wealthy will always have money, and will try to use it in elections. The only power able to counteract the influence of money is the power of numbers, and this is almost by definition the power of the poor, or the non-wealthy. The problem in elections, and in government more generally, is that the US government is not democratic, and thus is not able to counter the influence of wealth. Contrary to Dionne's claims, this country does not a class war; it is not irrational, it is basic.