Human Sacrifice
Is an important part of democracy
Back in 2014, a political lifetime ago, two social scientists published a study that seemed to demonstrate that our democracy is not that, but an oligarchy, with poor and middle-class Americans having little influence on policy decisions.1
Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page provoked a brief flurry of press coverage — “Gosh, maybe we’re an oligarchy. In other news …” —which faded within a few weeks, which betrays one of many blind spots suffered by the fourth estate and the people they serve, at least in imagination.
A few years later the study appeared to have been debunked. Other social scientists and data analysts said the data and the conclusions of Gilens-Page were flawed; we’re only an imperfect Democracy in which the wealthy have an outsize voice.2
A few years after that, in 2020, the study appears to have been rebunked, with a new analysis of the Gilen-Page dataset. This study, conducted by Duke University social scientist Jarron Bowman, concluded that “the affluent have substantial influence over policy making while average Americans have little to no influence.“3
In April 2022, the New York Times Magazine published a long story4 about a second study by Benjamin Page along with two Northwestern University colleagues, Jason Seawright and Matthew Lacombe, and Larry Bartels from Vanderbilt, looking to establish what influence billionaires have on policy. To no one’s surprise the answer is a lot, on the state and local level as well as nationally.
The main reason Billionaires practice stealth politics, Page says, is that taken collectively, their political preferences do not align with what a majority of Americans want. Their near total silence on issues like taxes and Social Security is “almost certainly deliberate — probably caused mainly by a desire to avoid offense concerning their unpopular political opinions.” This makes it easier for them to avoid being held accountable.
Page was surprised by the difference between perception and reality when it came to billionaires and their politics.5 A few characters with public personas and relatively centrist or even left-of-center reputations — figures like Mike Bloomberg, George Soros and Warren Buffett — tended to define how the public felt about the cohort as a whole. “But it turns out when you look at all the wealthiest billionaires, the picture is very different, much more economically conservative,” Page says.
Page and his colleagues found that billionaires perceived as liberal or -ish by the public did nothing to further the policies they espoused in print. Warren Buffett, the favored cuddly billionaire among Democrats, is famous for demanding vigorous taxation of the rich but has contributed no money to advance that cause. And as we’ve noted, even his calls for taxation are balanced by demands for social welfare cuts.
Twelve members of Congress will soon take on the crucial job of rearranging our country’s finances. They’ve been instructed to devise a plan that reduces the 10-year deficit by at least $1.5 trillion. It’s vital, however, that they achieve far more than that. Americans are rapidly losing faith in the ability of Congress to deal with our country’s fiscal problems. Only action that is immediate, real and very substantial will prevent that doubt from morphing into hopelessness. That feeling can create its own reality.
Job one for the 12 is to pare down some future promises that even a rich America can’t fulfill. Big money must be saved here.
(Emphasis ours.) That’s from Buffett’s widely praised and reprinted op-ed, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.”6 Which promises must be voided, we wonder.
"The 12" were supposedly incentivized by a crude and demonic budgetary device, the sequester,7 which would go into force if they failed to reach an agreement, which they didn't,8 which was as everybody with a lick of sense knew it would be.
Blame for the sequester is robustly assigned by each party to the other,9 but in the end they all voted for it.
A recent example of attempted silent influencing was detailed in the Lever/Propublica story about very silent billionaire Barre Seid’s billion-dollar-plus donation to the Federalist Society maven responsible for helping Republicans pack the federal judiciary, including the Supreme Court, with right-wing judges.10
Some billionaires (and lesser but still hugely wealthy lights) are more public with their adversarial efforts. Once the Koch family's network of right-wing causes was dug up, to very little public outcry, they became more vocal and less circumspect. Tyler Cowen, a George Mason University economist and longtime academic partner of Chares Koch, wrote a 2000 paper called “Why Does Freedom Wax and Wane?”11 in which freedom is deemed to be primarily economic. Among his findings is that the degree of freedom in putative democracies is often eclipsed by undemocratic regimes.
If we examine reforms in noncommunist autocracies, those of Augusto Pinochet’s Chile were probably the most successful. The Pinochet regime started in 1973 when a military coup overthrew the elected government of Allende. The Pinochet government then ruled undemocratically until Pinochet stepped down in 1990 after losing a 1988 plebiscite on his rule. Since that time, Chile has been a democratic nation.
The Pinochet government ushered in many significant reforms. Nearly 3,000 price controls were lifted and over 4,000 firms were privatized, including large ones such as airlines and the telephone company.
So yes, crimes against humanity, people tortured, disappeared, thrown out of helicopters and the like, and a democratically-elected government was overthrown, but economically, man, what a time was had.
Fred Koch, who spawned the brothers, was a co-founder with Henry Welch of the John Birch Society. For the most part the family’s politics haven’t evolved,12 and the GOP has exemplified them since Reagan got elected.
We’ll leave you with the pull quote from the Jarron Bowman study validating the results of the Gilens-Page study with which we opened this post:
“[W]hen the affluent prefer policy change and the middle oppose it, the rate of change is nearly identical to when both groups prefer it. When only the middle prefer policy change, the rate of change is the same as when both groups oppose it.”
Join a socialist organization. And throw some money if you can.
Pokey Lafarge, comrades. We’ve been on a bit of a Pokey bender, this morning listening to his album In The Blossom Of Their Shade. If Bob Wills, Keely Smith, Willie Nelson and Nancy Wilson had a baby, it might sound like Pokey. Next up was Mariachi El Bronx and their album “Música Muerte, Vol. I.”
The Bouncing Souls is playing us out with “Volume 2.”
Okay, I've ordered a Pokey.
It's clearly true that money has an outsize influence on governmental policy. It's also true that voters (people who actually vote; not just people who could vote) have a major influence. Older people, for example, tend to vote and as a result social security is considered to be a "third rail" of politics. Likewise medicare. Young people could have the same effect except that they tend to slack off on election day. An exception was when Obama ran and they had a substantial impact. They may have caused his emphasis on medical coverage even though it wasn't the medicare for all that the young would have preferred. I still like his one liner: "Don't complain; vote!" So, I don't dispute your point. I simply suggest that combatting its effect requires voting that has an impact.