Why is it healthy for American democracy to have an oligarch purchase the U.S. Presidency like a shiny, new yacht?
When he ran again 3 years later he gave away 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of cider royal — "nearly enough for a half-gallon per voter." And guess what, he won.
Considering we wouldn't even declare independence until 18 years later, it's safe to say that buying influence in an election has been American since the beginning, and even before.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/12384/swilling-planters-...
I totally accept it if we're only counting from the start of true universal adult suffrage, including women and taking no account of melanin content of skin - whoever is first on that deserves it be known widely for their national pride. Was that the USA?
UK has had universal suffrage since 1928. It looks like Finland was the first in 1904.
Edit: New Zealand 1893. Go the Kiwis! Ka Mate!
Arguably we still don't, given what the republicans have done to subvert democracy in Florida.
And you ignore the other key point, which is that the US had no real national competitors near its borders, while other countries whose stability you discount did. That's the key point to American stability, not any world historical genius in drafting the Constitution.
America is by far the oldest nation with a presidency, and it's finally starting to collapse.
Setting those things aside, claiming that Congress doesn’t act as a check on the President simply does not square up with such things as the government shutdowns of 2013, 2018, and 2018/19, the Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, and it only goes on from there. Partisan polarization has made the checks and balances between the two elected branches more, not less relevant.
> Senate’s refusal to confirm Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court
Not a check so much as a complete refusal to perform constitutional duty. What McConnell did was subvert the process of checks and balances to remove the presidents ability to make appointments.
Sure they can. They can refuse to confirm his appointments, they can pass laws with a large enough supermajority to override his veto, and they can even remove him from office with a Senate supermajority.
> What McConnell did was subvert the process of checks and balances to remove the presidents ability to make appointments.
Thus disproving this notion that Congress is powerless against the President. The President has the constitutional power to make appointments with the advice and consent of the Senate. There's nothing in the Constitution that says the Senate has to have a good reason to withhold that consent.
The constitution is a deeply flawed document that relies on the acceptance of norms and generally good actors. Absent that you end up with a wannabe dictator like Trump acting basically unchallenged.
> and they can even remove him from office with a Senate supermajority.
an act made much harder when the executive flouts subpoenas.
I don't care about the merits of Congressional prerogatives here, which is an entirely secondary point. The point is that the Founding Fathers believed that Congress would defend its own prerogatives against the executive. This has been proven false: a model where government is dominated by partisan prerogatives is far more descriptive of reality than one where branches-of-governments pursue their own prerogatives.
Your latter point--that a Republican Congress investigated and obstructed a Democratic President--is true, but it is, again, an indication that Congress is driven by the needs of the political parties who happen to be running it at the time, not as an institution in itself.
This is entirely contrary to what the vaunted Founding Fathers intended or expected. Not least because the main thinkers among them thought the system would prevent the development of political parties. The Constitution was theorized to deal with abstractions that don't correspond to reality, and it doesn't even consider the most important driver of politics and governance not only in the contemporary world but in the world that existed a year after it was ratified.
In a world where political parties are accepted as a given and inevitable, no one would write anything like the Constitution and expect it to be effective. And no one has: even after WW2, when the US was drafting constitutions for its defeated opponents, it went with documents entirely unlike our own.
I wasn't intending to.
> I don't care about the merits of Congressional prerogatives here, which is an entirely secondary point. The point is that the Founding Fathers believed that Congress would defend its own prerogatives against the executive. This has been proven false.... Congress is driven by the needs of the political parties who happen to be running it at the time, not as an institution in itself.
Got it, this is a better explanation and I think I agree with it.
It will be a good read for everybody deifying "a realpolitik grandmaster" Henry Kissinger how badly he failed in the role of Rockefeller's political adviser. His ineptitude in politics was borderline tragicomedic. This the best proof to me that a "professional politician" is really an oxymoron.
The rich are bad at politics more often than not, and their money can compensate for that only partially.
Georgie Washington was however a spectacular politician on his own, without a doubt.
Win Rockefeller was elected, and very popular.
He's not purchasing anything - as long as Americans care enough to be informed, he's blowing hot air that no one will believe.
Caps on campaign spending are there for reasons. A campaign should contribute to meaningful public discourse. Nothing more.
> the American media is free enough to have reported on it
Private media can be biased. Either explicitly (lying to peoples faces), or implicitly (self-censorship on stuff related to the owner). Surprisingly, in several countries - such as Britain or Czech Republic - state-owned media are the one sticking to higher values.
> American citizens are now well-informed enough to know that some of the folks they talk to online are paid, and the American election will be based on the interactions of a free people
Well, there are multiple studies in several countries which show the opposite. Quick google search yields one such https://thehill.com/homenews/media/392870-pew-study-finds-am...
If you can show evidence of this, I’d be interested. I’m pretty sure that /all/ media can be biased, and is. The BBC is no different or better than Fox News. They both share the news from their perspective.
I wouldn't be too sure about that.
Amusingly, in the search results below, BBC themselves report on their own secret links to the state security establishment.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=bbc+used+mi5+to+vet+staff
I'm curious: How do you think that Americans can be well informed in a system that actively attempts to feed them disinformation by a series of interested parties that have down to a science how to switch public opinion and humungous budgets?
I'm not claiming that it's impossible for a single person to be well informed, mind you; I'm simply saying that it's pretty clear that the efforts to keep people misinformed are giant, becoming stronger by the day as technology advances and with no significant opposing force. I can't see how anyone can see that trend and think it's not going to have a harmful effect on society.
Unintended consequences abound, should Citizens United be fully overturned and financing be more tightly policed. Maybe those are good, maybe they're bad.
Personally, a 50% tax on any political speech spending, dedicated to funding voter media literacy and education, seems like a better approach.
Give everyone the freedom to speak, but teach everyone to listen critically.
Many voters don't have the time to spend on political education, nor the interest - I actually think the lack of free time is an issue in a democracy, and it's why elderly people are such an active demographic during elections
And the elephant in the room is that propaganda works even on informed people. Just making a name familiar to you is money well spent for marketers, even if you don't buy the claims of the ad it's still an advantage.
Media is designed to be addictive in our days. We should start treating it for what it is - if something disguising as news is actively attempting to evoke an emotional response for the reader/listener to get them hooked, that thing is harmful and not a public service (state funded or not). I don't have a solution, but I do think that at some point in the future we'll look at clickbait and disguised ads the same way we look at tobacco or asbestos now.
There's time for voter education, that's currently not being used.
As to malicious media, I hesitate to advocate censorship before I can come up with an unambiguous, simple test of what qualifies.
having a lot of money makes it easier to run, but there's no guarantee of success
1. purchase it with their own money
2. purchase it with money from bribes
3. blackmail party insiders for the nomination and support
Using their own money is the cleanest and most honest way to do things.
4. Convince millions to give just a little bit of time or effort because you spent your entire political career fighting for working people.
Which, in my view, is even better.
So it's absolutely possible to raise money without using one's own money or taking bribes.
And even if a candidate raises money from a 100 billionaires, that's better than one billionaire. The more people you raise money from the more likely it is that those people have conflicts with one another that can then balance one another out.
A single billionaire financing their own campaign is just too much centralized power for my tastes, even if I trust that billionaire and generally like his policies.
Power corrupts.
Meanwhile, small donor fundraising has become much easier and much more successful than in the past, and imho, the entire problem revolves completely around the amount of power that has been centralized and expanded to the Federal Government. Part of the whole idea behind, you know, the principle of limited government... is to limit the amount of power that could be bought in the first place and therefore limit the incentive to corrupt the process, but obviously that ship has sailed a long time ago...
I would think that in a free society, people are not forced to give their money to support political activity they would otherwise not support. For me, it’s that simple. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.”
...and now the systemD vitriol makes sense.
Michael Lewis' the Fifth Risk highlights this pretty well.
Maximizing-liberty libertarianism would say that an impartial government is necessary to enforce rights for all citizens, even if that's the right to information to vote efficiently.
Trump wanted to tack hard away from the center and to tear down the Republican establishment and rebuild it with a more populist vision. Bloomberg is running to stop the Democrats from tacking away from the center and to 'protect' the party from those threatening to tear it down and rebuild it with a more populist image.
Trump ran as an outsider populist, Bloomberg as an insider technocrat.
Neither candidate believes in compromise or their own fallibility. In either case, we would be choosing to forfeit the ability to decide for ourselves going forward.
There are no candidate that signals fallibility and or possibility of compromise. Why should they, anyway?
The entire political process is based on money (fundraising determines whether you're even on the ballot or a debate or able to be on a ticket) and controlled by money as there is a direct correlation between media spend and campaign success.
The worst part is that the "media" is the one sector in our country that has the most to gain from chaos and they're the ones who for the most part, control the dialog and the direction and worse, the cost.
Frankly, I am more shocked by the fact that people dont understand that its all about money.
That said, I agree that money in politics is an issue, but since getting money out of politics is impossible, perhaps we should just get politics out of money. A government which is not empowered/encouraged to waste the publics money would be a nice starting point.
I guess it's a rhetorical question. In other words, let me rephrase: why money has always played an important role in politics?
In 2016 Lawrence Lessig tried to attack this problem, with little success. In this election there seemingly is another candidate, somewhat more practical than Lessig, with somewhat stronger systematic approach than others, so we can hope for some progress.
The more influence successful people have on politics - the better it is for the country overall.
Countries that try to manage themselves by poor majority - quickly deteriorate into chaos or into dictatorship.