America simply is no longer a democracy or representative democracy.
I don't think any democracy could survive Fox News. Unfortunately the global right is colluding to export this concept across the globe...
In reality, that's not how it works. There are countless examples of candidates who outspent their opponents and lost.
Money gets you reach. It doesn't get you guaranteed results.
Besides, the voters don't get any of that money, nor do they even know most of the time who got more financial support. They'd be insulted by even the slightest suggestion that money is driving their vote.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives could affect more voters with the same amount of money, since spreading bullshit is much cheaper than proving it wrong. The right can flood the zone with a firehose of lies, and even if they literally admit these lies, their voters go along.
But a reasonable interpretation of “the primary reason for people voting like this is the ungodly sums of money spent on elections” is that such a direct causal link exists.
If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
> If you meant something else, happy to receive a clarification.
As a thought experiment, assume we're playing gods and decide to simulate a bunch of universes almost exactly like ours, so we can reliably study how civilizations develop (free from the influence of random chance). Then we evaluate how many of these civilizations had periods of strong corruption, loss in quality of life, and all the other negatives we're experiencing this decade.
My argument is: you'd find a correlation between these periods, and the relative amounts of wealth invested into politics. Note this doesn't imply that bigger sums of money must lead to victory - especially if the thesis mentioned in my first reply is correct, which I very much assume it is.
If not, I once again fail to see your point - sure, the issues I mentioned occur a lot in poorer countries, I never claimed otherwise! So I still can't see how this relates to my hypothesis.
The reality is that spending can keep a candidate from losing an election for dumb reasons (e.g. lack of name recognition), but it can't win an election by itself. There are plenty of examples of the bigger spender losing, both before and after Citizen's United.
Well, that's the kicker. We actually did vote him in. TWICE. It would be great if we could blame some cabal or coup or something. It would get us off the hook.
But the sad fact is that Trump--after sending cop-killing goons to the capital to try to steel the last election--we voted him in by a margin of 53%.
We have no one to blame but ourselves.