Moneyed

The nitty-gritty details of specific policies can get complicated, and many voters don't take the time to get educated on them. That can give well-funded advertising campaigns more power to shape their views.
Why did California's billionaire tax fail to surf the blue wave?

Then, once again, it seems to me that the problem with money in politics is twofold: One) people are being passive receptacles for information on topics, rather than doing some basic due diligence themselves and two) no more is expected of them. When campaign finance activists seek to limit spending on campaigns, they have an incentive to portray the voting public as helpless to become even marginally engaged on issues.

I, personally, am not a big fan of "wealth taxes," especially as means of plugging holes in state budgets; I'd rather have an across-the-board income tax (flat or progressive, take your pick), because I feel that using taxation specifically as a means of wealth transfer has a few to many perverse incentives attached to it. It's similar to the discussion around Medicare for All. People point to Europe as a model for the payment saide, but they still expect American levels of access to, and quality of, care, when that's really not the way Europe appears to operate. For many left-leaning people in the United States, "billionaires" are conceived of as an endless pot of money that can be used to make other people's lives better without their being any costs associated with it. Reality is rarely that simple. But I digress.

If the presumption is that some significant portion of people are simply going to vote in accordance with whomever has been able to funnel the most messaging their way, then direct democracy, in the form of citizen initiatives and referenda, is a bad idea. I've come to the conclusion that attempting to make the world safe for passivity and ignorance leads to bad outcomes. Especially given that, in a representative (or direct) government, people can vote in favor of things that they want without needing to care about whether or not those things are attainable, or what the costs are. And the United States already appears to have a problem with people voting for their short-term interests and presuming that a long-term bill will never come due.

Just In Case

 

Sigh.

This is one of those things that is "technically correct," which, I have on good authority, is the best kind of correct. Mr. Reich is correct that good-faith investigations and prosecutions are not, in and of themselves "retribution." Although the "good-faith" that I added (and I suspect is assumed by Mr. Reich) is doing a lot of heavy lifting, investigations and prosecutions are not justice, in and of themselves.

But if the goals of a modern justice system are intended to be some mix of incapacitation, deterrence, rehabilitation and retribution, then, while it might not be "getting even," exactly, "retribution" is certainly past of the picture, especially if one actually believes in any concepts of retributive justice.

Incapacitation, deterrence and rehabilitation are all, generally speaking, utilitarian goals of a system of criminal justice. The goal is to either raise utility or to prevent disutility. Retribution isn't on that list because, in utilitarian thought, it doesn't do anything to make anyone better off. An eye for an eye doesn't help either party see better. But not everyone is a Utilitarian, and the moral intuition that wrongdoing merits punishment, even when it isn't required to obtain the other goals of a justice system, is fairly common.

But I get it. Mr. Reich is attempting to make the point that the wave of Congressional investigations that everyone expects is coming, and the resulting prosecutions (and convictions) that a lot of people hope are coming, aren't going to be about hounding people over partisan disagreements. They're going to be about actual crimes that were committed.

Personally, I find that attitude to be quaint in the political environment of the modern United States, but I realize that Mr. Reich's understanding of "who needs to hear it" really means people who are, like him, convinced that the Trump Administration, and the technology executives who have been cozying up to it, have violated the laws of the land. And no-one ever thinks that they're being willfully perverse.

Populism, however, tends to be less concerned with good or bad acts than it is with good or bad people. And that's where things go off the rails. For certain supporters of the current Administration, the President using the Department of Justice as a cudgel isn't him misusing the institution; it's him using it go after bad people. And bad people have obviously done bad (i.e. prosecutable) things. It's the fact that it's not so obvious to the rest of us that causes a problem.

And that's likely the way that investigations and prosecutions of Trump Administration officials and corporate executive (or even another impeachment and trial of the President himself) will be seen. Because for someone who views all and sundry of them as good people, they haven't done anything wrong. And it's going to be quite a while before that changes.

On Offer

One of the topics that I'm seeing come out of this most recent mid-term election is that of money in politics. It's been noted that companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXAI and the like have been pouring money into campaigns. And while that expenditure may not have worked as well as company executives may have liked this time around, the general understanding that companies are buying policy preferences, and elections, chugs along.

Fair enough, I suppose. But one topic that I have yet to come across in the small corner of the podcast ecosystem in which I spend my time is: If elections are being sold, who's doing the selling? And I think that this may be a more pertinent question than it's given credit for.

In may general understanding, what money buys a campaign is a way to cut through public inattention. While there are any number of means through which people can obtain information about this or that candidate's positions on various topics, most of these, like websites, require at least some active effort on the part of the voter. And there are any number of people who can't or won't expend that effort. Here in Washington State, voters receive pamphlets in the mail that lay out the races, and candidates can place statements them. When I lived in an apartment, these voter's guides would quickly pile up in the trash can near the mailboxes... people couldn't even be bothered to take them back to their homes. Given this, campaigns rely on getting their messages to pop up on television, social media and people's inboxes. And these channels have costs associated with them.

So, at least as I see the world, one of the easier ways to reduce the impact of money on politics is to understand that when a person or organization "buys" an election, the general public is who's selling. A more active and engaged public would do a lot to make money less effective. If a candidate could put up a website and have people read it, they wouldn't need to rely so much on expensive means of proactively attempting to get themselves in front of people.

But one of the rule of the game, and one that I've come to understand is fairly ironclad, is that the public cannot be criticized. Because to do so would be akin to blaming the victim, even if that attitude may be standing between people and their stated goals. To be sure, I don't spend a whole lot of time reading candidate position papers, although I'll sometimes do so during primary elections. And, to be honest, most of the ones that I have read tend to be lists of banal platitudes masquerading as solutions to policy problems. I suspect, however, that this is indicative of the fact that so few people actually read them carefully, let alone follow up with questions.

In any event, I think that a somewhat more active public would go a long way towards solving the problem of money in politics. Except, perhaps, that most of the public doesn't consider it a problem in need of a solution. 

Remember, Remember

I first started tinkering with this way back when, and have been monkeying with it since. I posted a version of it to Google+, back when that was still a thing; but I came across it again recently, and thought that I'd drop it here... as another, futile, form of protest of the constant march of the Christmas shopping (and advertising) season.

Remember, remember, this Fifth of November,
The Christmas promotions and plot.
Stores see no reason why gift-buying season
Should ever be forgot.

We're no longer living in time of Thanksgiving,
There's less than two months left to shop!
Execs face the onus of no year-end bonus,
Should retailer's registers stop.

As a child they once told me, that Christmas was holy,
That it marked the salvation of all.
But now, ain't it funny, it's the feast of Saint Money,
And we've all come to worship the Mall.

The crowds have stampeded, when they've been impeded
From snagging their holiday deals,
In a mad dash for loot, their IQs get the boot,
And they've trampled folks under their heels.

We're told if we stop it, the stores won't have profit
The commandment is "Go forth and buy!"
So we troop to the forefront of each retail storefront
I'm not sure we understand why.

So let us remember, on Fifth of November,
The Christmas promotions and plot.
Stores know the reason why gift-buying season
Must never be forgot.

Next Phase

I'm curious as to what lessons the Republican Party will take away from their carpet-bombing at the hands of nationwide Democrats last night. As I understand American politics, the likely answer is "None." They, after all, realize that Democrat candidates will have made any number of promises that they're not in a position to keep on their own (candidates for Congress fall into this trap all the time). As long as Republican members of  Congress feel that the "Make American Great Again" activist class will still punish them for any apparent disloyalty to the President and the Trumpist project, the Legislative Branch will be a graveyard for any bill that promises major change, and voters have historically had very little patience for the realities of legislating (or governing more broadly, for that matter).

And so the likely outcome is that Congressional Republicans will obstruct where they can, and rely on the President to Veto things where they can't. Because they still have a base of voters for whom the Democrats aren't simply the Opposition; they're Evil. And while they don't want the country to fail, they also can't see how the Democrats can succeed without the country failing. And as far of those voters are concerned, the problem is with everyone else. (Take Representative Greg Steube {R-Florida}, who claimed that: "Instead of standing firm on our principles, you have governed out of fear, continually knelt to the moderates in our conference (who all got crushed last night anyway), and discarded conservatives like me who warned of last night’s results." I'd like to know what "moderates" he was referring to, given how thoroughly the Republican party managed to purge anyone who refused to salute anything that President Trump hoisted up the flagpole.)

Thus, the cycle will continue.Because the Democrats aren't going to be in the business of selling the difficult choices that will be needed for long-term improvement any more than the Republicans were. And so the promised quick fixes will fail to materialize. The Democrats won't be willing to alienate their core voters in a futile attempt to reach out to people who don't support them any more than the Republicans did. And so expect them to hope that situations that benefit their base, but bother the public at large, will just go away (regardless of how poorly this strategy has worked in the past). Which means that the Democrats will manage to alienate many of the people who voted for them, perhaps for the first time, before the next Presidential election.

Back in 2012, the Republican party created a post-mortem after Mitt Romney's fail bid to unseat President Obama. By 2016, it was being ignored, and the victory of Donald Trump seemed to vindicate that decision. Losing in 2020 didn't change any outlooks, and again 2024 appeared to back that play. But now the standard midterm change in the political tide seems worse than usual, so maybe people will take a second look at what may have gone wrong. But, given the history of such things, I doubt it. Politics seems to be more attached to what's familiar than it is to what might work, because a good number of voters are, too.