The billionaire Koch family members, outspoken on a host of Republican causes, have lately begun discussing something different: themselves. Koch Industries, the Kansas-based energy giant, is running advertisements that attempt to protect its corporate image, which may have taken a hit from the efforts of Democrats – particularly Senate majority leader Harry Reid – to sully the family name. Republicans, meanwhile, have belatedly begun highlighting the Democratic party’s network of plutocratic backers, linked to a donor group called the Democracy Alliance. At times, American politics can look like a clash of oligarchs.
In a new book, Brookings Institution political scientist Darrell West argues that this is exactly what it is. In Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust, he writes that they shape US politics more than we think (although he at times assumes, wrongly, that Republicans are by default the party of privilege, and Democrats the party of those arrayed against it). In his view, the Kochs’ approach has been “emulated” by such left-leaning donors as hedge fund manager Tom Steyer (a backer in this election cycle of environmentalist causes in several states) and financier George Soros.
Almost every analyst of rich people’s influence on politics focuses on campaign finance, and West is no exception. But he also gives a picture of less noted methods the rich use to shape politics. One is to befriend senators who have certain prerogatives. West points to Bill Ackman, the activist hedge fund manager who has taken a short position in nutrition company Herbalife and has been close to Democratic senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts. As The New York Times reported last spring, Mr Markey wrote letters to both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission, urging a formal investigation of Herbalife , at which point the stock’s value dropped 14 per cent.
Perhaps the easiest place for US billionaires to work their will is not in the national government, however, but at state level. With the shift of governing responsibilities to Washington over the decades, local countervailing forces have been hollowed out. They can be overwhelmed with money. Big donors create Potemkin political movements, phoney groundswells for their favoured causes. Sometimes these causes involve economic advantage. The gambling mogul, Sheldon Adelson, has campaigned against the legalisation of internet gambling, which would harm business at his resorts. Stephen Ross, owner of the Miami Dolphins American football team, sought a referendum that would approve hundreds of millions of dollars in publicly funded repairs for his side’s stadium.
But it is social issues on which billionaires are most agreed, and on which they have had the most success in altering the political landscape: gay marriage, immigration, guns and marijuana. Rich people care more about choice (because they can do more with it) and less about order (because they can pay for it themselves). On some of these issues they are virtually unanimous. Hedge fund manager Paul Singer, for instance, is seen as a Republican donor but for several years his policy priority – gay marriage – has also been that of Democrats. By the time California’s law forbidding gay marriage came before the US Supreme Court in 2013, it was opposed by Apple, Google, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon and the White House. Mass immigration is an issue many billionaires would like to regularise and few to halt. Guns appear to be anathema among America’s richest donors, none more so than Michael Bloomberg. The late insurer Peter Lewis did much to push the legalisation of marijuana in certain US states after using it as a painkiller.
Almost all billionaire activism in these areas seeks to drive public opinion away from traditional or conservative views. It is often the Democratic party on which the eyes of the super-rich shine. West describes the organisation of Karl Rove, the former aide to George W Bush, as having “devoted $300m to unseat Obama”. Mr Rove’s way of doing this has been by purging the Republican party of less electable conservative candidates.
Two things make ours an era of big money in politics. One is inequality (for which Republicans are rightly given much of the blame); the other is centralisation (seen rightly as the fault of the Democrats).
Most suggested remedies would curtail campaign finance – which is to say political speech – and merely compound the problem. The two parties simply serve the rich in different ways: Republicans are an army of the rich and their emulators; Democrats an army of the rich and their retainers. Those looking for a “billionaire’s party” are unlikely to find it.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
Fonte: FT
