Unilateral Disarmament is Not a Great Plan

I agree with some of Libby Watson’s piece about the problem of rich people and the Democratic Party, but this framing is rather odd:

But finding the thousands of dollars Weinstein donated over the many years he has spent as a major Democratic donor, and dutifully Doing Something with it, does not solve The Harvey Problem. The problem does not go away along with his money. Instead, the Weinstein story—and the collateral damage it has caused Democrats—should provoke a moment of reflection: As long as they keep taking money from the super-rich—as long as sustaining the party depends on huge sums of money from people like Harvey Weinstein—things like this will happen. It’s not that every super-rich guy is a predator, though wow, a ton of them are; it’s that when you run your campaigns largely on the donations of rich people, you tie yourselves to them, whether you like it or not, whether you mean to or not.

I’ve mentioned before how a lot of online lefty discourse — and this tendency, ironically, is particularly strong among people who define themselves as non- or anti- liberal — takes a liberal individualist approach to what are primarily structural problems. The idea that the Democratic Party is just making an unfettered choice to be reliant on rich donors to be competitive is problematic, to say the least. Because of Buckley v. Valeo and its progeny, there will be tons of money in American politics whatever the Democratic Party does. Bernie (and to a lesser extent Obama) may have shown that you can run a presidential campaign relying mostly or exclusively on small donors — but it just doesn’t scale down. There just aren’t enough small donors to competitively fund every marginal congressional and state or local race. And it’s not just venal Democrats who are vulnerable to this money — Russ Feingold can be drowned by PAC money just like Evan Bayh.

The obvious way out of this dilemma — and there’s no disagreement between Sanders and Clinton on this point — is 1)to get a median Democratic justice on the Supreme Court who will vote to give Congress and state legislatures much more leeway to regulate election spending and 2)healthy Democratic majorities in Congress that can pass campaign finance legislation. But how this can happen if the Democratic Party engages in preemptive unilateral disarmament is…not obvious. (It’s also worth noting that while the typical Republican big money donor is more right-wing than the typical Republican, this is much less true on the Democratic side.) At the very least, this is a question that needs to be dealt with — it’s not very useful to discuss the role of the wealthy in American politics as a choice the Democratic Party is freely making that it could walk away from with no negative consequences. Buckley and Citizens United are important precisely because they make the vastly disproportionate influence of the rich inevitable.