What Rules Politics? The Money, of Course.

Few people understand how democracy works; lots of people understand the basic theory behind how it “should” work. This leads to an immense disconnect where voters and politicians are speaking entirely different languages and expectations deviate massively.

Research shows that oligarchic conditions prevail in a democracy, especially when elections are expensive enough to require sponsors:

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

In reality, this is always the condition of democracy: people with money hire others and therefore have great influence, and elections will always be expensive since a staff is required to manage them, so candidates will always be influenced by big donors.

This works in the early years when the donors are naturally talented people who have an interest in making society healthy so that their audience will grow. Once government subsidies come into play, however, companies find it is easier to sell to morons instead.

In turn that means that when we speak of democracy, we are looking into a system which consists of not just political activity, but economic and social activity as well. These are mutually dependent and form a system because they vary with each other:

A system is understood here as a functionally existing whole that consists of interconnected components. It is holistic in nature and presupposes the necessity of encompassing within its framework all the phenomena to which it applies. These are usually captured in the form of normatively defined subsystems (White, 1959). The individual elements of the system are functionally dependent on each other. The system should be closed, and its boundaries precisely defined. System refers to different levels of organization, such as cellular, individual, population, or species-wide.

Changes within each component trigger a reaction from the others, causing the system to enter a state of imbalance. It is assumed that changes are most often caused by external factors. The system’s response to this situation is to seek a return to a state of dynamic equilibrium called homeostasis or equilibrium. It thus takes the form of an adaptive model. The system, while under the influence of stimuli, becomes unstable, after which it returns to equilibrium and thus adapts to the new situation triggered by the incident of this stimulus.

The system, in other words, has to include the human dimension, which has almost nothing to do with actual politics.

In free market terms, democracy involves trading the action of voting for the warm feelings it conveys to the person voting. If it makes you feel better to think you are helping “the poor,” yank that lever, and then you get warm feelings for your vote, with actual costs deferred.

For this reason, people with money and power have great influence in elections, because they pay for advertising agencies and psychologists to craft appealing messages that have little to do with reality. The goal is warm feelings, not actual policy.

They also offer something pragmatic, which is that for people who depend on those industries, the health of those industries writes their paychecks. People vote for their immediate interests because they have no other choice. This destroys long-term thinking or ideals higher than individualism and consumerism.

In fact, the best thing to offer is something which has no hope of succeeding, because then it also cannot fail. For example, giving money to “the poor” always makes people feel good even though it achieves nothing lasting or realistic.

During our time in nature, whoever found a way to take fruit off of trees was able to survive. Voting is taking the fruit of good feelings, and getting elected enables people to have access to the taxpayer cash which means that they can hire their friends and those friends will then appoint their children to Boards of Directors.

It is how you build lasting wealth. You spend money belonging to someone else in order to get favor with others, and then use that favor to trade for insider stock tips or placements for your kids, so that everyone gets enough money to invest and build dynastic wealth.

Ideological groups offer a voluntarist proposition, which is that something is morally right or practically correct so it should be done, but it offers nothing in terms of lasting good feelings because there is no transfer of wealth to accompany those warm feelings.

However, ideology does not pay the bills, nor does realism, which unites short-term and long-term thinking in the long term because that influences the short term. The two cannot be separated; dualism of all forms seems an artifact of human fear, not thinking.

If you want to know why our politics increasingly resemble duels between billionaires, it might be because only billionaires can afford to have long-term and affirmative, futuristic, and forward-motion beliefs at this point.