Money Talks Votes

[Content Note: Class warfare.]

Something you probably know about me by now is that voting is about the closest thing there is to a sacrament in my secular little world. Even when my vote doesn't matter to the outcome of an election, for one reason or another, my vote matters to me.

That's why I get angry about gerrymandering, about disenfranchisement, about the decimation of the Voting Rights Act, about financial influence in politics, about Citizens fucking United.

That's why I get angry when I read shit like this:

Never have so many candidates entered a White House contest boosted by such huge sums.

...Some party operatives say that 2016 could be the first race in the modern era in which a candidate does not need to win Iowa or New Hampshire to prevail. Strong showings in those early states historically translated into much-needed financial momentum. But this time, wealthy patrons might keep their favorite picks aloft through independent spending.

...The 2016 primary contest could resemble the fracas in 2012, when super PAC benefactors kept alive the bids of former House speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, forcing Mitt Romney into an extended fight for the nomination.

Adelson and his family poured $15 million into a super PAC backing Gingrich, then an unthinkably large amount. This time, with more big spenders in the mix, such sums could be commonplace, the former House speaker said.

"What seems like really big money is less than a yacht," Gingrich said in an interview. Wealthy donors could decide that "this year, instead of buying a new yacht, I'm going to spend $70 million on a candidate," he said.

One person with more money than zie could ever spend in a lifetime now has the ability to meaningfully affect the nation's presidential election.

That isn't a democracy. Not a functional, meaningful one.

What that is, despite conservative caterwauling about "wealth redistribution" in response to any attempt to robustly fund an effective social safety net, is class warfare.

Class warfare is not, as we are meant to believe, taxing people who have way more than they need so that people who don't even have the basics to survive can have a little more.

Class warfare is obliterating a democracy by rendering irrelevant the votes of any and all human beings who aren't grotesquely wealthy, and calling it "free speech."

Class warfare is believing that money is "free speech," but one's constitutional right to cast a vote that means something is not.