The Eclipse of American Democracy, Part Two: Money Talks, Everyone Else Shut Up

In December, Republicans pushed through Congress a tax cut for corporations and the 1% that has support of only 32% of the public, making it the most unpopular legislation in decades. To be fair, most Republican voters support the cut. But the question remains: Why are Americans getting a law that less than one-third of them want?

Republicans, you see, don't believe in participatory democracy the way Democrats and other folks do. They believe in "freedom", which is not the same thing at all. Here's a hypothetical conversation I think illustrates the opposing philosophies:
Democrat: The local chemical company has been poisoning the ground water. We need to pass a law limiting the amount of chemical runoff. That way the water stays safe, and the chemical company has clear guidelines that allow it to protect its reputation. Everybody wins.
Republican: Government regulations impinge on freedom.

Let's dig into the philosophical backing of this particular brand of freedom. Probably the single biggest private influence on American elections and the crafting of legislation is the dark-money machine built by Charles and David Koch. From a 2015 New York Times article: "The political network overseen by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch plans to spend close to $900 million on the 2016 campaign, an unparalleled effort by coordinated outside groups to shape a presidential election that is already on track to be the most expensive in history."

The Koch brothers aren't just a couple of billionaires who want a public policy environment favorable to their interests as oil tycoons. They want to destroy government entirely, except as a vehicle to protect them from democracy. An article in the Guardian by George Monbiot explains how Charles Koch spent millions sponsoring the work of an economist named James McGill Buchanan:
"Buchanan, in collaboration with business tycoons and the institutes they founded, developed a hidden programme for suppressing democracy on behalf of the very rich. The programme is now reshaping politics, and not just in the US.

Buchanan was strongly influenced by both the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, and the property supremacism of John C Calhoun, who argued in the first half of the 19th century that freedom consists of the absolute right to use your property (including your slaves) however you may wish; any institution that impinges on this right is an agent of oppression, exploiting men of property on behalf of the undeserving masses.

James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money that others have earned, through involuntary taxes to support public spending and welfare. Allowing workers to form trade unions and imposing graduated income taxes were forms of "differential or discriminatory legislation" against the owners of capital.

Any clash between "freedom" (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that "despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe." Despotism in defence of freedom."

To summarize, the 2017 tax cut and other unpopular federal government actions were "despotism in defence of freedom" in action. First Republicans gain power through illicit means including extreme gerrymandering and a lot of other anti-democratic tactics (which I'll discuss in future posts in this series). Then they pass laws that people don't want, but most definitely protect the "freedom" of corporations and billionaires to pay little if any taxes, destroy the environment, allow the public infrastructure they depend on to crumble and keep the real generators of profit, America's highly-productive workforce, in poverty.

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