One Person, One Vote, One Joke…on Democracy

Sam Pizzigati

 November 5, 2024
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

As Americans, we hold dear several core democratic values, none more basic than “one person, one vote.” But our contemporary economic realities have essentially obliterated this core value’s essence. “One person, one vote,” we’re relearning this year, simply cannot exist in an America where a single individual can hold 1.4 million times more wealth than the typical American household.

That particular single individual, Elon Musk, currently holds a personal fortune worth over $260 billion. The net worth of America’s median family, according to the latest Federal Reserve data? Less than $200,000.

How much of Musk’s fortune — and the fortunes of his fellow super rich — is going into the 2024 presidential and congressional elections? A just-released report from Americans for Tax Fairness has found that 150 of America’s wealthiest have already contributed $1.9 billion to the candidates they find most friendly to how our richest see the world.

That $1.9-billion total, Americans for Tax Fairness points out, will most likely run well over $2 billion by the time this year’s election dust has settled. But that same $1.9 billion has already surpassed, by a stunningly wide margin, the $1.2 billion that over 600 billionaires spent on electing presidential and congressional candidates in 2020.

Who’s benefiting from all this billionaire loot? Nearly three-quarters of this $1.9 billion — 72 percent — is going to support Republican candidates. The Democratic Party candidate share: 22 percent.

And how much wealth will the 150 billionaires that Americans for Tax Fairness has been tracking have left in their personal fortunes after subtracting their hundreds of millions in 2024 political contributions? Plenty. The $1.9 billion these super rich have laid out so far amounts to a mere 0.07 percent of their collective $2.67 trillion in wealth.

Musk himself had at last count poured at least $133 million into electing his favorite candidates, with Donald Trump by far and away the biggest beneficiary. That sum almost certainly understates what Musk is actually spending on campaign 2024. Billionaires like Musk, analysts at Open Secrets note, can also contribute anonymously to political campaigns through “dark money” groups that need not reveal their donors.

Let’s assume for a moment that Musk’s overall outlay for Trump’s election ends up in the vicinity of $200 million, less than 1 percent of his personal net worth. In backing Trump, he could hardly be making a more profitable investment. With Trump once again in the White House, Musk could look forward to lower tax bills, better access to lucrative federal contracts for his SpaceX, and fewer regulations on the rest of his sprawling business empire. He would be richer than ever.

And so would the rest of his super-rich peers. Should we fear for our democracy at that prospect? We most certainly should, as the New Yorker’s Charles Duhigg makes frighteningly clear in his just-published analysis of Silicon Valley’s enormous new political power.

Back in 1982, the year Forbes began annually publishing a list of America’s 400 richest, Big Oil dominated the upper ranks of America’s richest. Nine of our wealthiest 15 on that initial top 400 list owed their good fortune to the oil industry. High-tech now dominates the Forbes 400. On the 2024 Forbes 400, billionaires who owe their fortunes to high-tech occupy 10 of the top 15 slots.

Like their Big Oil predecessors, today’s high-tech rich haven’t just accumulated great wealth. They have gained enough of a political punch to make elected leaders think twice before getting in the way of anything Big Tech wants to see happen.

The most brazen of today’s Big Tech punchers now come from the highly speculative cryptocurrency sector. Silicon Valley venture capital firms have invested billions into crypto. These same investors have invested mega-millions in super PACs, with the prime goal, the New Yorker’s Duhigg details, “of convincing politicians that the political consequences of being anti-crypto would be intensely painful.”

The crypto crowd chose the California U.S. Senate primary this past March as a high-profile opportunity to get that message across. That primary drew a host of candidates, all seeking to become one of the top two finishers who would square off against each other in the November election. This broad field included Rep. Katie Porter, a nationally known consumer champion. Crypto’s movers and shakers decided to go all-out in the primary against her.

Porter, for her part, had never devoted much attention to crypto. But that didn’t matter. For the crypto crowd, getting into the California Senate race against Porter, a popular member of Congress, would be an ideal opportunity to intimidate other politicians, “to warn anyone running for office,” as an industry insider told the New Yorker, “that, if you are anti-crypto, the industry will come after you.”

Crypto’s top super PAC would go on to deluge California’s airwaves with ad spots that blasted Porter as a “bully” and a “liar,” never mentioning anything about crypto at all. Porter ended up finishing third with a mere 15 percent of the primary vote. Message delivered.

“Candidates in New York, Arizona, Maryland, and Michigan,” notes the New Yorker’s Duhigg, soon “began releasing crypto-friendly public statements and voting for pro-crypto bills.”

Crypto-related super PACs have so far spent over $100 million on 2024 political races. Donald Trump, predictably, has now emerged as an exuberant crypto champion, and crypto dollars have played key roles in the primary defeats of two high-profile congressional progressives, New York’s Jamaal Bowman and Missouri’s Cori Bush.

The sort of billionaire muscle-flexing that Big Oil and now Big Tech have inflicted upon American politics, we need to keep in mind, has an impact that goes beyond the political fates of individual politicians. That muscle-flexing serves to keep off the table any serious discussion of America’s fiercely unequal distribution of income and wealth.

Ever notice one of those pre-election polls that ask the American public to rate the importance they give to the “issues” facing the nation. The Pew Research Center, for instance, this past spring did extensive polling on what the Center deemed 16 “top problems” facing the United States, everything from inflation and illegal immigration to domestic terrorism and the affordability of health care.

Nothing on that Pew list directly highlighted any aspect of our deep-seated economic inequality. The Pew “issues” list made no reference whatsoever to concerns ranging from billionaire political influence to the vast gap between CEO and worker pay.

And that should not surprise us. Inequality-avoiding “issue” lists reflect the logical consequence of what happens in modern societies where wealth sits explosively concentrated. That wealth funds the think tank reports that shape the nation’s ongoing dialogue over what issues matter. That same wealth owns our nation’s most influential mass media and can strike fear, as the crypto political saga demonstrates, in lawmakers who don’t toe the plutocratic line.

In the 2024 election cycle, that concentrated wealth has, by and large, gone unchallenged. We can’t afford to let that happen again.

Sam Pizzigati writes on inequality for the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest book: The Case for a Maximum Wage (Polity). Among his other books on maldistributed income and wealth: The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970  (Seven Stories Press).