Plutocracy: Scott Walker Edition

The campaign leading up to yesterday's election on the recall of Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin -- which Walker won -- was marked by an unusually large disparity in campaign spending by the contenders. According to this chart in today's New York Times, Scott Walker spent $29.3 m or ten times the $2.9 m spent by Tom Barrett, his Democratic opponent. (If you count spending on behalf of the candidates by groups other than the campaigns themselves, the disparity is smaller: $45.6 m for Walker and $17.9 m for Barrett. However, it is not clear to me why, in the New York Times's chart, the $4.5 m spent by "Wisconsin for Falk," a group that supported Kathleen Falk, Barrett's primary challenger, is counted as spending on behalf of Barrett.) As E.J. Dionne argues in today's Washington Post, Walker's huge advantage in early spending was critical as "nearly 9 in 10 people said they had made up their minds before May, according to exit poll interviews." Barrett closed the spending gap somewhat towards the end, but by then it was too late.

The point of plutocracy is to drown out opposing views by buying up as much as possible of the finite windows into voters' minds. Voters aren't dummies, but they are busy, they have lots of stuff to do and to think about; so it is understandable that they may let others do their thinking for them. If a candidate can't make a clear case and can't remind the voter of her counter-argument every time an opponent makes a pitch, then the opponent gets a free pass into the voter's heart. (There may be limits to this line of reasoning, however. Some day we may find out what today's North Koreans, who have little or no access to opinions other than those of the state, really think and believe.)

Therefore, in today's America, with its high and growing inequality of income and wealth, one can expect the left to get ever more insistent on the need for Robin Hood policies, thereby inviting an ever greater financial disadvantage -- and, therefore, continued lack of success -- in election campaigns. At some point, the left may simply give up, seeing no way to influence the voter. At that point, America's political system will have all the moral majesty of Saudi Arabia's.

Right now, the role of spending disparities is somewhat dampened by the fact that money for a candidate tends to follow the electorate's enthusiasm for the candidate. This is why Barack Obama managed to raise a huge amount of money, mostly in small contributions, to fight his 2008 campaign. This rough parity between the distribution of genuine political support across candidates -- by which I mean the notional political support that candidates would receive in a hypothetical world in which all candidates spent equally -- and the distribution of campaign spending across candidates, means that the latter can't prevail over the former: money can only amplify what would have happened anyway. But this situation is likely to end as economic inequality increases in America.

When economic inequality rises beyond some threshold -- a threshold that I am unable to pinpoint, sorry! -- the distribution of campaign spending across candidates will cease to reflect the distribution of genuine political support. When that happens, money will do all the talking, and candidates with views not held by the plutocrats will simply give up and withdraw. And, as I said earlier, at that time we'll feel as free as the people of Saudi Arabia.

The rise of Scott Walker in Wisconsin also heralds the death throes of labor unions and collective bargaining in America. But, in truth, the time to fight for union rights has long passed. Unionization rates have been falling for decades. At this point, something like 6 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions. Naturally, most people see unionized public-sector workers going on strike to extract concessions and say, I don't have collective bargaining rights. Why should these public-sector workers have rights that I don't have? And why should they be able to use those rights to extort juicy pay packets, gold-plated pensions, and easy working conditions, all at my (that is, the tax payer's) expense? (By the way, when John and Jane Doe expresses these sentiments, don't expect Fox News or the people on the right to decry their thinking as the "politics of envy.")

If the American left wanted to preserve collective bargaining rights, the time to act was long, long ago, before the slide in unionization rates began. Now, the battle is over and public sector unions may as well just pack it in.