People still don’t get it. Soon after the presidential election, The Recorder ran an opinion piece about how “Big Money Wins,” extending the fallacy that money buys elections.
It doesn’t.
I will refer those interested to a recent Harpers’ article, which actually researched the data, showing that spending more on campaigns simply doesn’t translate into election success.
Certainly, this presidential election is a glaring example of that lack of connection. The big beneficiaries of PAC money, Rubio and Bush, never made it past the primaries. The biggest campaign fundraiser, and the recipient of the vast majority of general-election PAC money was Clinton, who couldn’t translate her vast monetary advantages into a win.
So, go ahead and keep blaming “Citizens United” for what’s wrong in U.S. politics. Progressives, keep dredging up the myth of the Koch brothers bogeymen. After all, it’s useful in your fundraising. Money certainly does corrupt, but mainly between elections, as contributors play for having paid, but it doesn’t win elections. That’s the dirty little secret that the media, which benefits most from all of those campaign dollars, doesn’t want to admit.
The educated professionals are still getting Trump’s election wrong. It wasn’t the consequence of hate, or intolerance. He was elected by people who don’t make six-digit salaries, adherents of traditional family values, followers of religions other than “humanist spiritualism,” people who work with their hands in nonartisanal industries, and people proud of their own country’s culture and who see its history as something good and special.
For decades now, those people have been openly ridiculed by those of wealth and power. It’s no surprise that the pollsters missed them. The “important” people in the country haven’t seen them in decades, and only allude to them as “deplorable” primitives that should simply disappear because they have no place in the Progressive Future of the Globalized planet. But, despite the media’s indoctrination efforts, the educational system’s concerted efforts to alienate their children from them, and the regular references to them as a dying breed, they manage to persist from generation to generation, and in numbers great enough to affect the fates of nations. And all because we desperately need them.
John Blasiak
Greenfield