What’s at Stake in the 2024 Election

In the minds of many, defeating Donald Trump has become, by far, the single most important objective in the entire political universe. There are clear and compelling reasons to be concerned about Trump’s possible reelection. There are any number of ways in which his personality characteristics, including his grandiosity, paranoia, vindictiveness, and cruelty, could lead to impulsive and irrational actions that would put us all in danger. Trump and MAGA permit making manifest the always-present latent, dark side of human nature. Xenophobia and racism are, if not actively encouraged, given license to be expressed. Trump is a threat to the rule of law by escaping accountability for his criminal acts and attempting to delegitimize the judicial system.

Lately, there has been a great deal said and written about the alleged attack on democracy in this country, spearheaded by Donald Trump and his MAGA followers. Here are three of the many recent books as well as numerous articles about this threat: How Democracies Die (2018) and Tyranny of the Minority (2023) by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zimblatt, and Tyranny (2023) by Timothy Snyder. While most of the statements about the dangers that would follow a Trump victory are quite real, the part about the threat to democracy is problematic. The issue is that we don’t live in a democracy. A Trump presidency brings with it many dangers and threats, but we can’t threaten something that doesn’t exist. What follows is a brief account of how far we are from living in a democracy.

The central meaning of democracy is that the will of the citizens of the nation, at least a majority of the people, determines government policy. To put it concisely, the fundamental principle at the heart of what we mean by democracy is “one-person one-vote.” This means, in the ideal, that all the enfranchised members

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of the polity under the rule of a democratic government have an equal influence on the policies of the government. If one of the universally accepted goals of democracy is to maximize voter turnout in order to accurately assess the wishes of the greatest number, one might expect to see attempts to make it easier for people to vote. For example, to allow online voting. To not allow this is a functional disenfranchisement. Any obstacles, barriers, time-consuming activities, or cost-incurring procedures that are required to vote mean that fewer people will cast their vote.

Arguably, other features are essential aspects of democracy, such as guaranteeing civil liberties, including freedom of speech, religion, and assembly—essentially, the content of the Bill of Rights. A government that doesn’t grant or respect the civil rights of its citizens may well be said to not be democratic. However, a commitment to protecting civil rights, though it may be necessary, is not a sufficient condition for democracy to exist. The essence of democracy remains, as Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address, “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

The essence of democracy is not upholding civil rights; it is that the people govern. Civil rights and government by the people are quite distinct ideas. Those who claim that we are a democracy are far more focused on civil rights than they are on who is actually governing. It is possible, at least in theory, for there to be such a thing as a government ruled by an enlightened despot—one who guarantees all civil liberties but makes every policy decision alone without giving any voice to the people. People would not want to call this democracy.

We clearly do not live in a democracy. Our current political system is best described as an oligarchy or a plutocracy, not a democracy. As Joseph Stiglitz (2019) said, “…our political system can better be described as one dollar, one vote than one person, one vote” (p. 167). Successful candidates will have received some financial support from individuals. But most often, they receive it from certain groups who spend their money on campaign contributions for a reason: They expect the recipient to act in their interests.

Once in office, the winning candidate is subject to the necessity of keeping current and future campaign contributors content. The elected official is then put under pressure from various lobbying groups to support their policies or else face opposition in the next election. At the federal level, under our current two-party

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system, party loyalty—which means voting the way your party leader tells you to vote—is far from being democratic, but it is a requirement for political survival.

Another anti-democratic feature of our oligarchy is that there is an amazingly sophisticated art and science of electoral rhetoric: persuading voters to vote in the manner desired by those doing the persuading. Those with money to spend can influence the beliefs and behavior of voters through their control of media outlets and a variety of public relations and advertising methods. These can be effective enough for people to wind up voting against their own interests.

In the early 20^th century, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, known as the father of public relations, started plying his trade of influencing people’s desires. Going back as far as the early 1920s, when Walter Lippmann said that propaganda had already become “a regular organ of popular government,” the realm of advertising, broadly defined, has become an increasingly important part of the rhetoric of politics. This field is truly a bastard child of psychoanalysis as its power and effectiveness are largely dependent on the operation of unconscious processes. The stimulation of and appeal to the wishes and feelings of the id, sex, aggression, and their manifold variants, along with the employment of psychological manipulations such as scapegoating and fearmongering, are what gives political advertising its power. Its effectiveness is enhanced when it operates in the dark out of conscious awareness.

The entities making the campaign contributions are the multi-national corporations, mostly headquartered in the United States, or those who represent the interests of these high-net-worth corporations. Our government primarily represents their interests. Large corporations may be in competition and conflict with one another on any number of specific policy positions, but they do have one thing in common: They are all primarily interested in their profits. At this time, no government could possibly be elected that would seriously challenge the power and influence of these corporations.

The most troubling influence on election outcomes in our contemporary democracy is the influence of money. As the Supreme Court of the United States has decided, money, or decisions about what to spend it on and how much to spend, are actually forms of speech. Thus, the freedom to do what one wishes with one’s money—specifically, how much you give and who you give

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it to—is a right guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Over the last several election cycles, the amount of money spent per election, particularly at the federal level, has been growing phenomenally with each new election. The candidate for election who spends the most doesn’t always win. Unless a candidate has the resources to spend approximately as much as his opponent(s), he is unlikely to win the election (Schuster, 2020). In addition to how voters are manipulated into voting in ways that do not seriously threaten the interests of the oligarchs, there are other ways to persuade the government to do what the oligarchy wishes. Money can buy lobbying services—the practice of persuading elected officials to do what lobbyists want them to do. There are an increasingly large number of “lobbyists” working for a large number of interest groups, each promoting its own agenda.

Although some are sanguine concerning these developments, most would see this as a corrupt process. If electoral democracy is supposed to be about government by and for “the people” and “one-person one-vote” expresses the ideal, then any process that gives a small group of individuals who have the wealth and access to campaign and lobbying expertise more influence than the substantial majority of people who don’t have such wealth is something that undermines the democratic process.

Despite what the Supreme Court says, money is not the same as speech, and there is a difference between democracy and oligarchy; rule by and for the citizens of a polity is not the same as rule by and for the wealthy. It is in the interest of the oligarchs to keep things as they are. Keeping the myth alive plays a key role in keeping the actual system of governance operating in the way it does.

When large numbers of people believe something to be true when it is not, we look for the operation of a group fantasy. The operative fantasy here is an aspect of the belief in American exceptionalism. We want to believe that not only are we a democracy but that we are also the chief promoters of democracy around the world. We see ourselves as the embodiment and upholders of democratic values. By this, what is usually meant is that we value civil rights—the first ten Amendments of the Constitution. We are particularly offended when other countries like China, Russia, and Iran show that they have very low tolerance for public expression of dis-

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sent or that they violate the civil rights of some or all of their citizens.

There is clearly splitting and othering involved here. We are the good guys who choose the word democracy as our moniker; they are the bad guys who don’t adhere to our democratic values. This same splitting occurs between those “democracy” supporters, like Biden and the Democrats, versus Trump and MAGA, who are characterized as a “threat to democracy.” If a majority of voters in this country choose Trump to be president in the upcoming election, is that not democracy at work?

The governance of these powerful corporations is far from democratic. Policy decisions are made by the CEO and his cohort along with the board, which represents the interests of the shareholders. The employees—the workers in these corporations—do not get to vote on corporate policies, and they rarely get to own more than a token number of shares in the corporation. The percentage of unionized workers is quite low, and their power to wrest higher compensation from their wealthy employers is considerably less than it used to be. The entities that are determining the policies of our putative democracy are thoroughly authoritarian at their core.

There has been a fairly recent extension of the influence of corporations on what should be public policy. This is the growing wealth and power of nonprofit foundations and a variety of private organizations (non-governmental organizations/NGOs), which have a significant impact on the lives of many people throughout the world. The decisions about how foundations and NGOs spend their money reflect the wishes of their founders, donors, and members. They are not made in anything resembling a democratic manner.

No matter who wins the election, large corporations will still wield enormous power and influence on the political process. Successful corporations that have high market capitalization will use this power in the service of protecting their markets and their profits. Both Republicans and Democrats share the ideology of corporate capitalism. The government will still be beholden to those whose primary imperative is to maximize their short and medium-term profits and to promote economic growth. Both parties believe that virtually all goods and services are most efficiently and effectively provided by private profit-making enterprises rather than public agencies or governmental bodies.

To be more specific, consider the prospects of fossil fuel-

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dependent industries, such as oil, gas, and coal producers, refiners, and transporters, along with the many secondary industries, such as the entire plastics industry, that are dependent on the consumption of fossil fuels. In a world of climate change, their future economic prospects should be dim. However, they are largely doing as they usually do and have always done: Stock prices remain high, and these industries are not in danger of collapse in the foreseeable future. There are too many people making too much money with jobs in these industries who are happy with the way things are and will do everything in their power to make them stay that way. The same can be said of why we have such high healthcare costs. Virtually every developed country in the world has some form of single-payer health insurance. There are mountains of evidence on a wide variety of measures showing that a single-payer system is a better way to deliver healthcare than the multi-payer and largely privatized system that this country has now. In addition, numerous polls have shown that a majority of citizens support a single-payer healthcare system; specifically, two-thirds of voters support providing Medicare to every American (Schulte, 2020).

However, we have a health insurance industry that makes money by acting as the middleman between medical providers and their patients. A single-payer system would put all the health insurance corporations out of business. As with the fossil fuel industries, there are too many people making too much money and corporations employing too many people who would lose out if there were a single-payer system. In addition to all those employed by health insurance corporations, all the staff who work in hospitals and medical offices doing the complex and time-consuming billing of multiple insurance companies would lose their jobs. Collectively, these industries are far too powerful for the government, no matter which party is in power, to be successfully challenged.

No candidate who captures the nomination for either party will support the kind of tax policy that might lessen the wealth disparity. It is certainly true that Trump lowered taxes on the wealthy and corporations (perhaps the only real policy change that was made under his administration). While that might not have happened in a Democratic administration, the current Democratic administration has made no effort to reverse the tax cuts. No matter which party wins, there will continue to be no significant estate tax, no increase in the corporate tax rate, no meaningful carbon tax, and no serious attempt to fund the IRS to go after the many billions of

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dollars in lost tax revenue due to various tax avoidance methods that high-income individuals and corporations have kept from the nation’s treasury.

We all know how the political process in a democracy is supposed to work. The central mechanism is the election contest in which there is one winner and one or more losers. All eligible voters choose. Each voter gets one and only one vote, supposedly guaranteeing that all voters have an equal say. Any deviation from the democratic ideal can be accurately described as a corruption of the democracy. To the extent that some individuals or groups within the polity have more say or influence than others, democracy has been corrupted. Perhaps the most insidious aspect of holding on to the myth that we live under a system that can accurately be called a democracy is that it is a distraction that actually works in favor of maintaining the status quo by diverting energy and wasting the time of those who want to bring about real political change.

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