Sheldon Adelson is the man behind Newt Gingrich's anti-establishment success
Newt Gingrich is a Washington insider but he’s not in the good graces of his party’s elite. And yet he manages to stay competitive in the GOP primary.
Jon Chait makes an interesting point about the competitiveness of the Gingrich campaign:
Money is the primary mechanism that parties use to herd voters toward the choices the elites would prefer them to make. The nomination of George W. Bush offers a classic example. Bush and his network had organized so many Republicans to donate so much money that the contest was essentially over well before a vote had been cast. The Bush fund-raising network didn’t involve a handful of billionaires in a room. It required thousands of fairly affluent people working together.
He points to the GOP marching orders on Gingrich:
If Gingrich does win, veteran GOP strategists tell CNN to expect pressure on Senate Minority Leaders Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders to call key GOP donors and ask them not to contribute to Gingrich’s campaign.
Chait notes that ten years ago “this sort of edict would have suffocated Gingrich. But under the present system, Gingrich can simply have a single extremely wealthy supporter, Sheldon Adelson, write a series of $5 million checks.”
Now I draw a very different conclusion than Chait from this. Here’s Chait:
Conservatives may not care much about the good-government problems that this scenario raises. (I care! Imagine a sitting President trying to make a fair judgment about a policy decision impacting the businessman who single-handedly financed his entire election.) But they may come to care about the problems arising from a system that now allows one very, very rich man with very, very poor political instincts to overturn their own best laid plans.
On the other hand, I’m sort of thrilled to see the duopoly threatened. Our two-party system really is a threat to American democracy. No power bases are more entrenched than the Democratic and Republican parties. Money be damned, if the party is going to unite around Bush in 2000 then McCain’s chances are null and void. In 2012, the rules have changed.
Is this the first crack in the GOP’s thick armor – an even more stunning change of fortune than the Tea Party sweep in 2010? I wrote recently about how Citizens United helped take at least a little power away from traditional media corporations. Is it also weakening the two-party grip on the political system? Could this be the beginning of the end for lesser-of-two-evils democracy in America?
To Chait’s fretting over good government, why should we be more concerned with the influence of one billionaire over the decisions of a hypothetical president Newt Gingrich than with the amassed influence of corporations over the Republican party itself? After all, if Gingrich did anything explicitly to help Sheldon Adelson we’d know about it rather quickly. Everyone would be paying close attention. But the machinations of the Republican party itself and the money which keeps the back-scratching mutual between the party and its benefactors is largely opaque – a perpetual process that, like breathing, we barely notice at all.
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I’ve haven’t thought much about Citizens United, so I can’t say I have an informed opinion on it. I guess my questions are whether the pluses of Citizens United that you mention offset the minuses and whether its pluses could be achieved in a way more preferential to people who lack the wealth to influence elections.
We across the ocean from you are laughing ourselves quite silly, because we manage to have multi-party rule and viable third and fourth and fifth parties while simultaneously having much more stringent rules about the allowance of moneyed interests to influence our politicians.
The fundamental problem within your misguided governmental system is that you run a winner take all system whereby a political party with 10% national support will never see even a single vote anywhere in your government. I suggest that you change that first. You do have a bicameral institution that are constructed around the same sorts of winner take all votes, why not parliamentarise at least one of them to invite a wider field of opinions?
Yup. America is going to be a duopoly of some sort no matter the campaign finance system we have as long as we’re a FPTP electoral system. Even if the GOP falls apart into pieces, the people to the right of Ben Nelson will realign themselves into one party because that’s how our electoral system works.
Oddly enough our ‘misguided governmental system’ has had only one bloody civil war since it’s inception, while you Euro’s have had at least three or four, depending on how you count them.
Europe has had bloody wars between nations, true. But the countries within Europe, taken as a whole, tend not to have internal civil wars on any greater frequency than your shortened history, and most of our internal civil wars punctuate and end upon the creation of properly representative governments wherein even the minorities receive a proportionate voting influence on the system.
Take most nations in the European Union, and you’ll find a functioning set of third parties. Greens tend to be quite popular as a minority party. Your own Green party in a parliamentary election would probably register around 5 percent, but have they controlled one legislative seat in the past hundred years in your governmental method? Is it any wonder that your system creates anarchists and loonies like your backwoods survivalist militias and your Earth Liberation Front who believe that absent violence they have no chance to even be heard, while our loonies tend to shout themselves hoarse in parliament and then go home satisfied that they have had their say?
…are you for real?
I mean….seriously?
The Civil War was 152 years ago.
Should we look at what European states did back then? Hell, it wasn’t that long ago that Spain had a bloody civil war that ended in a fascist dictatorship. Or Yugoslavia broke up into a bloody three-tiered civil war that’s still simmering below the surface. Bombs going off in Northern Ireland isn’t exactly that far back in the past…Basque separatists blow up trains, French muslims riot because they’re marginalized…
I mean…are you for real, or are you like the European version of Bob Cheeks, performance artist?
If you’re really laughing at the United States, you ought to grow up. Political parties in the United States aren’t monolithic. You write that a party with 10% national support “will never see even a single vote.” How do you explain Bernie Sanders or Ron Paul? Do they count? If you don’t know who these people are, maybe you should learn about them.
The winner-take-all system in the presidential election also encourages moderation. The views of people like Jean-Marie Le Pen don’t have to be taken into account, even if they make up 10% of the population. An American example from the past is George Wallace, or Strom Thurmond in 1948.
I agree with David and Jesse above, that our two-party system is a necessary consequence of our winner-take-all system. Historically, what those two parties represent has changed, albeit more slowly than the culture has changed (call it “sticky representation” if you want).
“The establishment” is just one block with influence, just as the “libertarians”, “Christian right”, “technocrats”, etc. all are. And like any block, they’ll try to maximize the return on their investment, even if the have to switch party loyalties.
Yeah…it’s called Duverger’s Law. Perhaps the only actual “law” in political science.
Whether or not there’s actually a correlation with multi-party democracy and less corruption is less clear….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger's_law
The reason we have a two party system is at least in part due to the fact that the power is structured around maintaining a two party system. If Citizens United weakens the two parties, then we will have a better chance at changing this.
I’m sorry Erik, but it’s math that makes it a two-party system. Yes, Citizen’s United may create a one-time scenario where a third-party candidate comes in (like w/ Perot in ’92), but we’ll be back to a two-party scenario quickly. Because people who want to be President (even Ron Paul) realize that in a true three-party race, the person who wins is the person who isn’t splitting their base.
As been pointed out above, there are completely publicly financed elections with two-party duopoly’s and others with multi-party democracies. It’s not the financing system, it’s the political framework.
I have to agree with Jesse here. I certainly think it’s possible that a third party may come in and influence one election, or even win, but there can’t be a stable equilibrium with three viable parties. If Citizens United weakens the two parties enough to effect change, the window will be very short. You’re right that the structure is at fault for creating the two-party system, but it is at the more basic level of FPTP.
It has always seemed to me that the problem is one of transparency and not one of funding.
Finding out who was vacationing at whose summer home, or borrowing whose corporate jet, or hiring whose nephew in a sinecure would give us *SOOO* much more information (and explain so much more) than banning or censoring political speech would. Heck, enough transparency, and things might even *CHANGE*.
Yep, exactly.
I’m with you, Erik. Loosening the stranglehold that parties have on elections and government doesn’t seem like a threat to good government.
Of course, I could be wrong. This may only cause the parties to find new ways to maintain their stranglehold on the political process.
Mr. Kain,
I enjoyed this piece just as I enjoyed your previous one centered on Steven Colbert. In fact, I had always known the media had a significant control of the national dialogue, but never compared them with what SuperPACs are doing today.
I can’t help but offer another insight which few seem to realize: the entire reason business CAN influence politics is because politics CAN influence business. The role, scope, and breadth of the government (at all levels) has grown far and beyond its original design and its moral purpose. Because we have tailored our government to be the purveyor of privileges, subsidies, and subjective regulations, our marketplace has become an ocean of rent-seeking businesses who must plead at the feet of politicians if they are to compete fairly with their competitors.
Only until we reign in government’s responsibility — and even more importantly, until we reignite an honest dialogue about the very nature of our republic — we will always be plagued by the monster we’ve created as a country.
Thanks for your thoughts.
there is no monster.
there is only demographics.
and like Nate Silver says, demogrphaics is destiny.
and it doesnt matter what Sully tells you about “healing the nation”.
the GOP is done.
do you know what is blowing up the models?
Race and religion.
Romney cannot be elected by WHITE CHRISTIANS because he is a MORMON.
there is a basic dichotomy there. the WECs wont SAY they arent voting for a mormon– they will find some other excuse. Romney cannot get the 65% of the white vote he needs to beat O.
The Doom of Sarnath is coming for the GOP.
Kain will delete these comments as soon as he wakes up.
But Sully is right.
Palin has truly destroyed the GOP. She is allying herself with Gingrich. It is the same populist sentiment that burned Pythagoras’ temple and put the mathematekoi and and aukosmatikoi to the pitchfork and scythe.
cassandra/matoko – I’m willing to let the comments where you don’t call names stand. You’re more than welcome to comment here unless your comments are nothing more than trolling and telling me what an enormous moron I am.
If you don’t see your comment for some reason it’s because I’m going to pipe them through the moderation queue – just until we can have a little common understanding.
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