Words for the day: plutocracy and kakistocracy

A plutocracy (from Ancient Greek πλοῦτος (ploûtos) 'wealth', and κράτος (krátos) 'power') or plutarchy is a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income. The first known use of the term in English dates from 1631.

An opinion piece in the Washington Post today is entitled "How megadonors circumvent laws to give huge checks to politicians."  Here is a graph of the surge in donations for Congressional and Presential elections:

The explanation:

One big reason for this has been an innovation known as “joint fundraising committees.” Both parties use them. And their influence is growing.

Here’s how they work: Election laws try to limit the influence of any one rich person by capping how much the individual can donate to a given candidate. In 2020, individuals could give no more than $5,600 directly to Joe Biden or Donald Trump. That’s a tidy sum, but it’s not enough to curry favor with Biden, who amassed more than a billion dollars in the 2020 election, or Trump, whose haul surpassed $800 million.

Joint fundraising committees render such limits meaningless. They allow presidential candidates to bring their campaign, their national party and state parties into a single fundraising entity. Donors can give a limited amount to each group, but -- thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC — they can hit the contribution limit for as many groups as they want.

The result: The maximum donation to these mega-committees is not $5,600. It’s the combined maximum for each participating group.

This is how two donors were able to cut $817,800 checks to Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee run by the former president in 2020. Multiple donors gave $730,600 to the Biden Victory Fund. Both campaigns amassed hundreds of millions of dollars this way.

And, unlike super PACs — which can raise and spend infinite sums but can’t legally coordinate messaging strategy with candidates — joint fundraising committees allow politicians to have direct control over these pooled funds.

That gives large donors ever-greater power to buy influence with candidates. As Brendan Doherty, a political scientist at the Naval Academy, told me, “Joint fundraising encourages presidents to raise money in even larger amounts from high-dollar donors. That, in turn, has led to them spending more time at fundraisers with people who can cut ever larger checks.”

And candidates love these fundraisers...

More information at the link, but I've already abstracted an inordinate amount.

Many laws have been passed to prohibit or at least regulate this type of actitivy.  And each time the wealthy sit down with some damn lawyers to draft a variant of legislation or an amendment or a new law to allow the money transfers to occur, and these revisions/amendments/whatever are eagerly passed by whatever legislature is in session because the incoming money is going to go to them.  The only people empowered to regulate or limit this activity are the very ones who benefit from it.

In the rest of the Americas this abuse would lead to demonstrations in the streets.  Here the public shrugs their collective shoulders in deference to "freedom."

And don't think the flood of money is somehow magically limited to campaign flyers and badges.  Tons of it get channeled to personal accounts, family members hired for "campaign" activities, private planes, retreats to discuss campaigns in exotic locales, and bank accounts in overseas locations. 

Plus these politicians have inside information on upcoming wars, weapons procurement needs, highway plans, infrastructure upgrades - everything.  And if they can't buy shares in the companies that benefit, they can notify their cousin Sally in Peoria or their high-school buddy in Cheyenne.  

There is an ongoing endless abuse of political power in this country and nobody is making an effort to restrict it.

I have previously decried American plutocracy in a 2014 post, and was roundly criticized by readers who declared that there is nothing preventing the people on the bottom from rising to the top if they only work at it.  That's bullshit too, but I don't have time to write a rebuttal now.

I'm tired of all this bullshit.

Next word: kakistocracy

The earliest use of the word dates to the 17th century, in Paul Gosnold's A sermon Preached at the Publique Fast the ninth day of Aug. 1644 at St. Maries:

Therefore we need not make any scruple of praying against such: against those Sanctimonious Incendiaries, who have fetched fire from heaven to set their Country in combustion, have pretended Religion to raise and maintaine a most wicked rebellion: against those Nero's, who have ripped up the wombe of the mother that bare them, and wounded the breasts that gave them sucke: against those Cannibal's who feed upon the flesh and are drunke with the bloud of their own brethren: against those Catiline's who seeke their private ends in the publicke disturbance, and have set the Kingdome on fire to rost their owne egges: against those tempests of the State, those restlesse spirits who can no longer live, then be stickling and medling; who are stung with a perpetuall itch of changing and innovating, transforming our old Hierarchy into a new Presbytery, and this againe into a newer Independency; and our well-temperd Monarchy into a mad kinde of Kakistocracy. Good Lord!

English author Thomas Love Peacock later used the term in his 1829 novel The Misfortunes of Elphin, in which he explains kakistocracy represents the opposite of aristocracy, as aristos (ἄριστος) means "excellent" in Greek. In his 1838 Memoir on Slavery (which he supported), U.S. Senator William Harper compared kakistocracy to anarchy, and said it had seldom occurred:

Anarchy is not so much the absence of government as the government of the worst—not aristocracy but kakistocracy—a state of things, which to the honor of our nature, has seldom obtained amongst men, and which perhaps was only fully exemplified during the worst times of the French revolution, when that horrid hell burnt with its most horrid flame. In such a state of things, to be accused is to be condemned—to protect the innocent is to be guilty; and what perhaps is the worst effect, even men of better nature, to whom their own deeds are abhorrent, are goaded by terror to be forward and emulous in deeds of guilt and violence.

American poet James Russell Lowell used the term in 1876, in a letter to Joel Benton, writing, "What fills me with doubt and dismay is the degradation of the moral tone. Is it or is it not a result of Democracy? Is ours a 'government of the people by the people for the people,' or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?"

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