Late Stage Democracy

Progressive Support for a billionaire who made his money polluting the planet and constructing private prisons is one level of hypocrisy. Hiding millions and manipulating voters is something else

“Our Revolution” is now supporting the oligarchy

There is something clarifying about Tom Steyer’s campaign for governor of California. Not in the way he intends. His candidacy is not proof that a wealthy outsider can shake up a sclerotic Sacramento. It is a case study in exactly what has gone wrong with American democracy, and exactly who helped break it.

Steyer has already spent more than $200 million on his race for governor, far outspending his rivals, while positioning himself as the progressive’s progressive — the environmentalist in the field, the billionaire who fights billionaires, the man who will make corporations pay their fair share. His plan to address the state’s problems is largely predicated on taxing billionaires and big companies to fund programs and services within the state. He is running, in other words, as the candidate of the people with the largest self-funded war chest in the history of California gubernatorial politics.

The irony would be funny if the stakes weren’t so serious. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate the rich the way many on the Left do. No, for me those aren’t the stakes at all.

Yes, the hypocrisy of the American progressive Left rivals that of the American Republican Right. There is now no discernible difference between the hypocrisy of the white evangelical Trump voter supporting him for being a Christian and the hypocrisy of the largely white progressive Steyer voter. Understanding why is central to understanding why its clear we are in the last legs of American democracy as we have known it. We are witnessing the collapse of our national character and civic virtue that is required to maintain the norms serving as guardrails for our democracy.

For those of you who think I am “both side-sing” this let me be clear: I absolutely am.

Steyer’s progressive institutional support ranges from “Our Revolution”, the organization set up by Bernie Sanders largely on the belief that the very existence of billionaires was a sign of a decaying dysfunctional society to the California Labor Federation, whose whole mantra is they are the voice of working people.

There candidate now is a billionaire who has made an ungodly largess in oil exploration, fossil fuel developments, coal mines and private prisons. Remember how Trump became the family values, socially conservative champion for Christian values by Franklin Graham? Yeah, well Jane Fonda hold his iced latte.

Through mid-April, Steyer continued to outspend his nearest opponent by a ratio of 150:1, mostly to blitz the state with television ads. These are not small numbers. For normal human beings running for governor of the nation’s largest state, they represent extraordinary, nearly impossible, fundraising. And yet even when ad buys from all his major competitors are combined, along with ad purchases by independent committees supporting candidates, Steyer is outspending the field by over one hundred million dollars. This is not a campaign. It is an attempt to purchase, through sheer volume unattainable by anyone other than a billionaire, an American election.

Porter herself put it plainly: “Billionaire money is flooding our state in an attempt to buy this election.” She’s right. She’s also running against a candidate whose profile her own party spent a generation creating.

For the better part of two decades, Democratic politicians, progressive activists, and environmental organizations spent enormous political capital railing against Citizens United, dark money, and the corrosive influence of billionaire spending in American elections. They were not wrong to do so. The argument was sound. Unlimited money in politics distorts representation, drowns out ordinary voices, and substitutes purchasing power for democratic persuasion. The left made this critique loudly, repeatedly, and correctly.

And then Tom Steyer entered the chat.

Steyer has faced renewed scrutiny over his lingering connection to Farallon Capital, a hedge fund that backed coal projects. He stepped down as CEO of Farallon in 2012, but financial records show he never fully cut ties to the firm, which financed coal projects in countries like Australia. His own tax returns show that Farallon funds were used in coal-related transactions more than a decade ago, and later filings list Asia-focused Farallon funds connected to coal deals — the fortune now being poured into a campaign in which he presents himself as the field’s preeminent voice on climate.

His campaign’s defense is that he left Farallon over a decade ago and that his remaining investments are screened for fossil fuel exposure. Maybe. But the wealth being deployed right now was built at Farallon. The $147 million coursing through California’s airwaves did not materialize after he became a climate activist. It was made first, and the conscience came later. That is not an unusual biographical arc — but it is a particularly awkward one for a man asking California voters to trust him as the authentic environmentalist in the race.

But again as bad as this is, it’s not what signals the end of democracy. My apologies for burying my argument so deep into this essay but the layers of hypocrisy deserve their own prioritization.

No the problem isn’t that a rich man is running and that there are people willing to follow him. It’s that even with the enormous advantage unfathomable wealth provides - it is that he still feels he must cheat the system to win.

State election regulators are now investigating Steyer’s campaign over payments to social media influencers, most of whom have not disclosed that they were being paid. This is not a technical matter. Undisclosed paid promotion is exactly the kind of manufactured public opinion that the progressive left has spent years condemning — the dark money complaint in a different costume. The same candidate whose allies accused Citizens United of poisoning democratic discourse is now under investigation for paying influencers millions of dollars to simulate organic support without telling anyone they were being compensated.

This is a far bigger problem than the Citizens United decision. Far bigger. Far more dangerous and far more consequential to the erosion of institutional trust in elections, the media and elections.

Because billions aren’t enough

What makes this more than garden-variety hypocrisy is who has rallied to his side.
Our Revolution, the progressive group founded by Bernie Sanders as an outgrowth of his 2016 presidential campaign, endorsed its first billionaire when it threw its weight behind Steyer. Our Revolution was founded by the two national co-chairs of Sanders’ presidential run. The organization vows to “fight for a government that works for all of us — not the billionaire class.” Its slogan is “fight oligarchy.” And yet there it was, endorsing a hedge fund billionaire who made his wealth running a $20 billion fund that invested millions of dollars in coal companies and a private prison company that owned immigration detention centers, and who is outspending his Democratic rivals thirty to one with his own money.

Our Revolution’s executive director acknowledged the awkwardness without quite grasping it. “If you had asked me a year ago, ‘Oh, are you going to endorse a billionaire for anything?’ I think that would have been highly unlikely,” he said. “The most energizing and ideologically aligned candidate just happens to be a billionaire.” That sentence should be preserved as a museum piece. The most energizing anti-oligarchy candidate just happens to be an oligarch. The most authentic working-class champion just happens to have made his fortune in coal and private prisons.
California’s organized labor establishment completed the picture. The California Federation of Labor, which represents more than 2.3 million workers, voted to endorse Steyer alongside three other Democrats, with federation president Lorena Gonzalez declaring that “our enemy is the Big Tech billionaires.”

Apparently the hedge fund billionaires are fine. SEIU California, after rescinding its support for Eric Swalwell, co-endorsed Steyer. The California Nurses Association endorsed him outright. IATSE, the largest crew union in Hollywood, also threw its support to the man whose fortune was built before he discovered his conscience. These are organizations whose entire institutional identity rests on the proposition that working people deserve protection from concentrated economic power. They endorsed a man who embodies that concentration, because he promised to wield it on their behalf…and to do it without any disclosure to the public.

This is worth sitting with.

This is literally a textbook definition of what ends of political systems look like and have been written about throughout history. Literal warnings from history replete with the collapse of character of a people, the compromise of institutions and the value of power over principles.

For years, Democrats appropriately deployed the hypocrisy of white evangelical Christians supporting Donald Trump as a kind of closing argument. Proof that the other side had abandoned its values so completely that it could no longer be taken seriously as a moral actor. And there was real force to the critique. The spectacle of self-described Christians enthusiastically backing a man whose personal conduct represented a comprehensive inventory of the seven deadly sins was, in fact, a form of hypocrisy worth noting.

It was this hypocrisy and complete abandonment of values and principles that drove me to speak out against Donald Trump, the Republican Party and all of the compromised organizations that out power over principle and party over country.

Democrats no longer get to make that argument without answering for Tom Steyer.

As I spoke out then I will speak out now.

A party that spent fifteen years insisting that billionaire money corrupts democracy cannot simultaneously run a billionaire who outspends the entire field twenty to one and ask voters to see him as the reformer. An anti-oligarchy organization literally founded by Bernie Sanders cannot endorse the candidate with the most oligarchic campaign in state history and then explain it away by saying he has good values. A labor movement that calls itself the political voice of working people cannot hand its endorsements to a man who built his net worth in fossil fuels and private prisons that detain immigrants and banks that preyed on working class people then describe it as a victory for the working class.

Hypocrisy at this scale is not a character flaw. It is a systemic failure. It tells us that the Democratic Party’s commitments to campaign finance reform, environmental accountability, and anti-corporate politics were never really principles at all — they were weapons, effective against the other side and quietly holstered the moment one of their own needed to use the machinery they claimed to oppose.

That’s the real story of late stage democracy. Not that billionaires are corrupting the process. We knew that. The story is that both parties have now made their peace with it, and only one of them is still pretending otherwise.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you have asked yourself over the past decade, as any good American should have, where you would stand when the decision to stand on principle was asked of you - your moment has arrived. Have the last ten years really been about MAGA, a cult of personality and Fox News drones blindly following what their party tells them to do or were they just a precursor to what has existed in the Democratic Party all along?

Your move.