How billionaires are wrecking US democracy and why UK must beware – Henry McLeish
In the US, election results increasingly reflect the wealth of the few, not the will of the many, and the UK must snap out of its current complacency, writes Henry McLeish
Money, money, money is US politics today. Most international indexes measuring the condition of democracy agree that America’s is decaying or declining and, with the midterm elections taking place in a few weeks, there are fears that money – dark, big, tech and secret – is destroying the now distant ideals of Abraham Lincoln’s “government of, by and for the people”.
The concept of “dark money” resembles “dark matter” – you know it exists even if you can’t see it or understand how it works. But sometimes it is brazenly out in the open, such as Donald Trump’s offer of a $5,000 incentive – or bribe – to each adult citizen if the Republicans win both houses of Congress, at a total cost of $1.2 trillion.
While US politics has always had a dispiriting relationship with money, a catastrophic Supreme Court decision in 2010, Citizens United vs Federal Electoral Commission, accelerated the rot by effectively removing restrictions on political spending.
It allowed political action committees (PACs) – basically shadow political parties – to accept unlimited donations in order to promote the interests of wealthy individuals and corporations. Not surprisingly, the billionaire class tend to support socially conservative causes and candidates, limited government and free market policies.
The floodgates open
Citizens United, a PAC, won the case by arguing for the legal concept of “corporate personhood”, giving companies the same status as individuals. Corporate spending on elections was, they insisted, a “form of constitutionally free speech” that invalidated century-old controls on political funding.
This opened the floodgates and money poured in, massively corrupting an already fragile democracy and intensifying the marketisation of politics with insane levels of spending.
Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision, federal election expenditure has risen from $5.23 billion to $8.4bn in 2020 and $14.8bn in 2024, suggesting the present election cycle could be far more costly. It is a complex picture of spending, a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly where transparency is simply not on the agenda. In the 2022 midterm elections, just 21 wealthy families spent a total of nearly £800 million.
Estimates of dark money have increased from less than $5m in 2006 to more than £1bn in 2024, but much of this is impossible to track. The Roosevelt Institute, a think tank, has suggested that “overall billionaire spending in elections has multiplied by a factor of 163 since the [2010] ruling”.
The consequences of this game-changing piece of legislation were evident at Trump’s recent state dinner for the Chinese president, which was attended by a number of billionaire ‘Tech Bros’.
Record UK election spending
Even bearing in mind the fact that the US population is five times larger than the UK’s, the difference between the levels of spending between the two countries is stark.
Total expenditure on the 2024 general election was £94m. That was a new UK record, but it was just a fraction of the amount spent on the US presidential election later that same year. A currency converter is not required to expose the staggering scale of spending in the US, where election outcomes increasingly reflect the wealth of the few, not the will of the many.
In his weekly newsletter from the Brennan Centre for Justice, lawyer and political adviser Michael Waldman noted reports that political consultants were “warning Democratic candidates not to talk about regulating AI”. “Not because that would be unpopular (it would be very popular!). No, the consultants warned, it’s that outspoken candidates could be demolished by millions of dollars suddenly dumped into their [election] races by tech companies,” he wrote.
The Brennan Centre has warned that unlimited political donations are heavily shaping US elections and “drowning out the voices of ordinary Americans”.
Democrats getting huge amounts
Amidst the 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is hard to imagine that shadowy organisations are at work in the US elections, not only supporting favoured candidates but seeking to take out candidates who oppose particular corporate interests.
Billionaire families and crypto and AI obsessives are all seeking dominance and freedom from political critics in the market place of votes. It’s worth noting that AI and crypto-currency companies spent $127m in this year’s US primaries, while Elon Musk recently announced plans to spend at least $100m through his Super-PAC.
The Republican party and their candidates obviously receive large donations of money. However, of the ten highest recipients of donations in the current midterms race, so far, nine are Democrats, receiving a total of nearly $350m. Jon Ossoff, a Democrat in Georgia, has received the most with $77m.
The UK has a tendency towards complacency in terms of what might happen here in the future. Donations to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party by two billionaire donors, totalling £72m, should ring alarm bells.
US politics in crisis
It is difficult to believe that the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2010 was actually an attempt to strengthen the First Amendment, covering five fundamental freedoms, including free speech. This thinking is beyond reason and, in reality, it has only served to devalue democracy, deepen the crisis in US politics and expose the highly politicised nature of America’s top court.
It was a narrow decision, with judges voting by five to four, but it is unlikely to be overturned by the current court’s right-leaning majority of six to three, unless deaths, retirement or a new Democrat president in 2028 change its composition.
Until that happens, oligarchs, autocrats, billionaires, corporates, crypto and AI enthusiasts will continue to determine the rules of engagement, and American democracy, based on the ‘power of the people’, will remain in ruins.
Henry McLeish is a former First Minister of Scotland
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