“‘I affirm my institutionalized powerlessness.’”

Voting as abdication.

As it was then, is now… The National Bird of Prey, J.S. Pughe. Puck, 6 September 1905.

This is the second of two essays The Floutist publishes as the American elections scheduled for 5 November draw near. Part 1 of this series, “The evils of ‘lesser evilism,’” can be read here.

—The Editors.

Patrick Lawrence

2 NOVEMBER—I began thinking about this commentary and what I judged in need of saying in it about a year ago. I had been reading about Penny Pritzker, offspring of the famously wealthy Chicago family and an exuberant but demanding patron of politicians she chooses to favor. Penny Pritzker was in the news because President Biden had just appointed her the overseer of private investment in Ukraine once—theoretically, at this point even fantastically—America and its European clients, having funded the country’s ruination, begin reconstructing it.    

The Pritzkers have more than occasionally come under heavy fire for crudely, cruelly exploiting service workers at the Hyatt Hotels chain, in which they own what is effectively a controlling share of stock. Penny Pritzker, who is personally worth something more than $3 billion, was previously prominent in the news during Barack Obama’s first run for the presidency, in 2008–09. She chaired his campaign’s finance operation. And she grew bitter when Obama declined to name her commerce secretary, an office she considered she had purchased fair and square, because by then the labor movement was asking what in hell the new president-elect was doing in bed with someone with so disgraceful a past.

Obama, it seems, eventually judged the coast to be safely clear and, in 2013, he gave Penny Pritzker Commerce. It is preposterous enough that a former community organizer who quoted Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” during his November 2008 victory speech put someone of Penny Pritzker’s kind in a senior cabinet position. It should have been sign enough that no serious change was a’gonna come during his presidency. But this is not why I mention Penny Pritzker. I mention her because of a single sentence from the 15 July 2012 editions of The New York Times. “Without Penny Pritzker,” two of its political reporters wrote with refreshing honesty, “it is unlikely that Barack Obama ever would have been elected to the United States Senate or the presidency.”

If you need a little time to contemplate the implications of this assertion, do take it: I did. The weight of this observation is nearly too heavy to take on, or in.

And then I went on to consider all the reporting over all the years during which money as the sine qua non of our electoral politics has been so normalized as to pass unnoticed among most of us. Campaign finance reform was long a topic among Americans and, indeed, on Capitol Hill. But each time some kind of restriction was passed, we shortly learned that a way around it was already in place. I cannot recall when I last read anything about campaign finance reform. When we read the coverage of elections now, it is—unapologetically, matter-of-factly—primarily about how much money this, that, or the other candidate has raised and how this measures up to his or her opponents.

There are many Penny Pritzkers running around in American politics, to put this point another way. They are sometimes silently behind the scenes, sometimes pleased to stand under the Klieg lights, and at other times indifferent to their visibility or invisibility. This does not matter. The important thing to bear in mind is that it is the Penny Pritzkers among us who control our politics and so run our country. The mainstream press reminds us of this each time it explains to us how such people impose their will by way of a legal but undemocratic process in the name of the democratic process.

I come to Kamala Harris and the election scheduled a few days’ hence. Hers is a singular case in various respects—in all likelihood unprecedented in some. The Democratic Party’s immensely wealthy, immensely powerful donors—“the donor class,” we now call these people without the slightest thought to what this phrase implies—now exercise their unearned authority in open view. They forced Joe Biden’s resignation as the Democratic candidate and then, with scarcely a couple of days’ pause, forced Kamala Harris’s nomination on the party without a primary or any other attempt to survey party members’ preferences.

Instantly the money these donors withheld from Biden flowed into the Harris campaign—hundreds of millions of dollars within days. By 5 November the Harris machine will have raised more than $1 billion in contributions. Here is a New York Times report on the Harris machine’s fundraising, datelined 25 October, that includes very useful line graphs—left to right, time on the horizontal axis, money on the vertical. These graphs come close to making words unnecessary. They give us a picture of just what the American political process has come to in 2024. Once again, The Times reports these matters such that it normalizes this obscenity, this desecration of its readers’ Constitutional rights.