I had skimmed this piece from the Revolving Door Project, reprinted at the American Prospect, but I guess I missed the most important part. In my defense, it was the first paragraph:
According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: “Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.” Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.”
Democracy is, indeed, sometimes pretty ugly, and a lot of dumb people participate. I mean, look at Trump. But if you want to tell me that your whole purpose in life is to flatter rich donors without saying it out loud, the best way to do it is to call small donors “dumb”. If the last few years of billionaires getting everything they want has shown anything, it’s that there are plenty of dummies with lots of money running around.
The unfortunate fact about abundance movement is that it takes a pretty garden-variety observation — that the bureaucracies in blue states and cities are often slow and annoying — and turns it into carte blanche for rich folks’ businesses to be even less regulated. To put this in terms that even rich folks might be able to understand: more efficient regulation — hell yeah. Little or no regulation — fuck no.
The reason that I missed the “small donors are dumb” claim is because I was searching that piece to see how many times Ezra Klein was mentioned, since some folks reacting to Pitchbot’s post below made the claim that Klein was hardly mentioned (he was mentioned plenty, actually):
I get that some (probably former) readers of this blog don’t like it when I go hammer and tongs against Ezra Klein. Well, he deserves it. He’s “house liberal” at the NYT and he spends his time doing abstract thought experiments and other nonsense. I don’t subscribe to the Times, but I have listened to his podcast, and it is very much like a freshman politics seminar. Abstract in a time when we need concrete. He’s a pseudo intellectual, similar to David Brooks but smarter, and he seems to read the books he talks about. His book about abundance might have some good insight, but clearly it’s been co-opted by the same big money that co-opts the rest of our politics.
If you think I’m being too hard on Klein, look at Jamelle Bouie. He’s able to take his study of history and of the constitution and apply it directly to our common disaster. He seems to be about the only one who can do that at the opinion page of the “paper of record”.
Back to the small donors: they’re the way out of the Democratic Party’s current dilemma, not something to be avoided. I have another post on that topic in the hopper.
(I’m pre-writing this in the airport Thursday — I’ll be traveling — so I’m going to pre-write a couple of posts that aren’t on breaking news.)
