Huzzah for Transparency!

A report from Forbes that “at least 100 billionaires” were supporting either the former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris points once again to the unseemly involvement of rich Americans in their own country’s elections. 

So much earnest handwringing over this news can be expected in coming weeks that La Roche-Posay hand cream sales will go through the roof and send stock in L’Oreal, which owns La Roche-Posay, soaring. Even the factories producing O’Keefe’s Working Hands (this for the manliest among us) are said to be doubling production. 

It is only the billionaires backing Trump, of course, that worry the somber guardians of “our democracy.” Those backing Harris—and Forbes says there were far more Harris supporters among the billionaires than Trumpers—are a-okay. 

Leaving that aside, the undue influence of “fat cats”—a term dating at least to 1928—has been a subject of much discussion for most of our history, especially among those who see it as their mission to reform this messy system. If they cannot locate a golden age in which elections were conducted with less meddling by the malefactors of great wealth, they can at least look toward a better day. 

It will of course take some doing to get there. Rich people have had the audacity to involve themselves in our elections since the beginning of our republic—I mean, our democracy—and show few signs of doing otherwise. Even George Washington, who could not tell a lie, spent his money to advance himself in politics. 

Almost all his successors have used their resources (and those of their sponsors) to fund their campaigns; those in recent years who didn’t start out rich when they entered politics ended up among the one percent, and that includes those who fancy themselves among the reformers and whom we continue to regard as such. 

This might mean that those of us who do not possess the wealth of, say, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, or Bad Bunny, and the options that go with it, will need to think differently about money in politics. This will require uprooting a lot of deep-rooted prejudices and breaking bad habits. Reforming the system won’t be easy, considering how people with deep pockets have always influenced our elections and how accustomed we have become to this distressing reality. 

Back in Washington’s day, there was no Federal Election Commission, no PACs, and no dark money. There was no dark money because no one felt the need to hide what they were doing. Candidates routinely bought votes, and no one thought a thing about it. Hooray for transparency! Huzzah, huzzah!

They also had more fun doing it. In 1758, when Washington sought a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses—his first political office—he bought 160 gallons of liquor for fewer than 400 voters and “unnumbered hangers-on,” according to Douglas Southall Freeman, one of Washington’s most distinguished biographers. Charles Sydnor in Political Practices in Washington’s Virginia calculated this to amount to “more than a quart and a half” of hooch per voter. 

“An itemized list of the refreshments,” Sydnor figured, “included 28 gallons of rum, 50 gallons of rum punch, 34 gallons of wine, 46 gallons of beer, and two gallons of cider royal.” (And this was just for the day that freeholders showed up to cast their ballots.) 

Those who think they want a more transparent system should study the way things were done back then. In those days, voters would have to stand on a platform in front of the candidates and announce, for all to hear, who got their vote. 

Supporters of transparency might favor this practice, although with more than 160 Americans casting their ballots in 2024, this could be time-consuming. And, after a while, monotonous.

Democracy, as mentioned, is messy. People lie, cheat, steal, and commit bribery to achieve their tawdry ends. That’s why I’m so leery of transparency. Some of us don’t want to know how awful it is. The only thing worse than seeing it for what it is, in our considered opinion, would be trying to fix it.  

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