Organized People vs Organized Money: What can't they buy?

(This week’s post is brought to you by my general, vague sense of unease.)

I was taught from an early age that there are two sources of power in politics. On the one side you have organized people, and on the other you have organized money. This was, and is, a fair approximation of the state of play, at least within the reform-oriented social movement/civil society circles in which I travel.

You want to stop a data center from being built? You’re going to need to organize enough people to create counterforce against the voice of organized money. You want to change zoning rules to allow more mixed-use development in your city? Organize people. This is what we do. It is, as the old saying goes, what democracy looks like.

Right now there’s a ballot initiative in California to pass a billionaire’s tax — a one-time, 5% levy on the state’s 200 billionaires. The SEIU (organized people) has spearheaded the effort. The billionaires, as you might imagine, are not exactly being cool about the whole thing. They started a Signal chat to coordinate their response. Emily Shugerman of the SFStandard got a look at the chatlogs, and shared the details in an article titled “the 5% freakout: Inside tech’s madcap war against the California billionaire tax.”

Two notes:

(1) “Just buy it” is a relatively new thing. It was not, until quite recently, the case that organized money looked at every problem and defaulted to “can we just buy this and make it go away.”

Like, even if you go back to the Thiel-Gawker saga, Peter Thiel’s reaction to Gawker was “hey I could covertly fund dozens of lawsuits in order to bankrupt Gawker,” not “can I just buy it and salt the earth?” Billionaire lawfare is also, y’know, bad (see here for some extended thoughts on the subject). But billionaires just buying-all-the-things is a whole other thing.

(2) In this particular case, the billionaires didn’t buy the signature company. I’m not sure that the logistics would have worked out, tbh. But reading that passage increased my vague sense of unease, because it strikes me as the sort of tactic that broadly could work just fine for them. This is the sort of thing that organized money can do now, and it is a very difficult sort of tactic to defend against or effectively counter.

This has been one of the defining trends of the past decade. Organized money has gotten frisky and creative. Wealth concentration, plus owning multiple branches of the government, has left them with few limits and fewer scruples. There aren’t many obstacles that they cannot just buy.

We’re already seeing it in media. Jake Grumbach has a new paper, “Wealth Concentration and Democratic Erosion: A Theory of Media and Common Ownership.” It’s quite good. His summary below gets at the essence of the thing.

Again, this is new. Organized money used to fight organized people blanketing the airwaves with deceptive advertising, all while quietly pressuring editorial boards to adopt their viewpoint. Now organized money just buys the whole news station. Even if it drives away the audience, that can still be a win for the tech billionaires. (David Ellison can’t be HAPPY with Bari Weiss’s performance at CBS. But it isn’t really much of a problem for him. Oh no, she destroyed CBS and CNN. Gee whiz, I wonder if someone in the government can do an extra-large favor for Larry Ellison’s array of companies…) 

David Ellison didn’t want Bari to destroy CBS. He wanted her to turn it into Free Press - broadcast edition. And he thought that would work because he’s an out-of-touch nepo baby with zero taste.

They can’t buy our souls, of course. They can’t buy our hearts or our minds. But civil society relies on durable institutions that mediate political contestation. Another lesson of the past ten years is that democracy is fragile. And any institution that proves itself to be worthwhile for the effective expression of public dissent — any institution that organized people use to exert counterpressure against organized money — is probably purchasable if organized money is creative about it.

Of course then we can always just build another institution. If they buy the signature-gathering vendor, we launch another one. I brought this up on the latest episode of my podcast with Peter Loge (Office Hours with Karpf and Loge), and Peter’s gut reaction was that this would lead to a cottage industry of signature-gathering companies. He’s right about that, but it doesn’t make me feel much better. How is a movement ever going to develop scale and momentum if it has to keep recreating the wheel?

This brings me to a second piece that evoked the same sense of general unease. A substack essay by Nan Ransohoff titled “The Third Wave of American Philanthropy” has been making the rounds. Here’s the lede:

The author and I have different political leanings — she focuses on the awesome opportunity to build “Silicon Valley for Public Goods” — but the phenomenon is important to take seriously. In the next few years, the vast majority of new philanthropic money is going to be concentrated among a small set of rationalist techbros.

This will have predictable effects on reformist civil society organizations. They will uniformly be bad. I suspect we’re headed toward a “YCombinator for nonprofits,” run by actual YCombinator alumni who know nothing about organizing or power-building, but have access to so much funding that everyone has to sing from their new songbook.

Not every social movement group will be warped by the attraction of this new philanthropy money. But the ones that don’t remake themselves to satisfy the interests of Dario Amodei et al will find themselves sidelined within the sector. The gravitational force of concentrated money is just too strong, and the alternative sources of funding are just too slim. It will warp civil society, just as it is warping everything else.

This isn’t a trend that lasts forever. It is obviously unsustainable. Eventually it all falls apart. But (here’s a third defining trend of the past decade) things seem likely to get a whole lot worse before they get better. I don’t see how we fix this, at least in the immediate term.

It’s still organized people against organized money. But all the infrastructure for durably organizing people across time and space gets degraded when organized money is out there buying the playing field.

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