Yes, Small Donors Are Bad

I rise to defend Jonah Goldberg, and not just because he signs my paycheck.

(Kidding. I take direct deposit.)

For days the merchants of outrage on The App Formerly Known As Twitter have taken noisy exception to this clip, one of the most anodyne points Jonah’s ever made on air.

Small donors are bad? Who could believe such a thing?

Well, me, for one. How could you not believe it?

In the year of our Lord 2023, with the state our politics is in, who could look around at [gestures broadly] this and conclude that crowdsourcing the funding of political campaigns has made for a better, healthier country on balance?

Jonah’s critics can. They fall into three groups.

First are the post-liberals who relish the populist drift in politics and resent criticism of it from a well-known, ahem, “globalist.” And fair enough, I guess: If you’re the sort who thinks a more conspiratorial, authoritarian, aggressively anti-intellectual America is an improvement, you should jealously guard your ability to bankroll that vision.

Next are pundits, influencers, and other right-wing media barnacles who owe their money and status to the same cohort that tends to make small-dollar donations to political campaigns. If you earn a living as a Tribune Of The People, you’re all but obliged to hate on Jonah theatrically for having insulted your audience. It’s good business—or a good racket, I should say—in keeping with the devolution of political movements famously tracked by Eric Hoffer.

Lastly there’s the group that knows Jonah is right but will pretend otherwise because they have an ax to grind with him. Never Trumpers encounter this frequently, typically at the hands of anti-anti-Trump partisans. Years ago my colleague Kevin Williamson was the target of a similarly moronic frenzy when he argued that downscale working-class white communities where jobs had dried up “deserved to die.” It was plain what he meant—the residents should uproot and relocate to places with more economic opportunity—but some of his critics, miffed by his harsh attacks on Donald Trump, chose to distort his point and attack opportunistically. It was payback for a conservative who had refused to be a “team player” for the new GOP. Same for Jonah.

These three groups of critics are distinct but they do overlap. Why, here’s someone who’s a member of all three.

Vance is very much a post-liberal, as longtime readers know; his public support depends on grandstanding demagogically for seal claps from populist Republicans; and, as a former Never Trumper who disgraced himself by sacrificing his morals to his ambition, he naturally bears a grudge toward someone who did not. He’s the perfect Jonah critic.

As for his point about who pays our salaries at The Dispatch: You, our subscribers, do. Jonah isn’t a walking, talking Silicon Valley start-up owned by a billionaire tech bro, which is more than one can say for Vance. 

All of this being so, I resent having to revisit the arguments for why yes, ackshually, small donors are bad for America. The criticisms of Jonah are driven either by bad faith or by goblin-hood; there’s no other explanation for why so many would take offense at a point that’s been made and remade dozens of times over the past decade by writers on both the left and right.

But fine. Let’s revisit them.

There are solid lines of attack one can make on Jonah if you’re willing to impute to him things he didn’t actually say. But if we’re going to stick to what he did say, his point is simple: Small donors, on balance, have been a force for illiberalism in politics.

“Not always,” you might say, and that’s true. Among the Republican presidential field, for instance, the candidate with the third-largest share of small donations as a percentage of his total fundraising is Chris Christie. There’s no mystery as to why: Citizens on the right and left who want to see Trump defeated sent money to Christie to help him qualify for the first Republican debate, believing he’ll make the most robust argument against the frontrunner. That’s a case of liberals crowdfunding to try to defeat illiberalism.

But Jonah didn’t say that small donors are “always” bad, just as he didn’t say that large donors are always good—or mostly good, even. What he said is that the influence of small donors in 2023 is worse in important ways than the influence of large donors.

Which is true, and also amazing given how universally agreed upon it is that large donors have a pernicious and outsized influence over politics.

That’s why small-donor fundraising was greeted rapturously by good-government types when it broke big 20 years ago, promising to at last loosen the grip of special interests. If you worry about oligarchs buying and selling politicians, and you should (hi, J.D.!), the prospect of average Joes crowdfunding a candidate who’s unbeholden to the wealthy establishment is intoxicating. That’s democracy in action, strength in numbers. Real Mr. Smith Goes to Washington stuff.

Activists on both sides can rattle off the names of fatcats in the other party whose massive political spending is allegedly distorting U.S. policy to serve their own interests at the expense of the people’s. Among the left, it’s the Kochs, the Mercers, and the Adelsons. Among the right, the obsession with George Soros is so total that there seems to be a Soros tie-in in approximately 85 percent of all conservative media content. If you want moneybags like these to have less sway over Congress, it stands to reason that you should want small donors to have more.

We’ve all seen Norman Rockwell’s famous painting Freedom of Speech, in which the common man rises at the town meeting to share his views. That one image neatly captured the promise of small-donor democracy.

In practice, it turns out the guy rising to speak at the town meeting wants to talk about QAnon and microchips being put in the vaccines.

In May David Byler made a list of the top 12 fundraisers among House Republicans in the 2022 cycle. Tell me if these sound familiar: Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert. The Trumpiest performance artists in the GOP caucus are the biggest crowd-pleasers, and crowd-pleasers tend to be well remunerated by crowds. “Grass-root donors in the party have rewarded anti-establishment firebrands and conspiracy theorists who specialize in televised political stunts,” Byler wrote.

We were promised good government and instead we got organ-grinder politics, an endless line of tin-cup rattlers one-upping each other for spare change from working stiffs. The people—many of them, at least—want monkeys, not good government.

And now they have the purchasing power, so to speak, to make it happen.

This has been apparent for a long time. Ten years ago, before Donald Trump was a twinkle in the Republican base’s eye, Ezra Klein looked ahead to how small-donor fundraising might create new incentives in government. Small donors are not “ordinary Americans,” Klein noted, presciently. By definition, they’re people who are highly engaged with politics. And people who are highly engaged with politics also tend to be highly partisan. 

Just as big money is corrupting, small money is polarizing. And it’s polarization that probably poses the bigger threat to American politics right now. Big money, for example, generally wants to raise the debt ceiling. Small money is one reason Republicans in Congress came close to breaching it. Big money often wants the two parties more or less to get along; no one gets a tax break if legislation dies on the floor. Small money will turn on you if you dare cut a deal with the other side. Big money erodes what little trust Americans still have in their political system. Small money attacks the bipartisanship that, for better and worse, is required for the system to function.

Three years after that was published, an honest-to-God socialist backed by small-donor money on the left made a credible run for the Democratic nomination while a post-liberal authoritarian backed by small-donor money on the right won the presidency. If you find those developments more lamentable than exciting, congratulations: You’re probably Team Jonah on this.

In 2023, with a bit of showmanship and much bitter antagonism toward the other side, you can build yourself a devoted audience that operates like a self-perpetuating money machine. Harry Cheadle calls it “the politics of fandom” and notes that some Democrats like Adam Schiff and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have also made a lucrative show of their capital-R Resistance. “If every candidate in every district tries to go viral, we may soon learn that the country only has room for so many political celebrities,” Cheadle warned in 2020. When extreme ideological polarization is where the money and fame is at, that’s where more politicians will be too.

“Small-dollar donors didn’t save democracy. They made it worse,” Byler titled his piece. That’s untrue in the short term, as a system in which the people enjoy more direct financial influence over their leaders is surely more democratic. But in the long term?

How confident are we about the stability of democracy, ostensibly the safeguard of classical liberalism, in a system increasingly bankrolled by the most extreme grassroots ideologues on both sides?

My colleague Sarah Isgur was stark several months ago in describing the incentives created by our small-donor ecosystem. “It changes who wins, who runs, and how they govern,” she wrote in response to news that the Senate majority’s two most conspicuous centrists, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, were struggling to raise money among grassroots donors.

That was April. As of August it’s unclear if either will bother running for reelection. Years ago a normie candidate funded mostly by large donors would have made short work of a money-starved populist in a primary; as it is, if Sinema flames out in Arizona, her replacement in the Senate will almost certainly be much further left (Ruben Gallego) than her or much, much further right (Kari Lake). And her colleagues in the Senate will draw the appropriate lesson from her failure, that being a moderate and an institutionalist is a fast track to financial and political death.

And so antagonism in government will get a bit worse and compromise a bit more unlikely. The small-donor system selects for polarization, hostility, and dysfunction.

The rise of small-donor fundraising was also supposed to make life easier for politicians, freeing them from the drudgery of schmoozing fatcats 24/7 for money so that they can get back to work on policy. It hasn’t worked out that way. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s fundraising machine might run on autopilot, but more mainstream Congress-critters continue to scrape for cash. In fact, fundraising might be harder for the average member of Congress now than it was before: Not only are celebrity pols soaking up much of the supply of grassroots lucre, they’re gaining a competitive advantage over their colleagues by doing so. If you’re running against one of them, you’ll be forced to fundraise frantically to keep pace.

Our populist friends who are angry at Jonah for not caring enough about The People might also pause to reflect on whether small-donor fundraising is good for small donors themselves, financially and otherwise.

If you’ve got cash to burn and want to blow some of it on your favorite politician, go nuts. It’s a worse use of your money than gambling or buying drugs or lighting cigars with, but it’s a free country. What if you don’t have cash to burn, though, yet feel compelled to dig deep and give anyway because you’ve been bombarded by apocalyptic nonsense about the other party summoning Cthulhu if you don’t donate right this instant?

Last year Tim Miller wrote about our new small-donor reality and sifted through an internet archive of campaign emails to see what sort of messages Americans are receiving day to day from candidates. He found “conspiracies, fearmongering, hyperbole, flat-out lies, gimmickry, rage fuel and a meme or two that I admit will get me to chuckle from time to time.” Rage fuel is especially important: It’s been noted many times, including by Byler, how anger drives small donors on both sides. Liberals sate their hatred of Mitch McConnell by wasting gobs of cash on his no-hope Democratic opponent; conservatives sate their hatred of the left by raining gobs of cash on populist Republicans like Greene to spite the enemy. 

It’s essentially a lab experiment in which a mouse gets a food pellet every time it presses a lever. Want a quick dopamine hit from hurting your ideological antagonists? Just press the proverbial lever by donating 10 bucks the next time you get an email from your favorite candidate. For the supreme example look no further than Donald Trump, who’s managed to monetize FBI investigations and actual criminal indictments by treating donations as symbolic rebukes of the deep state. If you think a fundraising system that rewards enmity and emotional manipulation is bad on balance for America, then again: You’re probably Team Jonah.

In extreme cases, small-donor fundraising is outright abusive. During the home stretch of the 2020 campaign, Team Trump quietly changed the default for online donations through the WinRed platform to make them recur automatically. “Soon, banks and credit card companies were inundated with fraud complaints from the president’s own supporters about donations they had not intended to make, sometimes for thousands of dollars,” the New York Times reported in 2021. After the election, Team Trump raised no less than $250 million from donors for a legal defense fund to challenge the election results. There was no such fund, it turned out. It was a rip-off engineered by a master grifter facilitated by a culture of small-donor rage-gifting.

Few if any of Trump’s donors seem to mind having been snookered, though. Why should they? They got what they wanted from their donations, a frisson of righteous gratification from owning the libs by formally registering their protest of the election results. Grandma might have sent her monthly Social Security check to Trump and been forced to eat tuna and beans for weeks until the next check, but I bet knowing she’d stuck it to Joe Biden kept her belly feeling a little bit fuller than it otherwise would have.

In an earlier age, those seeking spiritual gratification from giving would have resorted to charity or tithing. Now, quite often, they resort to politics. Jonah is squeamish about it, go figure. Many of his critics are not.

Here’s the best I can do to find fault with his point: Ultimately, there is no “small-donor problem.” There’s an “internet problem.”

I’m old enough to remember the first days of the blogosphere in the early aughts. “It’s 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass,” the journalist Ken Layne crowed about the flowering of grassroots watchdog sites online. That logic heralded a new era of accountability for the media, just as the small-donor revolution heralded a new era of accountability for politicians. The democratization of political commentary and of political giving promised to give the grassroots American right a voice in the public square that it lacked before. We were going to make the media better and politicians better with exacting scrutiny.

Twenty-plus years later, right-wing media is the last place I would look to see anyone’s ass fact-checked responsibly. Democratizing political commentary has created a partisan media ecosystem that’s neck-deep in crankery, paranoia, and propaganda. In hindsight it’s strange that anyone thought democratizing political giving would look any different.

So long as there’s an internet to facilitate impulse gratification at the speed of light, from insulting Jonah Goldberg on Twitter because he correctly believes the Orange Man Is Bad to shooting 50 bucks to Marjorie Taylor Greene in sympathy because the libs are goofing on her for being a moron, we’ll have these problems. The more small-D democratic our politics gets, the more it’ll reflect the character of our most politically engaged citizens. We’re truly doomed.