Who’s Really Corrupting Politics with Huge Gobs of Money?
It’s about political and cultural influence as well, and here the Left’s base of financial power dwarfs the Right’s. The Right simply doesn’t have any institution that competes on equal terms with big labor. The Right’s educational institutions are dwarfed by the Ivy League alone. And conservatives would happily trade the influence of Fox News and talk radio for the influence of every other major broadcast and cable network, every major newspaper, and NPR. Conservatives have only the smallest presence in movies, television, and pop music.
.. I have no problem with money in politics, or with private citizens, corporations, and educational institutions using their resources to influence fellow Americans. That’s everyone’s right as an American. But it is almost unbearably hypocritical to see the Left decry the use of private financial resources to influence public debate while . . . using private financial resources to influence public debate.
.. They both work for a university that last year had $4.5 billion in operating revenue and net assets of $44.6 billion. All of that immense wealth services the needs of an ideological monoculture that is stocked top-to-bottom with thousands of liberals who dedicate themselves to both living out their worldview and fostering those same commitments in the students they educate.
.. The obsessive focus on campaign cash and the Koch brothers represents an effort to silence or limit the few methods through which the conservative movement can get an unfiltered message to the American people