When citizens vote in congressional elections, they often fail to ask themselves, "Why would any sane person want to be in politics right now?" Debates about imaginary policies only confuse the issue, as intended. Ideology and party loyalty have very little to do with it. As former Senator Mark Hanna said: "There are two things that are important in politics, the first is money, and I can't remember what the second one is."
Politics is a job like any other, but financially more rewarding than most. In an election, we are choosing between candidates for highly desirable jobs offering prestige, generous salaries, security, long vacations (mostly occupied with more fundraising), excellent health care, and virtually no responsibility. Congressmen and women have almost no independent power; any more than airline pilots, they go where the control tower sends them, but they are very well paid for it. We, voters, can't vote for a program because there is no program. We can’t vote on personality because we usually know nothing about the candidate's real personality. We can only vote on the basis of publicity. That’s where the big money comes in. Money pays for the deluge of misleading and downright false advertising, often created by artificial intelligence, so that the candidates are marketed like any other commercial product.
Elections are about illusions and handouts, power and enormous amounts of money, with individual and corporate donations now in the millions of dollars. The cost of the midterms is said to be approaching $3 billion. That buys a lot of advertising. Most modern democracies place strict limits on the amount of money that can be spent on elections, although of course politicians don't like that and try to evade it. But nations with those restrictions at least don’t have the appearance of auctioning candidates to the highest bidder, which makes a joke of the whole idea of democracy, though not a very funny one. In the ancient model of our democratic system, Roman senators did not pay for their seats in the Senate House, nor did they get any payment for being there. But they did have to be very rich to qualify, so money was still the essential foundation of power.
All this is not to say that every candidate is in politics for the money. Of course that's not true. This election year there are plenty of fine candidates who might have a chance of achieving something in Congress if they could only get elected. But the primary importance of money tends to push them out of the race or put them at a disadvantage. Not every future statesman is a good fundraiser, and not every brilliant fundraiser has the qualities we would want in a political leader. A statesman and a salesman are two different things.
As political campaigns move entirely to television and social media, the only essential factor will be money. In the long run, this will simplify the democratic process. The biggest fundraisers will buy the most and best commercials, real or fake, and will win automatically. Indeed, in a rational future, we could get rid of the whole tiresome electoral process and simply hand the country over to the candidates who have raised the most cash by election date. One thing we can be sure of, once the elections are over, is that, in the words of the cynical old joke, we will have "the best Congress that money can buy."
