Seth Klarman has been the largest giver from New England to Republican candidates, the largest giver to ballot committees, the largest giver to dark money fronts, and now the largest giver from New England to Democratic candidates. His largess this year is intended to save democracy from Donald Trump. It’s a noble endeavor and it’s also destroying the village to save the village.
That’s because we don’t really have a democracy so much as a campaign finance farce-ocracy. Or as former president Jimmy Carter has said, America has become an “oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery.”
Klarman has declared himself to be a “complicated guy” and it’s hard to argue with him. Dark Money Titans don’t often go on the record but he did this year with both the Boston Globe (here) and New York Times (here) to declare his contempt for Trump, his assessment of the president as a danger to the country, and his willingness to put his money behind that concern. Klarman may spend up to $20 million this year to help elect Democrats to assure that at least one house of Congress will check Trump.
It’s quite a turnaround for a donor who once earned the Boston Globe headline New England’s top GOP donor isn’t a Republican (he’s an Independent). He might not have registered as a Republican but Klarman lavished huge sums on Republican candidates as well as conservative Super PACs and dark money shops. He’s a fully paid up member of the American Oligarchy.
Klarman was the biggest giver in 2016 to Families for Excellent Schools, the money laundering operation for Massachusetts oligarchs that funded the Great Schools Massachusetts Ballot Committee. So for that he gets to be New England’s top ballot committee and dark money donor. He also was reportedly one of the check writers among the nine billionaires attempting to use dark money to privatize education in New York City. That operation also involved Families for Excellent Schools, which collapsed in corruption after its shellacking in Massachusetts.
As he was secretly sustaining FES Klarman was also talking about what he then saw as the greatest threat to democracy, and it wasn’t Donald Trump. At the April 2016 groundbreaking for Klarman Hall at Harvard Business School, he worried that “capitalism has come under intense attack” especially among the young. He offered what Harvard Magazine termed “a full-throated defense, and critique, of free-market capitalism.”
So should Democrats be grateful that Klarman is going to spend $20 million to save the nation from Trump? That is not clear, since the nation does need to be saved from Trump. But Klarman isn’t saving democracy, because America isn’t a democracy. Klarman is going to spend $20 million to save democracy for the Democrats. Michael Bloomberg is going to spend $80 million to save democracy for the Democrats. Sheldon Adelson is going to spend $80 million to save democracy for the Republicans. The Koch network is going to spend $400 million to save democracy for the Kochs.
This is not saving democracy, it is saving oligarchy. This isn’t government of the people, by the people, for the people. You can’t save the village by destroying the village, and you can’t save democracy by destroying democracy.
“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” – Justice Louis D. Brandeis
[Full disclosure: as an educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money (and other things). I don’t write about education policy.]
Photo from Wikimedia Commons.