5 Class, Race, and Power: The Impact on American Democracy

An Overview

In 2012, three scholars published a nearly 700-page book, The Unheavenly Chorus,[1] that carefully and methodically examined inequality in American democracy. Typically, the word inequality evokes images of the economic gap between the rich and the poor, but the authors—Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady—were more interested in understanding inequality when it comes to “political voice,” specifically in the context of a democratic political system.[2]  Their finding were clear-cut, namely that American democracy is characterized by deeply ingrained and persistent class-based political inequality, where in individuals with high socioeconomic status (HES) have a disproportionately “loud” or influential political voice. Other scholars have arrived at the same basic conclusion. In Chapter 3, I referred to the book by Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens (2017), Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It. Their carefully researched and well-supported conclusions are unequivocal: The average citizens’ influence on policy making is essentially zero. G. William Domhoff has long made the same basic argument in his book, Who Rules America? first published in 1967 (and now in its eighth edition). His answer to the question posed in the title of his book is simple, namely, the corporate rich.

To demonstrate the “political clout” of the wealthy (or monied) class but especially of the corporate class, parts of this book will be strongly informed by the research done by Page and Gilens, Schlozman, et al., Domhoff, and others (although most of this discussion will begin in the following chapter). I will also follow their leads by providing basic but important context for understanding how these two classes built, sustain, and deepen their outsized influence. An important part of this context was discussed in Chapter 3, namely, the organizational network that the corporate class slowly established, mostly during the 20th century, and which it has continued to strengthen and expand since then. More important is the even larger institutional context within which the organizational network is made possible and operates. This larger institutional context includes the electoral/party, and mainstream and social media, and legal-constitutional systems. The next few sections will briefly examine these systems.

The Electoral and Party Systems

It matters who is elected, whether at the local, state, or national levels. Elected representatives enact the laws and policies that shape our lives. These include the taxes we pay (or don’t pay); the costs and operation of educational, health care, childcare services, etc.; the substances we can or cannot legally consume; the people we are allowed to marry (in the past, many states outlawed interracial and same-sex marriage); the choices women can or cannot make with regard to their own bodies; and so on. The list of laws and policies that impact and shape our individual and collective lives is practically endless. In a dictatorship, ordinary citizens may not expect the people who make and enforce laws to be responsive to their interests and needs. But in a democratic system, one in which wage-earning individuals vastly outnumber members of the monied and corporate classes, it stands to reason, as I emphasized in Chapter 3, that the policies and laws made by the officials “we the people” elect would generally reflect the interests of the large majority Americans.  The fact that this isn’t the case (as I will document in the second part of this chapter), then, raises a number of important questions, one of which centers on the electoral system itself. To wit, “Why don’t elected representatives represent the interests of the majority of citizens?”

There are a number of answers to the foregoing question. One answer is simply that not everyone who is eligible to vote, votes. Historically, the voting turnout rate in the United States has been very low. For presidential elections, the turnout rate has generally hovered around 60%, meaning 4 out of every 10 eligible voters don’t cast a ballot. For “off-year” elections (i.e., years when there is no presidential election), which are just as important as “on-year” elections in determining the composition of Congress, the turnout rate is reversed, with 6 out of every 10 eligible voters choosing not to vote. Even in 2018 and 2022, both of which saw historically high “off-year” voter turnout, the rate was less than 50%. Importantly, in addition to low voter turnout, the people who don’t vote tend to be poorer, less educated, younger, and more “working class” than individuals who do vote.  White adults also tend to voter at higher rates than other ethnic and racial groups (Hartig et al. 2023). As a result, the electorate is generally unrepresentative of the population as a whole.

The “unrepresentative electorate” is, Page and Gilens (2017) argue, a “big problem” in large part because the “policy preferences of voters differ in key ways from those of nonvoters, particularly on class-related economic issues” (emphasis in original; 60). If unrepresentative voting was merely accidental, it wouldn’t be a cause for great concern. After all, if some people simply don’t want to vote for whatever reason, that is their prerogative. However, if unrepresentative voting reflects an effort, especially a purposeful effort, to discourage and even prevent certain groups of citizens from voting, it is a cause for great concern. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take much digging to see that some elected officials not only prefer to have a smaller, less representative electorate—as long it helps them win and retain their elected offices—but also will take steps to make it happen. The attitude and interests of elected state officials is important because they are largely responsible for making the rules and procedures that govern elections.

One method of limiting voting is to put up obstacles to voter registration. Some state officials have, for example, made it illegal for organizations to help people register to vote. This was the case in Kansas, which made it a felony to “impersonate” an election official. However, the standard for impersonation was so vague that the risk of arrest was too high for non-profit organizations to engage in registration drives (Morris 2021). If elected representatives wanted to encourage voting, there is a tried-and-true method: Automatic Voter Registration (AVR). Many peer democracies do this and, within the US, 23 states, plus the District of Columbia, have AVR. AVR has proven to be effective, relatively inexpensive, and more accurate than other forms of voter registration (Brennan Center for Justice 2023a), which suggests that states that choose not to implement it, want to keep voter registration down.  States have also tried to make voting itself more difficult by tightening identification requirements, removing polling stations, culling voter rolls, eliminating or reducing early voting, and so on. One state even bans giving food and water to voters waiting in long lines at polling stations. In 2021, Georgia did this while also closing down dozens of polling stations (Lee 2021).

Efforts to limit voter representation and the ability to cast a vote, not coincidentally, are mostly done in states where Republicans control the state legislature. Where Democrats are in control, the opposite is generally the case.  As Michael Waldman, writing for the Brennan Center for Justice, explains it, “States with unified Democratic control overall are moving to make voting more inclusive and convenient. This trend is most visible where Democrats recently won full control over state government — where reforms had previously been stalled” (Waldman 2023). By contrast, in states dominated by Republicans, legislators have been introducing restrictive voting bills at an unprecedented pace since 2021 (Brennan Center for Justice 2023b). In the past, the ability of states to restrict the voting process was limited by the Voting Rights Act of 1965; however, in 2013, the act was significantly undercut by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder (“Shelby County V. Holder”) and then further weakened in 2021 in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (“Brnovich V. Democratic National Committee”). The 2020 election, which Donald Trump falsely claimed as stolen, also motivated Republican-dominated states to enact new laws in the name of “voting integrity,” a discursive tactic designed to provide cover for the Republican effort to rig the vote in their favor. (Keep in mind, that discourse—the communication of ideas—is an important type of power.)

America’s Two-Party System

Another factor that both lowers voter turnout and leads to an unrepresentative electorate is the two-party system, which is a largely unintended but profoundly important element of the American electoral system. It is easy to see that the party system, more generally, was unintended, in part, because there is no mention of political parties in the US Constitution. This wasn’t an accident, as many of the Founders were deeply suspicious of “factions” (another word that can be used for political parties) and of partisan politics more generally. In his 1796 farewell address, to cite one prominent example, President George Washington warned the country against “the danger of parties in the state.” The problem, in his view, was clear: “The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism” (“George Washington’s Farewell Address [1796]”). Other Founders were equally fearful of political parties; in the Federalist Papers,[3] Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, in fact, argued that the Constitution needed to be ratified as a way to keep political parties from flourishing (Valsania 2023). The formation of political parties, however, was practically inevitable—every democracy on earth has political parties, because they have proven to be an effective way to organize political life (cited in Stokes 1999).

This said, a “two-party system” is not inevitable. (Note. In the US, there are certainly more than two parties; thus, the term “two-party system,” does not mean that only two parties are allowed to or able to exist at one time. Instead, it means that two parties almost always gain the lion’s share of votes, meaning that one or the other wins most elections.) A generally accepted explanation among scholars is that “the number of parties in a political system is a function of the institutional rules governing its electoral process” (Smith 2012).  Put very simply, when elections rules dictate that (1) there can be only a single winner in any given election, and (2) the winner only needs a plurality of votes (i.e., more than any other candidate), then voters tend to coalesce around two parties. This strong tendency is referred to as “Duverger’s Law.” Importantly, under the aforementioned election rules, the average voter is usually unwilling to vote for a candidate or party that has little chance of winning since doing so would be “wasting” their vote. As a result, even if they aren’t strong supporters of either of the two leading parties, they are basically compelled to vote for one or the other, sometimes choosing the “lesser of two evils.”

When the same two parties always win, significant problems often emerge. One is evident in the previous section; to repeat, the temptation to further entrench political power by rewriting election rules in a way that makes it harder and harder for the party in power to lose future elections, which also reinforces the two-party system. To put it more bluntly, when two parties dominate the political landscape, they are able to (legally) rig the election system in their favor. Second, with little fear of losing the next election, dominant parties are more susceptible to working hand-in-hand with “special interests,” and especially those with the deepest pockets—i.e., the corporate class. The funds the corporate class provides, in turn, gives politicians greater resources for their campaigns, thereby providing another electoral advantage. Third, the dominance of two parties creates a binary or either-or choice for voters. Voters with nuanced views and multiple interests or preferences—e.g., a fiscal conservative who is pro-choice and in favor of gun control, but who also wants dramatically lower taxes and fewer regulations on corporations—do not have a clear choice. Some will choose to vote for the “lesser of two evils.” But many others may decide not to vote at all, which helps lead to an even more unrepresentative electorate. It also explains, at least partly, the historically low voter turnout rates in the United States.

The Role of Mainstream Media and Social Media

Most of what we “know” is mediated. This is to say, almost all the information or knowledge we have about the wider world comes to use from other sources. Consider what I write about in this book. Every single piece of information in this book is mediated, not just once but multiple times (e.g., the information I provide comes to me through other sources; those other sources may also rely on others for their information, and so on). It’s for this reason that the mainstream (news) media and social media are so important, since they provide the bulk of information we have about the political world, the economy, social issues, and so on. The manner in which information is presented to everyday Americans, then, is also crucially important. If the information is distorted, incomplete, biased, misleading, or just plain false, this can have a big or powerful impact. In can change or reshape opinions on a variety of public policy issues, it can discourage people from voting or push them to vote in ways that support political parties, candidates, and causes that don’t necessarily align with their interests. A constant stream of “bad” information can also reinforce people’s already-held opinions and attitudes, making them less open to opposing or contradictory views, even if those contradictory views are true.

With all this in mind, in the United States, there has long been a myth that mainstream news media, in particular, can and should be objective or, at least, impartial. This was never the case, if only because the mainstream news media has always maintained a limit on what was considered acceptable discourse (Hallin 1986). “[I]n the early days of ‘objectivity,” writes Lewis Raven Wallace (2019), “Ida B. Wells and other Black journalists were branded as radicals for documenting lynching in the US” (10). Many decades later, in 2024, one can argue that not much has changed. Following the attack by Hamas on Israeli citizens in October 2023, and the massive reprisal by the Israeli government on people living Gaza (not just Hamas fighters), journalists who spoke out against the killings of innocent Palestinians were taken off the air or fired (Phillips 2023).[4] While racially motivated lynchings and war are extremely important issues, for the purposes of this chapter, it is more important to consider issues that connect directly with the influence of the corporate class and pose the question, “Do mainstream (news) media and social media serve the interests of the corporate class?”

Do mainstream media and social media serve the interests of the corporate class?

Before directly addressing the question, it’s useful to emphasize that mainstream news and social media are, for the most part, part-and-parcel of the corporate class. That is, they are all either large corporations in their own right or are part of a massive conglomerate or “business empire.” In fact, according to WebFX (a digital marketing agency), the major media outlets (which includes 24-hour news stations, newspapers, publishing houses, internet utilities, news magazines, cable TV stations, streaming services, movie and TV studios, video game developers, and more) are owned by one of only six companies. The “Big 6” are: (1) National Amusements headed by Sumner Redstone; (2) Disney, CEO Bob Iger; (3) TimeWarner, CEO Jeff Bewkes; (4) Comcast, CEO Brian L. Roberts; (5) NewsCorp, CEO Rupert Murdoch; and (6) Sony, CEO Kazuo Hirai. The total value of Big 6’s media holdings in 2023 was $430 billion (WebFX Team 2024). Major social media companies are also part of the corporate class. Meta, which owns Facebook, is worth an astounding $1.4 trillion. It also owns Instagram and WhatsApp. Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube (among other companies), is even richer than Meta, with a market capitalization of $1.78 trillion as of February 3, 2004. X (formerly Twitter) is famously owned by Elon Musk, who purchased it for $44 billion in 2022, and whose personal fortune was $252.2 billion in July 2024. The Washington Post is also famously owned by another billionaire, Jeff Bezos (who started Amazon), with a net worth of $215.9 billion.[5]  

To be sure, within mainstream news media there are hundreds or thousands of critically minded and independent-thinking journalists, and within social media, there are thousands more independent creators. In addition, journalists can and do publish stories that challenge corporate interests. In the Washington Post, for instance, there are plenty of stories that put Amazon in a bad light. One headline from 2022 reads, “Amazon calls cops, fires workers in attempts to stop unionization nationwide” (O’Donovan 2022).[6] Alphabet’s ownership of YouTube, in the case of social media, has not resulted in any censorship of voices that are extremely critical of the corporate class (including Google and its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin), government-business corruption, and of capitalism more generally. For example, type “Google is evil” into YouTube’s search page and you’ll be presented with videos such as, “Google is Evil,’ “Google: The Most Evil Business in the World,” “How Google Ruined the Internet,” “Google’s Plan for World Domination,” and so on. Similar negative results will appear if you type the same phrase into Google’s own search page (the top two results I got on July 11, 2024, were “Google Chooses Evil” and “Google’s ‘Be Evil’ transformation is complete: Time for the end game”).

On the surface, then, corporate ownership of mainstream and social media outlets may not appear to be significant. But it is. On this point, one consequence of the rise of social media has been a decline in print media, in large part because it has become harder to make enough money to stay in business. In 2002, there were 46,179 newspapers and 40,181 periodicals (i.e., magazines); by 2020, the respective number had dropped to 22,149 and 23,919 (Grundy 2022). Newsroom employment has, not surprisingly, also dropped significantly. In 2008, there were about 114,000 total newsroom employees but by 2020 only 85,000 remained—and this number includes “digital news” journalism (Walker 2021). Granted, few or none of the closures involved major news outlets, but even the most respected newspapers and new magazines have severely cut back on their newsroom employment. In January 2024, the Los Angeles Times (owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, a billionaire medical doctor who invented a cancer drug) laid off 20% of the newsroom; that same month, Time magazine, with its own pair of billionaire owners, laid off 15% of its union-represented editorial employees. They are not alone. The Washington Post, NPR, Vice, Vox, Texas Tribute, and many others have “axed huge swaths of staff” (Shafer 2024). The downsizing of traditional and even newer news media leads to downsizing or “darkening” of media coverage. And, as the official slogan of the Washington Post (somewhat ironically) states, “Democracy dies in the darkness.”

As the ability of virtually all news media sources to generate revenue has declined, those corporations or individuals with the deepest pockets have stepped in. Their motivations may and most often do have less to do with maintaining a free and vibrant press and much more to do with pushing their own political agenda. “Even more troubling,” as Anya Schiffrin (2021) writes, “rich individuals or corporations seeking legislation that advances their financial (or corporate) interests can buy even an unprofitable media outlet with the understanding that using such an outlet to set the agenda and frame the political debate in beneficial ways may be economically advantageous in the long run. Wealthy conservatives have done with a vengeance. The textbook case in Rupert Murdoch, one of the “Big 6” media conglomerates listed above. Here’s how one set of journalists, writing in 2019, described his power:

His newspapers and television networks had been instrumental in amplifying the nativist revolt that was reshaping governments not just in the United States but also across the planet. His 24-hour news-and-opinion network, the Fox News Channel, had by then fused with President Trump and his base of hard-core supporters, giving Murdoch an unparalleled degree of influence over the world’s most powerful democracy (Mahler and Rutenberg 2019).

Returning to the question, “Do mainstream media and social media serve the interests of the corporate class?” Even with or perhaps because of the vast proliferation of different “voices,” especially within social media, the answer is a resounding “Yes.” The proliferation of voices, to a significant degree, has become little more than noise. In addition, the sharp rise in “fake news” (misinformation and disinformation), has made it easier to discredit legitimate information and their sources. The most salient example of this is climate misinformation, which is encouraged by the fossil fuel industry through PR firms, advertisements (that often appear to be news articles), paid social media influencers, think tanks, and industry-funded researchers (Turrentine 2022). Importantly, these tactics are typically reinforced by sympathetic elected officials (almost always Republicans) who parrot the disinformation put forth by the fossil fuel industry; as they do this, they receive additional coverage by the mainstream media. A brilliant example of this was Senator James Inhofe, who famously brought a snowball to the Senate floor to “prove” that climate change was a hoax. His stunt then drew widespread coverage in the mainstream media—exactly the outcome desired. While Inhofe was mocked by many journalists and pundits, such tactics have proven to be effective in ensuring that enough of public remains skeptical of about the threat of climate change. This is true, in part, because a significant part of the population only believes what they want to believe (Moravec, Minas, and Dennis 2019); and as long as such bias-confirming “news” is available, their opinions will likely not change. Of course, this skepticism benefits the fossil fuel industry.

Race/Racism and Media

In the foregoing discussion, I have not touched on race/racism. But in any discussion of mainstream and social media in the United States (and elsewhere), race/racism is never far from the surface. After all, what most people “know” about race is mediated by the media. In the past (1800s into the mid-1900s), mainstream America media (mainly newspapers) were openly and unapologetically racist. The peoples of Asia, Latin America, and Africa and immigrants from those regions were, in general, depicted as sub-humans who needed to be eliminated or, at best, child-like humans who needed to be removed or subjugated. These early media accounts played an instrumental role in defining and reinforcing (or reproducing) the racialized class hierarchy that exists to this day in the United States.

Of course, media representations have changed over time; many people might argue that mainstream news media, if anything, has become overly “woke” in more recent years. To be sure, many journalists and their editors have attempted to root out implicit, much less, explicit racism in the newsroom. But this is easier said than done. Part of the reason for this stems from an almost unavoidable bias in (corporatized) mainstream media, which is to “sell” their stories to their audience. Often time, this means overrepresenting certain groups and sensationalizing some social issues, such as poverty and crime, because doing so draws more attention (for a controversial discussion of this point, see Herman and Chomsky 2002). To further attract audiences, mainstream media tend to rely on the tried-and-true narrative that social ills are either mostly the problem of or committed by communities of color.

On this last point, research has not only shown that Black Americans, especially men, are overrepresented as perpetrators of violent crime in television news coverage (Bjornstrom et al. 2010), but that they are also presented as more threatening than their white counterparts (cited in Sun 2018). Conversely, white individuals are overrepresented as victims of crime perpetrated by people of color. “Mass media are therefore a major contributor to Americans’ misconceptions about crime, with journalists and producers apparently acting based on their own or expectations of their audiences’ stereotypes about crime” (The Sentencing Project 2014, 23-24). Poverty and “welfare” (see Box 5.1 for a discussion of term “welfare”), more specifically, have been racialized and stigmatized by news media, which has led to the widespread perception it is a “minority” problem and that those who receive welfare are undeserving (Gilens 1999). The upshot is that mainstream media have played and continue to play a key role in reinforcing America’s racialized class hierarchy and in stoking white fear and resentment of Black and Brown communities.

Social media’s impact is complicated because the voices are so diverse. However, unlike mainstream news media, openly racist speech thrives on social media, in part because the major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter (before it was purchased by Elon Musk and rebranded as X) provided anonymity for harassers and allowed racist content disguised as humor because it led to greater engagement. Since Elon Musk’s purchase, racist hate speech on X more than double, largely because of looser moderation and the restoration of formerly banned users (Cohen 2023). Less obvious, according to Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas (2021), who carried out a systematic review of scholarly research on racism and hate speech media (the first part of this paragraph is based on their review), argue that “race is baked into social media technologies’ design and governance” in a manner that reinforces racism at a structural (as opposed to rhetorical) level.

The Legal-Constitutional System

When some of my students learn about gerrymandering, voter suppression efforts, lobbying, and other types of questionable activity undertaken by elected officials and their corporate benefactors, they often ask me, “Why are they able to get away with that?” The answer, to a large extent, is quite simple: The people who engage in such activities and practices are the same people who make the laws. To put it bluntly (and overly simply), what lawmakers decide should be legal is legal. Conversely, what they decide is illegal is illegal. Of course, there are limits. Legislators (and all government officials from the president to city council member) at the federal, state, and local levels are both constrained and enabled by the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Supreme Court, in turn, has the sole authority to either uphold a law or practice as constitutional or to nullify it by ruling it unconstitutional. Importantly, since the mid-1970s, the Supreme Court has generally moved toward weakening “limits.” For example, as Page and Gilens (2017) point out, “the court has shifted toward an extremely narrow conception of corruption, a concept confined to quid pro quid bribery” (113). This conception was narrowed even further when, in June 2024, the Court ruled that it’s permissible for a public official to accept a gratuity for acts already taken (Howe 2024a).

Typically, when specific laws or practices are challenged, there is a long legal process as the case winds way through state courts (which have their own state-level supreme court) and through the lower federal courts. The lower federal court system is composed of 94 district courts—where most cases that reach the federal level end once a decision is rendered—and 13 Circuit Courts of Appeals. If a case is accepted by the circuit courts, once a verdict is issued, the loser may then appeal to the Supreme Court (this is called a “petition for a writ of certiorari”). The vast majority of these petitions—usually about 10,000 a year—are summarily rejected. The nine justices of the Supreme Court get to decide which of these 10,000 or so cases to accept; the decision, however, doesn’t need to be unanimous or even a majority. If four other nine justices agree, the case will then be heard before the entire court (this is referred to as “The Rule of Four”).

It should be evident that the Supreme Court has immense discretion and power. Its power, to repeat a point made in Chapter 1, isn’t material. Instead, the Court’s power is almost purely institutional. But all judges at the federal level have a significant degree of institutional power. A single federal judge has the power to issue a ruling that has nationwide ramifications. For example, in April 2023, Federal District Judge Kacsmaryk agreed with a claim, made by the Alliance for Defending Freedom (a conservative Christian legal advocacy group) that mifepristone, a drug used to end pregnancies, was unsafe and had not been properly studied by the Food and Drug Administration. Despite the fact that neither of these claims were true (the drug was approved in 2000 and had no history of being unsafe), the judge rule in favor of the Alliance. Ultimately, Judge Kacsmaryk’s ruling was overturned by the Supreme Court, which had also issued a stay on the ruling. This means that it never went into full effect. Nevertheless, the mifepristone case demonstrates that a single federal judge—one who seemingly did not care about the rule of law or precedent (Feingold 2023)—was able to single-handily throw the country into turmoil for more than a year. The power of federal judges, moreover, is exercised without executive, legislative, or popular oversight; that is, they don’t need anyone’s permission or approval (once seated) and they cannot be voted out of office since all federal judges, not just Supreme Court justices, have lifetime tenure. In the mifepristone case, the Supreme Court ultimately did exercise oversight over a “rogue ruling,” but the judge himself was not subject to any other review, discipline, or official rebuke. In short, Judge Kacsmaryk is free to continue making any ruling he sees fit to make.

The power of federal judges, still less Supreme Court justices, is clear. Thus, they have long been and continue to be a keen focus of attention by any individual or group that wants to influence public policy in the United States. The goal is to place as many ideologically like-minded judges into the federal courts and the Supreme Court as possible. While both liberals and conservatives have this goal, conservatives have clearly taken the lead. The most important figure on the right is Leonard Leo, who is generally credited as driving force behind building the current conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court (Kroll, Bernstein, and Marritz 2023). Leo runs the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies (commonly referred to simply as the “Federalist Society”), which was founded in 1982. In their own words, the Federalist Society is a group of “conservatives and libertarians dedicated to reforming the current legal order” (Federalist Society n.d.). Unsurprisingly, the Federalist Society has received major funding from key figures in the corporate class, including billionaire Paul Singer, Texas real estate magnate Harlon Crow, and the Koch family (the third richest family in America in 2024) (Kroll, Bernstein, and Marritz 2023).

The Federalist Society is also closely aligned with influential Republicans. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who played the central role in blocking the appointment of a liberal justice after the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, while Barrack Obama was still president, told the audience at a Federalist Society gala, in 2018, that Republicans and the organization must “ … do everything we can, for as long as we can, to transform the federal judiciary, because everything else we do is transitory” (cited in Calmes 2021). The federal courts have largely fulfilled that role. The most well-known decisions center on social issues, such as abortion rights. Roe v. Wade (1973), which guaranteed the right to an abortion, was overturned by Dobb v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 1922.

Social issues are not necessarily of concern to the corporate class (although they may be of intense interest to individuals in the monied class), but it understands that the electoral advantage of the Republican Party hinges, to an important extent, on unwavering support from white evangelical Protestants and others on the religious right[7]; thus, it’s important that judges support conservative social issues as much as they support corporate class issues. With regard to the latter, an important Supreme Court ruling was issued in June 2024, as the Court “cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer”; instead, that power was given to the courts (Howe 2024b). This decision overruled a long-standing precedent set in 1984, in the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, and set the table for judges around the country to interpret “ambiguous” administrative laws according to their own standards (which, in practice, can be highly personal and biased), with the conservative Supreme Court acting as the final arbiter. More generally, the current Supreme Court has “six justices with the most pro-business voting records of all time …. These six (Barrett, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas) were each nominated by Republican presidents” (Salmon 2022). More specifically, in 2020, according to Felix Salmon, “When the court heard a case featuring a business on one side and a non-business on the other, it found in favor of the business 83% of the time”; that is more than double the historical average (Salmon 2022, citing Epstein and Gulati 2022).

The pro-corporate bent of the Supreme Court is perhaps best illustrated by two cases from the 2010s, commonly referred to as the Citizens United (2010) and Hobby Lobby (2014) cases. In the Hobby Lobby case—Hobby Lobby is a family-owned corporation that specializes in selling craft products—the Court ruled that the company could not be compelled to pay for health insurance covering abortion-inducing drugs where that would violate the religious beliefs of the corporate owners. In the majority opinion for Citizens United, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that limiting “independent political spending” from corporations and other groups violates the First Amendment right to free speech.  While the two cases have been frequently characterized as the Court ruling that “corporations are people,” this is an oversimplification or, as one Stanford University law professor bluntly put, a “silly misunderstanding” (McConnell 2014). Silly or not, one thing is clear: over the years, but especially beginning in the 21st century, the Court has “dramatically expanded the scope of protections for corporations without accounting for the range of corporations that had emerged” and “dismantled the basic framework laid down more than century ago recognizing corporate rights only when it is necessary to protect the rights of human persons represented by the corporations” (Blair and Pollman 2017, 285).

Summing Up Thus Far

Everyone understands that the corporate class has superior material power in virtue of its vast economic wealth and central structural position in the national economy. Less appreciated is the organizational and, as the previous pages have emphasized, institutional power the corporate class has nurtured and developed over the past five or six decades overall, but especially in the past 20 years or so. Corporate class power, in other words, is profoundly multifaceted and increasingly well embedded in the American system, thus making it easier for the corporate class to get what it wants, whether that is lower (or no) taxes, fewer and less onerous regulations, weaker labor unions, and so on. This doesn’t mean the corporate class can get anything and everything it wants. As I will discuss in Chapter 7, democracy still counts for something in the United States, especially at the state level. Even at the federal level, the interests and “wants” of ordinary citizens cannot be entirely ignored. As Page and Gilens (2017) put it, “If the citizenry always lost out, there would probably be riots in the street” (69). Nonetheless, there are a lot of things that the majority and, in some cases, the large majority of ordinary citizens clearly want but don’t get from their elected officials. These include[8]:

• progress on combating global climate change and greater environmental protection more generally
• immigration reform
• campaign finance reform
• raising taxes on the wealthy and large corporations
• Support for unions and a doubling of the federal minimum wage (to $15/hour)
• stricter gun control
• universal healthcare
• better K-12 schools and a tuition-free college education
• mandated paid family and medical leave

The list could certainly be longer. (Box 5.2 provides public opinion survey results for most of the listed issues; for some broader concerns, such as immigration, survey results are for a specific question related to the issue.) But the key point is a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” to quote Abraham Lincoln (in his Gettysburg Address), should pay attention to what the majority—and especially the large majority—“of the people” want the government to do. That this is not generally the case, suggests that democracy is not working the way that it should be.

Chapter Notes

Chapter References

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