If you think a minuscule number of ultra-rich people controlling the vast majority of resources, media and political influence doesn’t subvert democracy then you have a really naive opinion of democracy.
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Oh, I don’t know. Food banks, Illegal wars, massive cuts, police state, huge accumulation of inherited wealth, rich/poor divide, corporate influence.
You know, that sort of thing.
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I’m quite happy to work with people who I don’t agree with, just not people who are as ideologically distant to me as Stalin or the Kochs.
Even then, I won’t neccessarily trust them.
I’m going to stop replying now, I expect this conversation is starting to look tasty.
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If the Sierra Club decides to push a political agenda, I can easily look at their record, and decide whether I agree with it. If so, I can give money to them. If not, I can speak against them. Same with the political parties.
But so much of this money is being used in a way that doesn’t invite political participation.
“Citizens for a s sound society” says this candidate caters to pedophiles.
Who the fuck are “Citizens for a sound Society”?
Beats me. But are you going to vote for a pedophilcphiliac?
When the Koch’s spend money, you don’t really know whether it’s to weaken clean air laws, or to legalize drugs, or to weaken worker safety rules, or to restrict abortion.
That’s not the point. You’re not the point. The point is to change the state so that it advances the interests of those who have money, and ceases to advance your interests, except by chance alignment.
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Let’s play a quick game of word association. This will vary based on your age. What images or videos come to mind for any of these people?
Michael Dukakis
John Kerry
Richard Nixon
Mitt Romney
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If you won’t work with Stalin, who’s gonna cover the Eastern front?!
Of the things you listed, I would agree that undeclared wars and the militarization of police are problems for democracy (though, I’d argue, not existential ones). More to the point, neither of these things are the result of rich people, but rather a massive overreaction to 9/11.
The rest of the stuff on your list are things this country has dealt with since it was founded, and somehow we’ve managed to muddle through.
But what does this even mean? You throw around these hyperbolic terms like “subverting democracy” or “the fate of democracy,” but they’re just buzzwords without content.
How is democracy being subverted? Right now, it seems like you mean democracy is subverted when your side doesn’t win.
Thankfully, Citizens United means they are free to do so. 
If you think government being indifferent to what the majority of people want doesn’t subvert the kratia of the dēmos, you are using some idiosyncratic definition of the word that leaves out all the things that make it worthwhile.
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I’ll try to state this as simply as possible:
Democracy is healthy when the general populace has the power to make meaningful, informed decisions which direct the ways their government operates.
Democracy is subverted when virtually all political influence is concentrated in the hands of a few ultra-rich people.
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For those who were paying attention in the 1990s, there was a big push for laws not unlike these, bypassing and/or outlawing of encryption, open surveillance, detainment without due process, increased powers to declare martial law, tracking payments, allowing civil forfeiture, and others. Time and again these efforts were thwarted. The only ones that succeeded were forfeitures and erosion of financial privacy, under the pretext of “The War on Drugs”. Most of the other stuff was considered too uncivilized and dystopian until the 9/11 attacks scared enough people to finally enact these.
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Well, that’s not really how it works. The U.S. uses democracy as an input mechanism, that is, we use it to decide who makes the decisions. Direct democracy, wherein a majority of citizens decide every important question, is another name for mob rule.
Majority opinion isn’t always right; for instance, 59 percent of Americans support CIA torture.
Since the Washington Post doesn’t detail which policies were chosen over others (in fact, the whole article is a word salad of euphemism), I can’t offer an informed opinion. The point I can make is that it’s not necessarily virtuous to do whatever the majority wants.
Oh, indubitably. All of the Patriot Act was basically gathering dust in a drawer before the intelligence services caught the world’s luckiest break and got to send their Christmas list to Congress.
Must be nice to have 15 solid years of Christmas … 
Were you prevented from voting? Disallowed from publishing a political opinion? Banned from organizing? If not, it sounds pretty healthy to me!
Who says political influence is concentrated?
Awesome. So, confronted with the suggestion that maybe having no limits on rich people is subverting democracy, your answer is maybe we don’t want democracy anyway. I think that tells me a lot about what you value.
For me, it’s freedoms that actually let you do things, not freedoms™ that only let a privileged minority run over everyone else. If you’re actually willing to claim with a straight face that maybe plutocracy is a better system, you obviously aren’t going to come to similar conclusions no matter what evidence is given to you.
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Well, this was largely a consequence of Reagan/Bush era deregulation which was bought by corporations and monied people. Fed to people with doublespeak of what the promised economic growth entailed. Why does anybody need nearly 900 million dollars to run for public office? Does this not imply that only a person with a lot of money, or who was in the employ of such people, would even have a chance of running? How about the inability to make elected officials do what you elected them for? How about the increasingly secret rules the country is run with - secret rules which are shared with heads of industry, because - surprise - that’s where they came from. How about the US track record over the past few decades of destabilizing other democracies? How about the increasingly obvious lying about what they do, and their greedy agendas?
And yes, as it so happens, many types of organization are being banned. If you read the codes, acts, and statutes, it’s not too hard to find out that any group can now be detained, asset stripped, and dealt with in an arbitrary manner if it has been decided by some unaccountable group, by their own secret rules, are contrary to some vaguely defined or outright fabricated “national interests”. And yes, any sort of lobbying, campaigning, or activism can instantly be declared this and smacked down as sedition, with no trial - and the participants legally killed.
I am indeed allowed to cast a vote for candidates or measures which appear on the ballot. What you’re ignoring is that political spending and media influence determine which individuals and measures make it onto that ballot.
The mere ability to cast a vote doesn’t make for a representative democracy if the only choices are “plutocrat-supported candidate A” or “plutocrat-supported candidate B.”
I can post my political opinion on a blog, discuss it with friends, maybe print up some flyers. A well-connected billionaire can ensure that their political opinions are the dominant talking points for any given week’s news cycle, or written into a bill by professional lobbyists.
The Walton family alone has as much wealth as the bottom 42 percent of Americans combined. That means that if—by sheer force of will and without the benefit of media empires at my disposal—I was somehow able to achieve the unprecedented and organize the poorest 132 Million People in this country to back my political initiative we could still be outspent by a single family of billionaires.
Oh, well if the two often-indistinguishable political parties I can choose from and the billionaires who underwrite them don’t have a problem with this system then I guess it’s all A-OK.
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Sorry, do you support torture? No? Well, the majority of people in this country do – what kind of anti-populist jerk are you? Don’t you believe in democracy?!
My point, which you seem determined to miss, is that democracy is only a part of our system, and treating the will of the majority as some utopian ideal is silly. The Bill of Rights could easily be called “A List of Stuff You Don’t Get to Vote On.” That’s not plutocracy, that’s a federal constitutional republic.
Again with the “subverting democracy.” I hope someone actually offers evidence instead of platitudes.
Sorry, what state do you live in that requires political spending and media influence for ballot access? Most states require a bunch of signatures rather than cash on the barrelhead.
Of course! A mere blogger could never wield political influence!
You claimed political influence is concentrated in the hands of the ultra-rich; the articles were to show that a) it’s not that concentrated, nor is it b) very influential.
Look at Eric Cantor’s primary loss – he outspent his opponent by something like a factor of 10, and still came up short. Michael Bloomberg poured millions into his anti-gun Super PAC only to watch it fizzle and, ahem, die.
