Conservatives Fight for the Special Interests
That is why the United States is not in fact a real democracy. Government by the highest bidder is not a sensible definition of democracy. It is not even a normal plutocracy or oligarchy, that is, a government run by and for a particular small class of people. Rather, in the United States, individual issues are up for sale. It is hard to imagine a worse form of government. In a system of hereditary rulers, there is always the chance that fate will provide an enlightened leader who seeks the good of the country as a whole. Dictators, who are often ideologically driven, can do good as well as evil (even Hitler, as vile as he was, made some positive changes in his country).
But when individual issues are for sale, narrow private greed invariably prevails over the public good. American policy on firearms is dictated by the gun dealers and manufacturers. Our energy policies are designed for the benefit of the petroleum industry, and because it is in their short term interests, we are condemning the world to a catastrophic future of global climate change. Our public health policies are shaped in the interests of wealthy insurance companies, hospitals, and drug manufacturers, despite the fact that those policies, while making a few very rich, condemn tens of thousands of innocent people to death and hundreds of thousands to misery and bankruptcy.
So this is the system that American conservatives support. That is, they fight for the rights of powerful special interests to prevail over the public good — their own good. They fight for the right of gun dealers to sell firearms to lunatics, criminals and terrorists. They deride climate science for no better reason than that the oil barons tell them to. They fight for the right of agribusiness to contaminate our water and poison our food. They go to the barricades to stop those who would encourage our children to eat healthy food because that might interfere with the profits of the pushers of fatty, sugary junk.
It is hard to imagine greater madness. Yet there is greater madness: the fact that these lunatics and those who cynically goad them on have what remains of the progressive movement in America cowed and cowering.
What can be done about it? The first job is to correctly identify the problem (problems, actually) which is what the Radical Bleeding Heart is all about. The plutocrats most effective weapon is our own ignorance, which induces some among us to fight against our own interests. But our society is organized in their favor as well. We must understand what is wrong with our political system, which, as we just pointed out, is only nominally a democracy. And we must understand the economic basis of the current distribution of power. All power is ultimately economic power, but our political system is designed to insure that those who have the power keep it.
But the first job must be to restore democracy, because without that nothing else is possible.