Elon Musk’s Wisconsin Invasion: Democracy’s Turning Point or the Next Step Toward Autocracy?

A new Gilded Age has arrived — but will Americans fight back like they did in 1899, or are we doomed to follow Russia’s descent into billionaire rule?

“At bottom, the Court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.
“It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.”
—Justice John Paul Stevens’s dissent in Citizens United

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Last night, the richest man on Earth lost his first high-profile political test — and the American people won a small but significant victory for democracy.

Elon Musk poured money into Wisconsin in an effort to handpick a state Supreme Court justice, but voters rejected his candidate and, with that, sent a clear signal: the morbidly rich don’t own us. Not yet, anyway.

But the fight has only just begun.

We know a lot more about American politics today than we did yesterday. That’s both the good news and the bad news.

In 1999, I was working in a remote part of rural Russia for a German-based international relief agency; we were building housing and trying to teach peasant agricultural methods to people who’d only ever known massive, collective factory farms. I was staying in the home of a family of four with two young children; Dad was Russian and Mom — her name was Olga — was from East Germany, although she’d grown up watching West German TV.

The night before the first open and fair election in Russia’s entire history, we were watching Russian TV and eating dinner when a wild-eyed fellow came on the screen. He was giving some sort of speech, and his face was twisted with a kaleidoscope of wild emotions. He pounded his fist and shook his finger at the camera, then became soft and soothing in his voice, then began shouting again.

He was followed by a news anchorwoman, sitting behind a desk, making commentary. Olga suddenly broke out in laughter, although her husband’s face was serious, if not confused.

“What’s that about?” I asked my hosts. (My German is pretty good, but not my Russian.)

“Vladimir Zhirinovsy [the extreme right-wing candidate],” said Olga in German. “He’s a candidate in tomorrow’s election, and he says that everybody who votes for him will get a liter of vodka and a turkey after the election. The news lady is wondering where he’ll get all the turkeys.”

“People fall for that?” I said.

She nodded. “Remember, Russia has been here nearly a thousand years. And this is the first democratic election ever. Ever! People have no idea what to do, how to do it, or what to believe.”

Elon Musk seems to be bringing Zhirinovsky’s election strategy to America. This past weekend, he handed out $100 checks to people who signed a petition and gave two million-dollar checks to the head of the Wisconsin College Republicans and a woman who works for a company founded by Republican mega-donors.

Meanwhile, Ben Wikler, the head of Wisconsin’s Democratic Party, was having none of it:

“This race is a reductio ad absurdum of Citizens United,” he told The Financial Times. “It’s preposterous that a non-partisan judicial seat should be the subject of nine-figure political spending. But, you know, … it’s even worse if the world’s richest man can buy whatever judicial seat he wants to buy.”

Susan Crawford, the progressive candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court added:

“If Elon Musk is successful here, if he can buy a seat on a state supreme court in Wisconsin … he’s gonna try that in other places as well. This is his test case.”

For the 200 years prior to Nixon putting Lewis Powell on the Supreme Court and its later Citizens United decision, every American voter and politician knew how money in politics would corrupt government.

As the author of the Declaration of Independence wrote in his only book, Notes on Virginia:

“With money, we will get men, said Caesar, and with men we will get money. … They should look forward to a time, and that not a distant one, when a corruption in this, as in the country from which we derive our origin, will have seized the heads of government, and be spread by them through the body of the people; when they will purchase the voices of the people, and make them pay the price.

“Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic, and will be alike influenced by the same causes. The time to guard against corruption and tyranny is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and claws after he shall have entered.”

The teeth and claws of the morbidly rich are now deeply sunk into the American body politic.

The question today is whether we can twist free of them and again become a self-governing nation. Or if we’re doomed to continue to devolve into a full-blown oligarchy like Russia and Hungary did, where all decisions are made by oligarchs and a strongman leader empowered by them, and elections are just done for show and around local issues.

America has had an on-again, off-again relationship with political corruption by the morbidly rich that goes all the way back to the early years of this republic. Perhaps the highest level of corruption, outside of today, happened in the late 1800s at the tail-end of the last Gilded Age.

On an optimistic note for today, given last night‘s result in Wisconsin, it provoked a massive two-decade-long effort to get big money out of American politics.

One of the iconic stories from that era was that of William Clark, a Montana copper mine owner who died in 1925 with a net worth in excess, in today’s money, of $5 billion. He was one of the richest men of his day, perhaps second only to John D. Rockefeller.

And in 1899, Clark’s story helped propel an era of political cleanup that reached its zenith with the presidency of progressive Republican presidents (a species that no longer exists) Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.

Clark’s scandal even led straight to the passage of the 17th Amendment, which let the people of the states decide who would be their U.S. senators, instead of the state legislatures deciding, which was the case from 1789 until 1913, when that amendment was ratified.

By 1899, Clark owned pretty much every legislator of any consequence in Montana, as well as all but one newspaper in the state. Controlling both the news and the politicians, he figured the legislature would easily elect him to be the next U.S. senator from Montana.

Congress later learned that he not only owned the legislators but, several historians have suggested, stood outside the statehouse with a pocket full of $1,000 bills (literally: those bills weren’t taken out of circulation until 1969 by Richard Nixon), each in a plain white envelope, to hand out to every member who’d voted for him to become one of Montana’s two US senators.

When word reached Washington DC about the envelopes and the cash, the US Senate began an investigation into Clark, who famously told friends and aides, “I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.”

It was one of the most widely discussed political scandals in American history. Mark Twain wrote of Clark:

“He is as rotten a human being as can be found anywhere under the flag; he is a shame to the American nation, and no one has helped to send him to the Senate who did not know that his proper place was the penitentiary, with a chain and ball on his legs.”

Montana State Senator Fred Whiteside, who owned the only non-Clark-owned newspaper in the state, the Kalispell Bee, led the big exposé of Clark’s bribery. Enough of Montana’s legislators, however, took Clark’s money and ignored Whiteside’s reporting to shut down the statewide investigation.

The US Senate then launched an investigation in 1899 and, sure enough, found out about Clark’s envelopes and numerous other bribes and emoluments he’d offered to state legislators. Stunned by the national level of public outrage, they refused to seat him.

To get around that, the following year Montana’s governor — also in Clark’s pocket — appointed Clark to the US Senate seat he had previously purchased; he then served a full term.

Clark’s story went national all over again and became a rallying cry for clean-government advocates like progressive Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

It led to the passage of the 1907 Tillman Act, providing for a year in prison for any corporate director, officer, or agent who gave any money or thing of value to any candidate for federal office on behalf of any corporation.

Clark’s story also informed the 1910 Corrupt Practices Act, also known as The Publicity Act because it required all political committees supporting candidates in more than two states to publicly reveal their finances and donations.

In 1912, progressive Republican President Taft, after doubling the number of corporations being broken up by the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act over what President Theodore Roosevelt had done, championed the 17th Amendment (direct election of senators, something some Republicans today want to repeal).

Their singular goal was to prevent Clark’s kind of corruption — rich guys buying legislators — from ever happening again.

Meanwhile, in Montana, while the Clark-corrupted state legislature was fighting reforms the people were demanding, a state-wide wave of outraged citizens put a measure on the state ballot of 1912.

Their ballot measure parroted the federal Tillman Act at the Montana state level, outlawing corporations from giving any money or support of any sort to Montana politicians. That same year, Texas and other states passed similar legislation (the corrupt former Speaker of the US House, Tom DeLay, R-Texas, was prosecuted under his state’s version of that law).

Montana’s anti-corruption law, along with many of those of numerous other states, persisted until 2010, when former Republican Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the five-vote Republican majority in the Citizens United decision, declared that political corruption didn’t exist any longer in the United States.

Kennedy, in what has to be one of the most absurd things ever penned by a Supreme Court justice, wrote that he’d examined “more than 100,000 pages” of legal opinions and could not find:

“…any direct examples of votes being exchanged for … expenditures. This confirms Buckley’s reasoning that independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption. In fact, there is only scant evidence that independent expenditures even ingratiate. Ingratiation and access, in any event, are not corruption.”

But that was just the beginning, as I lay out in The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America.

That same year they decided Citizens United, the five Republicans on the Court overturned that Montana anti-corruption law in the 2010 American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock ruling, again claiming that money doesn’t corrupt politicians.

This is particularly true, the five Republicans on the US Supreme Court ruled, if that money comes from corporations that can “inform” us about current issues, (literally the logic they used in Citizens United) or the morbidly rich who, presumably, must be people of the highest possible integrity (and they pay great speaking fees to Supreme Court justices).

Now, as a result of these corrupt decisions by five corrupt Republicans on the Court, we’ve reached something close to peak corruption.

Which raises the question: Was yesterday’s election in Wisconsin the start of a serious backlash like we saw with William Clark in 1899, or will America continue to go down the oligarchic road that Russia and Hungary have pioneered and Trump appears to see as role models?

The electorate, particularly in Wisconsin, appear outraged about the richest man in the world trying to buy an election.

Are we approaching the end times for big money in politics as Americans wake up to — and are horrified by — the impact of the political bribery that Clarence Thomas cast the deciding vote to legalize?

The Wisconsin result appears positive, although it may have turned out differently if Musk had simply stayed away from the state and quietly shoveled all that cash in from the background like other billionaires routinely do for Republican nominees across the country. We don’t know yet exactly what turned the election, and probably won’t for a few days as they compile the results of exit polls.

History doesn’t always repeat, but it often rhymes — and this could be our 1899 moment. Just as public outrage over William Clark’s corruption birthed a wave of reforms, last night’s pushback in Wisconsin may mark the first cracks in the dam of billionaire domination. Or it could be a fluke.

The oligarchs will be back, and they’ll come harder next time. The question now is whether the rest of America will join Wisconsin in standing up — or if we shall all be forced to bow down and learn to live in Musk’s brave new world.

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