Louis D. Brandeis, the American jurist, famously warned: “We may
have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands
of a few, but we can’t have both.” Brandeis’s cri de coeur was
inspired by an indignant observation of the shenanigans of
America’s robber barons during the Gilded Age. Today, we live in
a data-driven age, and some careful students of the connection
between money and politics have now amassed a powerful body of
evidence to support Brandeis’s moral claim. A lot of it is
assembled in a report by the progressive research organization
Demos, published this week. One of the most striking findings is
the extent to which economic power translates into political
power. Institutionally, this is an era of unprecedented
democracy – one of the triumphs of the 20th century has been the
extension of voting rights to all adults in a lot of the world.
But even in the United States, the country that thinks of itself
as being the world’s leading democracy, it turns out that those
rights do not transl