In my opinion, you are conflating cause and effect, but per an earlier comment I made it is incorrect for anyone to believe that their passions are not shared by others. And when those others have more money than time, that is how they &quot;help.&quot;<p>If you run for office in the US, you will form an organizing committee. And you will put in your organizing documents the things you believe should be true about the world that aren&#x27;t (this would be your platform) and because that is a public document, it will be published by the State or Federal elections commission with all the other platforms out there.<p>And you will be surprised, perhaps pleasantly so, perhaps unpleasantly, that your &quot;agenda&quot; or platform may line up with what some billionaire thinks is the right thing as well, or maybe they just want to use you to steal votes from another player in the race (this is politics after all) and you will get donations to your committee from weird sounding names like &quot;Higgly Piggly Partners, LLP&quot; which are people who generally want to remain anonymous and want to help you get elected. Some of those people might be billionaires. You probably won&#x27;t know but it is always good to ask what they hope to achieve by getting you elected.<p>And there were a number of people who ran as Republicans in California found that the Koch brothers donated money to help their elections. Did it make them tools of the Koch brothers? Maybe some of them but certainly not all of them. And if some billionaire donated to your election campaign would you suddenly do anything they said?<p>Look no further than the county clerk in Kentucky to see that once you&#x27;re elected you are really really hard to fire, even if you don&#x27;t do your job. There is nothing that says you have to do the bidding of your donors, the worst that will happen is they won&#x27;t support your re-election efforts.<p>Politics <i>is</i> people. Its people collectively trying to achieve a goal, some for themselves, some for the group. Whether you are in a company or a government or on an island competing for a million dollars, politics is the process by which negotiation, decisions, and change is effected. It is perfectly legit to say that you don&#x27;t understand how it works, but it is incorrect to say that you cannot participate. And sometimes participation can lead to understanding which can lead to great things. But you won&#x27;t know unless you try.