It’s critical that Americans begin correctly identifying the qualities of our still-partly-a democracy that are leading to its becoming something more like an oligopoly or aristocracy, and Edward Fitzpatrick’s column, in yesterday’s Providence Journal, in my opinion, reinforces thinking in the wrong direction:

Lessig — author of “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress and a Plan to Stop It” — wasn’t offering a casual observation. He was summarizing what he called “the largest empirical study of actual policy decision by our government, maybe in the history of political science.” In 2014, Princeton’s Martin Giles and Northwestern’s Benjamin I. Page found that “when the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.”

Ouch. I mean, many suspect D.C.’s denizens are listening to the rich and the connected rather than the average Benny’s shopper. But in three depressing charts, the researchers show just how much the needle jumps when the elites and interest groups want it to — and how it barely quivers when the average citizen favors a policy change.

A note on the study in question: The actual document is behind a pay wall that I don’t care to breach, for the purposes of this post, but a quick Internet search shows that it’s mainly been embraced by left-wing sites and organizations.  Vox has some charts from the study, and here’s a related paper from one of the authors to get a sense of how the questions of opinion are being judged.

From what I can tell, the study defines “wealthy” as the top 10 percent of income earners, which this chart puts at incomes over around $116,000 per year, nationwide.  From what I’ve gleaned, the paper also acknowledges that the wealthy tend to be more engaged in the political process.  So, the caveats are that:

• To some extent, the revelation is that policy is determined more by people who get involved, which seems kind of reasonable to me grousing to pollsters isn’t enough.
• The “wealthy” is defined in such a way as to capture a very broad and diverse set of people, which will include a pretty sizable portion of people who work in government.
• It isn’t clear what issues the authors used to determine differences of opinion between the wealthy and the non-wealthy.  The left-wing and mainstream outlets (sorry to be redundant) emphasize a few economic and budgetary issues where the non-wealthy agree with them, but I’d wager even greater divergences are found in areas where the masses take a more conservative view, as on social issues, ObamaCare, and immigration.

With these caveats, the major omission of Lessig and Fitzpatrick’s assessment of the situation is obvious: The media, both news and entertainment, tends to agree with the elites.  The needle doesn’t jump when ordinary folks want it to because members of the media don’t make an issue of their causes, even going so far as to more or less yawn when the government works to suppress populist movements like the Tea Party.  On issues like same-sex marriage and illegal immigration, the media is positively activist in a way that helps the elites to make the needle hit top pin.

This is critical to acknowledge because it completely changes the direction of reforms to reverse course away from an aristocracy.  Fitzpatrick and Lessig favor campaign finance reform, but if a core part of the problem is that the media acts as a massive, professional in-kind donation toward liberal causes, campaign finance (and, especially, reverses of rules like the Citizens United case) would only exacerbate the government-for-a-few model.

The underlying challenge is that government is simply too big and powerful, which creates existential incentive to have influence with it.  As long as that remains the case, the “wealthy” will find ways to exercise their influence.  Just to grab one passing example in a continual flow, Katherine Gregg recently tweeted that former Democrat Representative Ray Sullivan, having spent some years as a paid activist for same-sex marriage and other causes, has now moved into the NEARI teacher union as a lobbyist.  He’ll replace Patrick Crowley, whose gross salary was around $119,000.  Not only does that make Sullivan one of the top 10 percent (“the wealthy”), but it illustrates how special interests can influence elected officials simply by making it implicitly understood that there are high-paying career paths for them, if they’re well aligned.

Knowingly or not, the left, and even mainstream liberals, are pushing our political system deeper into quicksand.  The more we struggle to “get money out of politics,” the more we sink into a system with disparate political influence, in which the wealthy and the government aren’t so much working together as one and the same.