Elites do tend to be... elite. That's not what I was objecting to. My contention is that this has little to do with corruption. Rather, the government happens t

Elites do tend to be... elite. That's not what I was objecting to. My contention is that this has little to do with corruption. Rather, the government happens to be a bloated, inefficient bureaucracy. Regular people have little interest in navigating it, while the rich can pay others to do so. IMO, the biggest problem is that people are increasing confusing politics for entertainment, so you get a lot of noise that doesn't translate into policy. I view vague disdain towards things like lobbying as one such example of such noise. It's always, "a corporation got something that I don't like. Must be legalized bribery!" There is never any discussion to the myriad regulations of lobbying or even have any clue how it operates. People don't even realize that lobbying money is primarily an operating expense that pays for the work of lobbyists. I found one section in the paper you shared interesting: > A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy... > But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that—collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect. This was written before the massive wave of populism. We got Trump and his attempt of protectionism. The UK got Brexit. Both were overall opposed by the rich as the largest corporations are multinational. Neither achieved the goals that the populists were hoping for. Later, we got the stimulus checks and student loan changes, but both of these were easily hijacked by lobbyists thanks to the economic ignorance of the the population. Small business owners managed to convince people that PPP forgiveness money would go towards keeping people on payroll. Universities and lenders are delighted that forgiveness and income-based repayment will increase the willingness to pay for tuition, which would make them more dependent on private loans. > There are rich people who are in favor of anti-abortion. Not really. You have rich people who are against abortion as the means to achieve an end. An example of this is Trump coincidentally becoming against abortion when has he was preparing for his presidential campaign. You don't see any billionaires as dedicated as Buffet is to pro-choice. > How about you look at the comment that I was replying to. Rejecting federal-level political corruption as “not endemic” since it’s not petty bribery is ludicrous. The comment was saying that corruption isn't endemic in America... because it's not particularly endemic. There isn't a fundamental difference between petty and federal corruption. If you can pay a police officer to forgive a traffic infraction, a billionaire can easily pay the entire police department to look the other way when they hire thugs to block a polling station.