The Naivete (Gullibility) of Most Progressives — and of Most People

5 November 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The example here is progressives, but the applicability includes to conservatives also.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DfVrf8Mu0iI/

4 November 2016

No one is really talking about what was probably the most consequential thing to come out of the midterm elections.

Everyone’s talking about the Democratic tsunami.

But I think — and I think most people in Montana think — that the most important victory happened yesterday in Montana.

Because almost two-thirds of voters in Montana approved the Montana plan, known as I-194, political organizations, wealthy donors from buying elections.

It’s basically a law that

overrides Citizens United and the ruling of Citizens United, and it ensures that Montana

elections are for the people, by the people. One person, one vote. And this is what real

long-term reform would look like if we are ever going to reclaim a government for all the people —

that unless we purge the influence from billionaires, think tanks, corporations, foreign governments,

from the political system, we won’t ever have a government for the people.

It can’t happen.

As long as there’s deep pockets in politics, they will represent them, not us.

And that applies to the Democrats as well.

So the question is, will the Democratic-controlled Congress take any steps to do anything about it?

23 other states are considering similar legislation to the Montana plan, and Hawaii has already passed something similar.

Government shouldn’t be this corrupt. I think we all know it, and it doesn’t have to be.

So, I asked ChatGPT:

“I-194 does not apply to the distribution of news, commentary, or editorial content. I-194 also does not apply to the state of Montana, political subdivisions, individuals, political committees, or public corporations.”

It replied, and I replied, and it then gave the answer:

——

The quoted provision establishes two distinct categories of exemptions from Montana’s I-194:

1. Activity-based exemption: Distribution of news, commentary, or editorial content is excluded from I-194’s application.
2. Entity-based exemption: The State of Montana, its political subdivisions, individuals, political committees, and public corporations are also excluded.

The first exemption is particularly important for journalism: it appears to protect the distribution of news and commentary regardless of whether the content concerns political candidates, elections, or public policy.

However, the precise legal scope depends on the full text of I-194, including its definitions and any qualifications elsewhere in the measure.

Are you asking whether this exemption protects independent investigative journalists and their publications from I-194’s requirements?

“No, I am asking whether it allows media-owners to corrupt public elections — transfers from corruption by all of the super-rich, to corruption by ONLY media-owning super-rich.”

Yes, I-194 would preserve a significant avenue through which billionaire media owners could influence elections, even while restricting corporate political spending by other businesses. But it would not restrict political influence exclusively to media-owning billionaires.

I examined the full text of Montana’s I-194, rather than merely its ballot summary. Section 3(4)(b) excludes bona fide news, commentary, and editorial content from the definition of prohibited political spending, unless the publisher is controlled by a candidate, political party, or political committee. Ownership by a billionaire is not an exception to that exemption.

Daily Montanan

Consider the consequences:

1. A billionaire who owns a newspaper could use its editorial pages to endorse candidates, criticize their opponents, and promote political positions without violating I-194 merely by publishing those opinions.

2. A billionaire who owns television stations could similarly use news and editorial programming to influence voters, subject to other applicable broadcasting laws.

3. A billionaire who owns an ordinary manufacturing corporation could not use that corporation’s treasury to finance comparable election expenditures outside the exemption.

4. A billionaire acting individually would remain outside I-194’s restrictions and could still finance political activities personally, subject to other applicable laws.

5. Political committees would also remain exempt from I-194’s general prohibition, although other campaign-finance regulations would continue to apply.

Daily Montanan+1

This creates an important distinction: the initiative would restrict the political spending powers of corporations generally while preserving the editorial political influence of corporations engaged in journalism.

Furthermore, wealthy media owners would possess an advantage that ordinary wealthy individuals do not necessarily possess: control over established channels of mass communication, including the selection, prominence, repetition, and framing of political information.

The exemption is not unlimited. It applies to bona fide journalistic and editorial content, not automatically to every expenditure a media company might make to influence an election.

There is also a constitutional complication: the First Amendment protects editorial freedom, and the Supreme Court has historically distinguished news and editorial activity from campaign contributions and expenditures. Removing this exemption would therefore raise substantial constitutional questions.

Your central concern is supported by the measure’s structure: I-194 would not eliminate the ability of concentrated private wealth to influence elections. It would leave intact both the political spending of wealthy individuals and the especially powerful editorial influence exercised through media ownership.

Whether that influence constitutes corruption depends on the meaning of corruption being applied. If corruption includes disproportionate control over the information voters receive, the media exemption leaves that potential mechanism substantially untouched.

Sources: Complete text of I-194, especially Sections 3–5; Montana Secretary of State — official ballot language.

——

MY COMMENTS:

That stupidly-thought-out ballot-measure (or “ballot proposition”) is ordinary, not extraordinary; it is normal; because sound drafting of laws is a rare expertise, which requires not ONLY good intent but deep understanding of how the Government functions and of how the various policy-priorities affect one-another. Direct democracy is just as corruptible as is representative (or indirect) democracy. As the Daily Montanan article had pointed out (right after its section “What proponents say”) in its section “What opponents say”:

This initiative would do little to curb money in politics. Individuals and political action committees would still be able to spend the same way that they do currently. This would just hamper smaller businesses, organizations like churches and unions, from supporting candidates or issues. Opponents also raise concerns about the legality of the measure since the U.S. Supreme Court has said that spending money in politics is political speech and should be given First Amendment protection.

This ballot measure, now law in Montana, is clearly in violation of multiple rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court, which categorize private campaign-spending as being “free speech” instead of corruption. A state’s law gets overturned whenever the U.S. Supreme Court rules it to violate the U.S. Constitution.

There is no way to prevent electoral democracy from degenerating into aristocracy — rule by and for only the super-rich. Electoral democracy presumes that voters possess not only good intentions but sound understanding of how the Government works, and that electoral campaigns which are funded by private money will not therefore degenerate into becoming contests between competing factions of the billionaire-class, instead of remaining any sort of ACTUAL democracy at all.

Thus, during the years ever since the billionaires-controlled military-industrial complex started taking over the U.S. Government on 25 July 1945 in order to extend their private corporate empires to control not only in America but over the entire world (now called “America’s global hegemony”), the U.S. Constitution has ever-increasingly been systematically violated so that, for example, the Constitutional provision that the President cannot invade a foreign country unless both houses of Congress vote by a majority to declare war against that country, has consistently and always been violated after that date. All of America’s more-than-a-hundred foreign invasions since 1945 have been by the U.S. President acting alone, and the U.S. Constitution (regarding this matter and many others) has increasingly become a mere piece of parchment whose meaning is controlled ultimately by the agents of America’s billionaires — NOT by the agenda and intentions, the PRIORITIES, of the Founders who collectively wrote it and each of its Amendments. In other words: the U.S. Constitution is overridden whenever the billionaires want it to be overridden.

On 10 February 2026, I headlined “How America’s Billionaires Control the Votes of American Voters” and described the legal case “Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.” in which the U.S. courts including the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there was nothing illegal when an American political Party (in that case the Democratic Party) ignored the electoral results in its own Presidential primaries when assigning delegates to its national convention — a political Party is a private club and has no obligations to its voters or to the general public but ONLY to its Members (currently 450 for the DNC, and 168 for the RNC). I noted that “If the club’s Members are dissatisfied with a candidate whom its voters preferred but whom the club’s megadonors refuse to accept, then the club’s members will select a nominee whom its megadonors DO accept.” This legal case didn’t come to a head until 2016, and the brief Wikipedia article about it, “Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.” , said:

Wilding et al. v. DNC Services Corporation, et al., was a class action lawsuit filed in 2016 against the Democratic National Committee and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.^[1] The plaintiffs, a group of Bernie Sanders supporters, claimed they have been defrauded in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries.^[1]

Their suit was dismissed by Judge William Zloch of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida for lack of standing.^[1] The judge found that none of the plaintiffs had claimed to have donated to the DNC on the basis of promises contained in the DNC charter, and therefore the plaintiffs could not claim to have incurred damages.^[1] The court held that “To the extent Plaintiffs wish to air their general grievances with the DNC or its candidate selection process, their redress is through the ballot box, the DNC’s internal workings, or their right of free speech — not through the judiciary.”^[1]

In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in a unanimous panel decision, held that the plaintiffs’ complaint failed on a “number of jurisdictional and substantive grounds” and affirmed the dismissal. The court held that the plaintiffs’ claims of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, consumer law violations, and unjust enrichment failed on the merits and directed those claims to be dismissed with prejudice. The court held that plaintiffs’ claims of negligence and breach of fiduciary duty failed for lack of standing, and directed those claims to be dismissed without prejudice.^[2][3]

Of course, the news-media in such a country (where all of the main news-media are also controlled by billionaires) constantly lie in order to fool the public so as to deceive them to accept increasing military spending and increasing the empire (all at the public’s expense, and further enriching the billionaires who own the government-contractors and the extraction-corporations). For example, that’s how they ‘justified’ invading and destroying Iraq in 2003 — a country that had never posed any threat nor danger to America — and many other such lie-based U.S. invasions to expand the U.S. empire.

Every national Government that includes public elections between competing politicians has degenerated into control by the richest (such as in the United States), because the richest donate more than half of all of the money that is donated to political campaigns, and they can and do aways spend enough on politics to deceive enough voters to vote against any candidate who refuses to be bought, so that only the candidates who are willing to do what their megadonors say — obedient candidates (obedient to the billionaires) — will have any real chance to win a major public office. So, if a democracy is to be defined as ONLY a system that includes public elections between competing politicians, then democracy will always degenerate into an aristocracy of the super-rich, which is a type of dictatorship (sometimes called by such names as “aristocracy,” “oligarchy,” “plutocracy,” etc.), NOT a democracy.

Corruption always comes from the top down, not from the bottom up; it comes from the super-rich (who profit from it), not from the public (who suffer it). However, the billionaires’ ‘news’-media don’t allow this fact to be reported to the public (notice that no mention is made there of corruption, nor of billionaires benefitting from it); and, so, the public are confused, and falsely assume that the solution to corruption is “less government, more free market” — as-if to eliminate governmental regulations and laws that protect the public from corporate abuses (such as those) is the way to protect the public from corporate abuses. (Instead, “An inflexible system trains you to lie.” The bureaucracy itself is the problem.)  Wow! The logic there is so ridiculous, but the public have been brainwashed by billionaires and their agents, to think this way. It is simply amazing. People have absorbed that garbage even in the billionaires’ universities — but it’s more often simplified to the alleged “magic of the free market” (the cartoon version of Adam Smith’s philosophy classic). It’s no “magic” there, but just the magician’s hand and deceitful tricks, blown up by mythology so as to become “the invisible hand of God,” as a ‘justification’ for the way things are: “Might [The Almighty —‘God’] makes right”; so, just let things be. Let the corruptness continue.

The basic deficiency in theory in the field of political science (which likewise is funded — directly and indirectly — by billionaires) is the false definition of “democracy” to mean public elections between competing politicians and Parties for public offices. That false definition (which is based on the billionaires’ “free market” idea, that competition is the solution to everything — so it should be applied to everything, including ‘democracy’) is the foundation-stone for what is supposed to be “representative” government, but in what way will it produce a government that authentically represents the public, if it actually is representing ONLY the billionaires who control which individuals will, and which won’t, be selected by them to run as candidates in their Party’s primaries and then selected by all billionaires to fund enough to win the general election to fill the given political seat? It WON’T be a “representative” government, because it will actually represent ONLY the billionaires — NOT the public. And that is the BASIC deceit in existing political theory — the mis-definition of “democracy.” The people in power, the billionaires, WANT political theory to mis-define “democracy” this way, so that they and their agents (in political ‘science’ and elsewhere) will be publicly believed when they say it IS a democracy — even though it isn’t and is even PROVEN to be a dictatorship (by only the super-rich).

An authentic democracy is instead a government whose policy-priorities are the same as are the public’s policy-priorities. (There, I have just DEFINED “democracy.”) Here is the way that this goal (and this redefinition of “democracy”) can be achieved (and why the billionaires — the super-rich — don’t want it, and have therefore pumped their ‘democracy’ instead):

We shall start by discussing the Legislature, not the Executive, branch of government, because in any putative democracy, the legislature is the source of the laws, and the Executive executes (carries out) those laws. (Furthermore, in a parliamentary system, the head-of-state, or Executive, is chosen BY the legislature; and, so, in that type of Government, there is no other option THAN to start with the Legislative branch of government.)

For a population of around 340,000,000, which America’s is, a random sample of 500 people would be plus or minus 4.38%, of accurately representing that 340 million people, such that there is at least a 95% certainty that that 500 randomly sampled people constitute or accurately “represent” (plus or minus 4.38%), or have the same policy-priorities AS, “the typical American.” Right now, the U.S. Government’s legislators are its 100 Senators and 435 Representatives. So: if the goal is to replace those 535 (almost completely corrupt) U.S. legislators, with 500 randomly selected Americans, then this number of randomly sampled people (500) would be plus or minus 4.38% of accurately representing that 340 million people, such that there is at least a 95% certainty that those 500 randomly sampled people (plus or minus 4.38%) represent the policy-priorities of “the typical American.”

What would be representative about these 500 people is that the average or “typical” policy-priorities of these 500 individuals would REPRESENT (within those stated parameters) the average policy-priorities of the 340 million Americans. This is a mathematical fact (within the bounds that I’ve specified).

Currently, the best evidence of the extent to which the existing 535 U.S. legislators do or don’t REPRESENT the average policy-priorities of the 340 million Americans, is the following body of empirical data:

On 14 February 2025, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions (in other words: these are the governmental functions that the public wanted the most to get more funding, and the least to get reduced funding, in that order): 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

Trump (with the cooperation of the U.S. Congress) is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And that is a dictatorship by the super-rich.

As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein, reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”.)

To see the empirical evidence proving that there IS class-warfare in America and that the billionaire-class is ruling this country and (by means of their agents) writing and executing its laws, click here. What it proves is that at least ever since 1980, the U.S. Government has represented ONLY the policy-priorities of the super-rich, and definitely NOT of the American people. Though that’s the situation as it had been ever since at least 1980, the current trend away from that is (as is likewise documented in those links) toward even more of a dictatorship. In other words: in America, this situation has been getting worse and worse over the decades. It is no mere fluke — not merely a Trump-era phenomenon.

Each reader here should be asking oneself “If the members of Congress had been selected by random lottery instead of by competitive political Parties and public elections, how likely is it that today’s federal budget would REDUCE spending for Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, Medicaid, and federal law enforcement; and INCREASE it for Border security, and for the Military? That’s what it did, but would it have done so if the legislators had been selected by lottery? The question here isn’t whether average Americans are more intelligent or more knowledgeable than today’s legislators are, but whether today’s legislators are more corrupt than the average American is.

I headlined on April 16th “The public lack the intellectual ability that’s needed in order for an electoral democracy to work.”, and argued there that the deficiency is not in the public, that they are insufficiently intelligent, but instead in the billionaires-s‘elected’ politicians, that they are insufficiently decent (made so by their megadonors, the s‘elected’ politicians’ virtual — but certainly not virtuous — owners).

So, the standard definition of democracy is a phony definition of “democracy” (though it’s the normal way that “democracy” is defined), because a democracy is instead a Government by representatives of each citizen equally, without regard for wealth, religon, ethnicity, or any other attribute — it is (and the term “democracy” can realistically be applied ONLY to) “Equal Justice Under Law” — and it CAN exist but never yet HAS existed (because of that false common definition for it). Therefore, all that we have had is aristocracies (and a few theocracies).

An authentic democracy would be based upon the following:

It would be replacing all public competitive elections (which inevitably will be corrupted) between competing politicians, by, instead, random assignment of members of the public, to the legislature; and, then, if that person is willing to serve as a legislator, be paid by the Government so to serve; and, then, voting BY those legislators, in the legislature. Those lottery-appointed legislators would then select from amongst themselves a head-of-state, the Government’s executive power, likewise paid by the Government. Randomly selected bar-certified lawyers would also be paid by the Government, to interview and select all judges; and all trials would be jury trials; and only pre-certified experts would be able to be paid by the court to testify on expert matters in trials. Certification of such experts would be based upon scores on purely multiple-choice specialized tests for evaluating a person’s competency in that field of expertise, so as to eliminate subjective factors and any influences by the rich (who normally select and sponsor ‘experts’). Any legislator or other Government-employee will be paid ONLY by the Government and annually audited, and any effort by any such person to derive income from any other source THAN the Government would be subject to trial and automatic firing from that Government-office if found guilty.

This would be a Governmental system that is designed so as to prevent corruption of the Government. Corruption comes almost always from the aristocracy, the super-rich, who own control over the large corporations, including the news-media and the think tanks and the most prestigious educational institutions, which they donate to and so the billionaires also fund the ‘experts’ that their ‘news’-media interview who likewise shape public opinions. The purpose would be to eliminate corruption from the Government. The common view, that the basic problem with elected Governmental officials is their incompetency instead of their corruptness, is disproven, in the relevant data.

Furthermore, in this system, there would be no term-limits (such as, for example, would have required FDR — perhaps our greatest President — to quit in 1941), and so whenever a legislator chooses to quit or else becomes expelled by a majority vote of his/her colleagues, and that person’s seat then becomes filled likewise by lottery, the collective legislature will tend to become and be long-termers, and so to be exceptionally well-acquainted with one-another, and — because there will be no Parties — legislative debates on issues will then be real debates (in which the legislators help and learn from each other) and NOT win-lose contests between power-craving professional politicians. It would be a legislature composed of normal people. Those legislative debates would be to convince each other — NOT to grandstand to any voting public. It would be a very different kind of legislature.

It would be the legislature for a democracy — a legislature that (UNLIKE existing ones) represents the public, by having the same (or approximately the same) policy-priorities that the public does. Consequently (and also unlike existing legislatures), the specialists and experts that it would select and hire to advise it and assist it in drafting legislation, will NOT be selected to satisfy the billionaires (such as is the case now), but will instead be selected and hired to serve the public.

The ever-increasing privatization of the government would, by this means, be reversed, in a way that would establish instead a government that is truly public, NOT controlled by the super-rich — by some aristocracy — but truly by and for the public. This would be done by means a body (legislature) of individuals whose policy-priorities can reasonably be expected to closely approximate (or “represent”) the public’s policy-priorities. That’s to say: a democracy.

It would be an entirely different type of Government than we have.

There is no precedent in history for this system. Ancient Athens has a “sortition” system, which partly entailed lottery-selection of people to vote for legislators, whereas my proposed system is random selection of persons to serve as legislators — the public don’t vote for any contestants in political Party primaries, nor in final general elections, and there are no such Parties or public political contests. There are, however, votes by legislators; it’s just that there no votes for legislators, and the only votes for the head-of-state are by the legislators, selecting from amongst themselves whom the head-of-state will be — and (when the time to remove that person comes) removing that person from that top position.

What would be required in order to implement this change? One Constitutional Amendment. That is all. I have here presented not the Amendment but the argument for it. If you would like to assist me in drafting the Amendment, or know of a person who possesses relevant expertise in that regard, please contact me. If you have any thoughts, at all, about the argument that I have presented here, you can contact me by clicking here.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.