this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
853 points (85.6% liked)
Political Memes
12626 readers
1890 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
1) Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
2) No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
3) Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
4) No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
5) No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There are conspiracies about the deep state and everyone on lemmy says the donor class is what decides politics, but what I've personally seen is just massive amounts of money dumped into propaganda and mass media stories about how dems want everything bad and how everything Republicans do is good and common sense, and it works unbelievably well.
It's not people just saying this by the way. There is empirical evidence the donor class decides politics.
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policycast/oligarchy-open-what-happens-now-us-forced-confront-its-plutocracy
Their inference from the data is correct but misleading, since for 90% of the issues the average citizen and the "donor class" were aligned, and when they were not, the citizen's decisions were chosen about 40% of the time. That's definitely a hard lean towards the rich, though their claim is that the average citizen has near-zero impact which is a big overstatement.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283035709_Testing_Inferences_about_American_Politics_A_Review_of_the_Oligarchy_Result
On the federal level near zero is accurate. Trying to downplay this is rather silly.