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Jeffrey McCarthy is a retired professor of environmental humanities at the University of Utah. He lives in Belfast.
Graham Platner has been tossed from the political stage, but Maine voters can still support the pro-democracy message that lifted him. Many Mainers liked Platner’s plain-spoken assessments: “I am fighting … the billionaire class that effectively dominates all of Washington.”
It turns out Platner himself is wrong for Maine, but the campaign against billionaire influence is right. That campaign succeeded with voters who recognized that vast fortunes concentrated in very few hands threaten democracy.
Many Maine voters share that misgiving with America’s founding fathers who thought concentrated wealth led to tyranny. Thomas Jefferson warned against “the aristocracy of our monied corporations,” and John Adams observed that “power follows property.” I think they’d be sweating through their wigs to see our United States enter this new Gilded Age in which a tiny number of households have billions of dollars each. It’s no surprise these very-rich have purchased political influence to maintain their power and enjoy government advantages.
I am not against people getting rich, I am for guardrails that allow wealth to coexist with democracy. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.”
Consider that in the last national elections 300 billionaire families gave candidates an average of $10 million each. That is 100,000 times the average donation. What has this influence purchased? Recent news tells me that Social Security will reduce payments in 2032. It tells me that SpaceX had an IPO making Elon Musk a trillionaire. It tells me that Affordable Care Act subsidies expired and five million Americans have lost health insurance (joining the more than 20 million already without coverage). The news tells me that corporate profits hit a record in 2025. The news tells me that public schools in Maine are struggling to fund music classes and athletics programs.
I believe Americans of every political stripe are concerned that immense fortunes translate into political domination, allowing a few people to shape the rules governing taxation, regulation and competition. Dirigo means “I lead.” Maine could lead the nation toward electoral reform. This can be a state where ordinary people have more impact than a few large contributions.
Let’s support the Clean Election Act that gets big donors out of candidates’ offices. Let’s insist on greater transparency about who is funding the attack ads that pollute every campaign. Let’s lead the nation toward a constitutional amendment limiting campaign spending by outside groups.
Today’s enormous concentration of wealth would be easier to accept if things were going great for the rest of us. You can argue that the daily trials of working Mainers stem from selfishness by the richest people in the country. Rural hospitals are closing across Maine after last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) pushed money away from Medicaid and other health subsidies. Instead, the wealthiest Americans will get permanent lower tax brackets and bigger exemptions. Meanwhile, their healthcare will probably be house-calls from concierge physicians and visits to the VIP clinics.
If medical pain is not enough, consider education. The OBBBA cuts $300 billion from student aid. Billionaires don’t need college loans but most Maine students do. Our state system has had to increase the tuition and cut the staff that serves Maine’s next generation.
This inequitable system is exactly what I believe drew voters to the Platner campaign. He said: “We live in a system that is functioning exactly as it’s intended … to enrich and support billionaires on the backs of working people.”
Maine Republicans, Democrats, and independents seem to know that the immense wealth enjoyed by a sliver of our population distorts our economy and corrupts our government. The Constitution begins “We the People” because political authority is supposed to flow upwards from American citizens. One candidate may have stepped out of the race, but the battle over democracy’s future runs on.