Personally, I would argue that the corruption afterburner kicked in with Citizens United v. FEC.

This was like giving a crack addict a feedback loop which gives them more crack. Of course it was going to end badly.

We could discuss many possible points of inflection, but I don't want to dilute the undeniable power of the phrase "trust is efficient."

However we got here, whatever one's politics, you cannot argue against that simple phrase, and the tragedy of the loss.

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just to give credit, it was https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=the_snooze who turned me on to these three words that have stuck in my head

Yet Kamala and her supporting PACs had two or three times the funding that Trump had.

There is no need to get left/right political here. There are two political parties in the USA, and they both hit the feedback loop of $crack. One might have led to low-trust faster than the other, but they are both $crack addicts in the end.

Just to be clear as to what this means in politics on the ground... left or right, if you have a political position which disagrees with the biggest money, they will primary you. So, left or right, generally speaking, you only see politicians finally standing up for their morals when they are no longer up for election. The most obvious recent example of this is Mitch McConnell.

at some point you hit saturation on most anything, doesn't stop the fact that hundreds of millions were spent on both sides. Kamala lost because she was a female of color, not because of policies, no one will ever convince me otherwise. There are just too many misogynists and racists in the USA currently to have both of those working against you unless you're bordering on messianic in charisma

You mean a single day fundraiser beat Trump’s single day fundraising by 2-3x, that would be correct. If you think her 90 day campaign fundraising managed to beat Trump’s 8 year fundraising campaign that would be wildly incorrect.