Equivocating “Speech”: Political Advertising, Mass Media, and Human Excellence

A WWII-era poster warning citizens not to discuss ship, troop, or supply movements. Its text is strangely apropos in distinguishing between real political speech and careless chatter. (Photo credit: NARA – 535383)

What follows is an abridged compilation of my recent series, “Money in Politics.” The essay is forthcoming in a Swarthmore College student publication entitled Left of Liberal.

Equivocating “Speech”: Political Advertising, Mass Media, and Human Excellence

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, the United States government has treated anonymous monetary contributions to political organizations as constitutionally protected free speech. Much has been made of the practical implications of Citizens United, especially regarding its alleged support of plutocracy. While I am generally sympathetic to such criticisms, I aim to evaluate a different premise of the Citizens United ruling: that independent expenditures are a form of constitutionally protected speech; simplistically, that money equals speech.

In fairness, the Court does not adhere to this premise directly. It cites the majority opinion from another case, Buckley v. Valeo:  “A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached…. The electorate’s increasing dependence on television, radio, and other mass media for news and information has made these expensive modes of communication indispensable instruments of effective political speech.” In other words, money is not speech per se, but because we live in a society that has commoditized major segments of public fora, we should protect persons’ ability to purchase space in such fora.

Its naturalism fallacy notwithstanding, the Court ignores substantial reasons to distinguish between monetary expenditures (a market transaction) and political speech (a political interaction). The very interests that the Court cites in establishing the historically contingent relation of money to speech – i.e., it’s ability to create broad, deep, and inclusive discussion of issues of public importance – are precisely those interests that no market transaction can achieve. Forcing speakers to buy entrance into public forums fundamentally subverts the political process.

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Monetary outlays do not have any speech content unless accompanied by some other communication. A Super PAC can spend a small fortune espousing the benefits of a healthy breakfast or just air hours of white space, if it so desires. Buying up ad space (the monetary expenditure part) is distinct from imbedding content within those advertisements (the political speech part). Even boycotts and other forms of “economic speech” only gain their political content from the message accompanying the decision to purchase or not to purchase a certain product. Otherwise, that decision is relegated to the entirely private, economic realm of personal preference, where it lacks the essential publicity of political action.

The Court thus relies solely on the belief that large monetary outlays are a necessary condition for exercising constitutionally protected free speech rights. They rely on the bizarre logic that, because our primary media happen to be controlled by corporations who use dollars as a unit of access, we as political actors must follow suit. This simply is not the case. The Greek agora and the Roman forum were political venues precisely because any citizen within them had equal power to engage in persuasive discussion with any other citizen present. All citizens had free access to the venue.

Radio, by contrast, has a finite number of usable frequencies, and television has a finite number of channels with substantial viewership. These media forms are far scarcer – and therefore far more expensive for the author – than, say print media was at the time of the American Revolution. Moreover, the relatively small market in these media means that increased demand during presidential elections rapidly increases the price of ad space. The structure of telecommunications limits the number of political ads that can be aired, so that large ad buys partially offset their added content by crowding out other, less wealthy advertisers.

Both radio and television also allow only for one-way communication, from the advertiser to the content subscriber. Broadcast advertisements therefore treat the viewer or listener as a mere receptacle for persuasion, and not herself as a persuasive, human voice. In conversation, the immediate proximity of the speaker to her listener is essential to speech – one must both attempt to persuade and be open to persuasion to engage in political discourse. This mutual discourse helps prevent the propagation of false or sensationalist rhetoric by exposing speakers to constant evaluation and rebuttal. The Court does away with the multilateralism of politics when it concerns itself with “the size of the audience reached” and not with the size of mutually engaged citizenry. The Court removes a further check on absurdity when it legalizes anonymous contributions, whereby the “speaker” need never expose him-, her-, or itself to any public scrutiny whatever.

Finally, it does not take a pessimistic view of society to believe that hyperbole and misinformation can skew electoral outcomes. Regardless of how much a candidate’s policies benefit me – e.g., by guaranteeing affordable healthcare – I am unlikely to support him if I cannot trust his character – for example, because I believe that he is a radical Islamic militant bent on global domination. We check shallowness from the permanent opposition by holding out the promise that it may one day inherit the reins of government, with all the responsibility that entails. When it comes time to rule, the opposition must have a workable plan, or else it will fail as a government and be booted out of office in the next election.

When apolitical actors like corporations and unions (neither of which can hold government office) become politicized, this check ceases to function, as attacks on the ruling coalition need no longer be grounded in reliable alternatives to achieve the actors’ legislative goals. Baseless attacks, do, however, serve to ingratiate the candidate or party that they aid, allowing these sometimes-libelous organizations additional access to candidates, and perhaps winning candidates’ support for narrow policy goals, like lower corporate taxes or protectionist labor laws.

The First Amendment protects against a tyrannical government by guaranteeing the relatively equal ability of citizens to create and disseminate content critical of government practices and elected officials. It operates on the theory, expressed by Madison in The Federalist No. 10, that many, relatively equal factions will balance one another to prevent oligarchy. Equalizing economic conditions within politics promotes a meritocracy of ideas better than a system that equates economic success with political profundity. This meritocratic system ensures the ultimate stability of democratic states. At a moral level, it recognizes citizens’ individual worth. At a practical level, it provides an institutional outlet for citizen’s frustrations, thus alleviating the risk of violent revolution.

While a political sphere entirely separated from the economic sphere may, in fact, retain some inequality – e.g., in speakers’ background knowledge or rhetorical skills – these skills are at least relatively amenable to self-improvement and relevant to political processes. In contrast stands wealth accumulated by the selling of products or services, which entails no such persuasive prowess, but, indeed, quite the opposite: profits, the surplus wealth of business, arise from the brute force of desire compelling economic activity. In no event should the public welfare be conflated with this private satisfaction of desire, as public legislation deals necessarily with emergent societal needs that lack microeconomic analogues. Neither should matters of public welfare necessarily be subject to the wills of the economically successful, as the selflessness of authentic public service transcends the personal enrichment inherent in capitalistic enterprise.

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The essence of human action is the spontaneous creation of something entirely new – a tool, a product, or an idea. Food, drink, and the ingredients therein are consumed almost immediately following their creation. They lack any permanence whatsoever except as an eternally recurring component of the natural cycles of life. This type of consumption comprises a biological imperative, which a human can forestall only by causing his or her own death. The unending cycle of life enslaves all biological creatures, and in our need to satisfy it we are no different from any other living thing. The market economy and the division of labor mean that few of us actually produce the goods we consume for sustenance, yet subsistence labor remains: we still must work for money to trade for the basic needs of life, and labor for which the laborer gains only the means to provide for his or her own continued existence remains in principle the same component of the cycle of life, only that a sophisticated system of trade has been introduced to regulate this cycle.

If subsistence labor was all that humans could accomplish, we would be indistinguishable in function from the simplest living substance imaginable, because such labor is itself only the state of having life. Thus labor, taken by itself, is a purely natural and not at all moral, thoughtful, or self-reflective.

An entirely laboring species would interact entirely with nature in its raw form. We are far more used to engaging with the enduring products of work – the chair in which you are sitting, the buildings in which you live and work, the screen on which you are reading this post. All of these more permanent tools and edifices arise from a surplus of labor capacity beyond that needed to satisfy the basic needs of life. From this surplus work arise objects meant for use, rather than for consumption. That these products last beyond the life of their creator distinguishes them from mere consumable goods and creates the enduring, man-made world with which are most familiar.

Durable creations are thus also the chief defining feature of human activity and, indeed, of human excellence. The ability to transcend natural imperatives implies and affirms a hierarchy of action in which the most fully human (I pointedly do not say “best,” “most moral,” etc.) of behaviors is to divorce oneself entirely from subsistence labor and create only lasting products and ideas. The capitalist system – as do all economic systems – provides a framework for the production and distribution of durable goods, but durable ideas can arise only within a political, not an economic, forum.

Human excellence materializes through politics when an action is endowed permanence by memory, that is, when it is found worthy of remembrance. Only this intergenerational transmission can bestow upon intangible goods, like stories, theories, or deeds, the same permanence that exists in the creation of lasting material goods like chairs and computers.

Unlike material goods, however, ideas can last as long as the species. A wooden chair will eventually decay, but the ideas of Socrates can endure indefinitely in the minds of each successive generation. Even were the chair built of solid titanium, guaranteed to last for all of civilization, still the idea, taken for granted by us, that this oddly shaped metal construction is meant to be sat upon must endure if the chair is to endure. If the idea is not passed on, then even this presumably permanent structure becomes only so much raw material. Intangible goods – stories, theories, and ideas – thus contain the ultimate seeds of permanence and therefore of true human excellence. That such intangibles require a public forum to thrive underscores the fundamental importance to humanity of a healthy political realm.

The central role granted to money and monetary expenditures threatens human excellence in the political realm because commoditization can exist only where goods are treated as substitutable. Both the strong formulation that “money is speech” and weaker formulation that “monetary expenditures are necessary for political speech” imply the commoditization of the forum, and therefore the substitutability of the speech therein. I highly doubt, for instance, that HGTV cares whether they are airing a Romney ad, an Obama ad, an anti-smoking ad, a pro-gay marriage ad, or an ad demanding more prisons, so long as they receive the same amount of money for each one. The “pay to play” mentality, inherent in markets, hinders the introduction of new material to the discourse and limits speakers based on apolitical, economic characteristics.

Because the market limits space in the forum, individuals who have not been economically successful are also denied the ability to become politically successfully. They are doubly robbed of the capacity for human excellence because failure within the market structures that allow for the shadow excellence of producing durable goods implies exclusion from the political forum in which alone can one achieve the greater excellence of producing durable thoughts.

The commoditization of the political forum surrenders the political realm to a handful of wealthy individuals, creating a de facto plutocracy within an otherwise democratic forum. Against this stands the general American assumption that casting a ballot is the ultimate form of democratic expression, and so exclusion from speaking publicly in no way entails the surrender of governmental power. A ballot, however, can in no way be speech in that it is both anonymous, therefore not human excellence, and a prescribed choice, therefore not creative or spontaneous. The dialectic that shapes politics and policy is constituted by the creation of ideas that frame our modes of understanding the world. Surrendering that dialectic to market forces is not identical with surrendering partisan control of the White House, but it is identical with surrendering control of the expectations and priorities by which policy is judged.

We interact far more with man-made objects than with the raw, natural world, and so we are conditioned to understand and interact with the man-made world. As any millennial trying to teach a grandparent how to use computers will attest, we also become conditioned to the particular objects that dominate our world growing up. We are similarly conditioned to think in a manner consistent with the dominant modes of thought to which we are exposed. When we are exposed to the thoughts and thought processes of only a few perspectives, we are conditioned to think in relation to those standards. Thus, an oligopoly of political speech entails an oligopoly of thought.

Speech is not a good for purchased, but an activity in which to engage. A narrow perspective, an enforced dialectic, an economically dominated public forum, and corporate control of access to political notoriety undermine political liberty, human excellence, and our collective future.

MiP 3 – Money and Spontaneity

Money, the prerequisite to speech post–Citizens United (Photo credit: epSos.de)

Part 3 of Money in Politics.

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan

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The essence of human action is the spontaneous creation of something entirely new – a tool, a product, or an idea. Food, drink, and the ingredients therein are consumed almost immediately following their creation. They lack any permanence whatsoever except as an eternally recurring component of the natural cycles of life. This type of consumption comprises a biological imperative, which human will can forestall only by causing its own death. The unending cycle of life enslaves all biological creatures, from earthworms to people, and in our need to satisfy it we are no different from any other living thing. The market economy and the division of labor mean that few of us actually produce the goods we consume for sustenance, yet subsistence labor remains: we still must work for money to trade for the basic needs of life, and labor for which the laborer gains only the means to provide for his or her own continued existence remains in principle the same component of the cycle of life, only that a sophisticated system of trade has been introduced to regulate this cycle.

Grocery store shelf with consumable goods (Photo credit: Pirkka Aunola)

If subsistence labor were all that humans could accomplish, we would be indistinguishable in function from the simplest living substance imaginable, because such labor is itself only the state of having life. Thus labor, taken by itself, is a purely natural and not at all moral, thoughtful, or self-reflective.

We interact very little, if at all, with nature in its raw form, as an entirely laboring species would do. We are far more used to engaging with the enduring products of work – the chair in which you are sitting, the buildings in which you live and work, the screen on which you are reading this post. All of these more permanent tools and edifices arise from a surplus of labor capacity beyond that needed to satisfy the basic needs of life. From this surplus work arise objects meant for use, rather than for consumption. That these products last beyond the life of their creator distinguishes them from mere consumable goods and creates the enduring, man-made world with which are most familiar.

Durable creations are thus also the chief defining feature of human activity and, indeed, of human excellence. The ability to transcend natural imperatives implies and affirms a hierarchy of action in which the most fully human (I pointedly do not say “best,” “most moral,” etc.) of behaviors is to divorce oneself entirely from subsistence labor and create only lasting products and ideas. The capitalist system – as do all economic systems – provides a framework for the production and distribution of durable goods, but durable ideas can arise only within

a political, not an economic, forum.

Human excellence materializes through politics when an action is endowed permanence by memory, that is, when it is found worthy of remembrance. Only this intergenerational transmission can bestow upon intangible goods, like stories, theories, or deeds, the same permanence that exists in the creation of lasting material goods like chairs and computers.

A bust of Socrates, 469-399 B.C.E., who we still remember 2400 years later after his death (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Unlike material goods, ideas can last as long as the species. Though a wooden chair will eventually decay, the ideas of Socrates can endure indefinitely in the minds of each successive generation. Even were the chair built of solid titanium, guaranteed to last for all of future history, still the idea, taken for granted by us, that this oddly shaped metal construction is meant to be sat upon must endure if the chair is to endure. If the idea is not passed on, then even this presumably permanent structure becomes only so much raw material. Intangible goods – stories, theories, and ideas – thus contain the ultimate seeds of permanence and therefore of true human excellence. That such intangibles require a political forum to thrive underscores the fundamental importance to humanity of a healthy political realm.

The central role granted to money and monetary expenditures threatens human excellence in the political realm because commoditization can exist only where goods are treated as substitutable. Both the strong formulation that “money is speech” and weaker formulation that “monetary expenditures are necessary for political speech” imply the commoditization of the forum, and therefore the substitutability of the speech therein. I highly doubt, for instance, that HGTV cares whether they are airing a Romney ad, an Obama ad, an anti-smoking ad, a pro-gay marriage ad, or an ad demanding more prisons, so long as they receive the same amount of money for each one. The “pay to play” mentality, inherent in markets, hinders the introduction of new material to the discourse and limits speakers based on apolitical, economic characteristics.

Because space in the forum is limited by the market, individuals who have not been economically successful are also denied the ability to become politically successfully. They are doubly robbed of the capacity for human excellence because failure within the market structures that allow for the shadow excellence of producing durable goods implies exclusion from the political forum in which alone can one achieve the greater excellence of producing durable thoughts.

One practical worry regarding the commoditization of the political forum is that it hands over the political realm to a handful of wealthy individuals, creating a de factoplutocracy within an otherwise democratic forum. Against this stands the general American assumption that casting a ballot is the ultimate form of democratic expression, and so exclusion from speaking publicly in no way entails the surrender of governmental power. A ballot, however, can in no way be speech in that it is both anonymous, therefore not human excellence, and a prescribed choice, therefore not creative or spontaneous. The dialectic that shapes politics and policy is constituted by the creation of ideas that frame our modes of understanding the world. Surrendering that dialectic to market forces is not identical with surrendering partisan control of the White House, but it is identical with surrendering control of the expectations, priorities, and scrutiny of public policy.

Shell Oil Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Put simply, Royal Dutch Shell does not get to vote on a public policy debate’s outcome, but it has disproportionate power in setting its terms.

A more general problem with the commoditization of political speech is, in turn, the commoditization of truth. As noted above, we interact far more with man-made objects than with the raw, natural world, and so we are conditioned to understand and interact with the man-made world. As any millennial trying to teach a grandparent how to use computers will attest, we also become conditioned to the particular objects that dominate our world growing up. And as with objects, so too with ideas. We are conditioned to think in a manner consistent with the dominant modes of thought to which we are exposed.

When we are exposed to the thoughts and thought processes of only a few perspectives, we are conditioned to think in relation to those standards. Thus, an oligopoly of political speech entails an oligopoly of thought.

Even where diverse viewpoints exist, as in environmentalism or the TEA Party, these movements’ access to limited forum space gives them undeserved sway over the types of thought and analysis that take place in politics. Al Gore or Michelle Bachmann, for example, bring fairly little personal, creative perspective to the public discussions of global warming or government overreach, respectively. In the main, each of them is remembered for furthering an existing line of argumentation rather than for creating a new discourse or fundamentally changing the discourse that already exists. They thus acquire notoriety within a pre-existing system, rather than winning notoriety by the very human creation of new systems. My point here is not to argue that such contributions are meaningless or worthless, but rather to illustrate that private interests control access to general fame of the type that creates enduring memories. That is, equating money with speech allows economic powers to control access to human excellence in politics.

The rich and vibrant political forum shrinks when money impinges on speech. More is not better when that more acts to the exclusion of other voices. One may legitimately fear that commoditizing speech makes the economically disenfranchised cease interest in political activity because they see themselves as lacking efficacy. Remarkable rates of voter apathy in the U.S. suggest that this may have already occurred. Thus, the interests of the poor, as well as their life perspectives, are lost to the public debate, and the social fabric by which we engage one another in our common humanity begins to tear and unravel.

This post does not establish a moral theory that can rigorously declare this unravelling “wrong.” Certainly a narrow perspective, an enforced dialectic, an economically dominated public forum, and corporate control of access to political notoriety are detriment human excellence. I leave it to the reader to confirm that they are also wrong for our society.

MiP 1 – Money and Speech

Buckley v Valeo opinion Wordle (Photo credit: llaannaa)

Part 1 of the series Money in Politics.

“A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” – Per Curiam (Anonymous) Majority Opinion, Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, quoted in Justice Kennedy’s Majority Opinion, Citizens United v. FEC, 2010.

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Let us begin with a facial evaluation of the Court’s claim that independent expenditures on electioneering speech, primarily television and radio advertisements, increases the breadth, depth, and inclusiveness of speech. The first two claims display an appallingly naïve conception of how mass political campaigning works.

English: Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the court rightly notes, broadcast advertising is expensive, so ad spots tend to be purchased by relatively few organizations that collect and concentrate contributions from many individuals (e.g., SuperPACs). Producing advertisements can also be expensive, limiting the number of “speakers” still further; at any rate it is more effective to run many ads about a few issues than to run only a few ads for each of a few issues. Political organizations conduct focus groups and internal polling to select the issues they will present. They then produce a slanted advertisement full of emotionally laden but intellectually shallow content. These ads often cite headlines from major newspapers without a shred of context, perhaps interviewing some angry citizens or indignant small business owners.

As a result of concentrating contributions in a few key lines of electioneering and the limited and emotive nature of short broadcast advertisements, independent political expenditures do little to diversify or deepen discussion of issues of public importance. Even the chief protection against shallow and repetitive messages, the supposed independence of, well, independent expenditures from official campaign strategy, is easily bypassed by waiting for the candidate to make a public attack on his opponent, then immediately preparing ads repeating and amplifying that attack. Such tactics have the added benefit of letting the candidate claim the high road by not directly associating with negative advertising.

The current state of political advertising demonstrates inherent differences between speech and independent campaign expenditures. Unlike speech, monetary expenditures lack political content. A SuperPAC can spend a small fortune espousing the benefits of a healthy breakfast or just air hours of white space, if it so desires. Merely buying up ad space (the monetary expenditure part) is distinct from imbedding content in those advertisements (the political speech part). Monetary outlays do not have any speech content unless accompanied by some other communication, even in the case of politicized transactions like boycotts.

The cover of The Assault on Reason by Al Gore. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Court thus relies solely on the belief that large monetary outlays are a necessary condition for exercising constitutionally protected free speech rights. They rely on the bizarre logic that because our primary media happen to be controlled by corporations who use dollars as a unit of access, we as a political entity must also use dollars as the unit of access to speech. This is simply not the case. The government could establish a publicly available political forum. A dramatically less expensive form of media like the Internet could take over*. And while the Supreme Court may be right that media is a commodity in the present day and age, its majority opinion establishes a precedent intended to prevail indefinitely. The grand irony is that Citizens United may allow exactly the type of plutocratic control of media development and regulatory structures that would prevent the emergence of a truly egalitarian public forum.

Even so, the nature of television and radio as mass media creates two more problems absent in normal speech: bandwidth limitations and unilateral communication. Political speech, in its most basic form, comprises two or more individuals verbally communicating with one another about a matter of public importance. The Greek agora and the Roman forum are political venues precisely because any citizen within them has equal power to engage in persuasive discussion with any other citizen present. All citizens, in turn, have free access to the venue.

Radio, by contrast, has a finite number of usable frequencies, and television has a finite number of channels with substantial viewership. These media forms are far more scarce – and therefore far more expensive for the author – than, say print media was at the time of the American Revolution. Moreover, the relatively small market in these media means that increased demand during presidential elections rapidly increases the price of ad space – even web-based advertisements suffer a price hike before election day. The structure of telecommunications limits the number of political ads that can be aired, so that unlimited ad buys simultaneously diminish the quantity of speech by crowding out other, less wealthy advertisers.

Both radio and television (and still, to some extent, web content such as YouTube videos) allow only for one-way communication, from the advertiser to the content subscriber. Broadcast advertisements therefore treat the viewer or listener as a mere receptacle for persuasion, and not herself as a persuasive, human voice. In common speech, the immediate proximity of the speaker to her listener is essential to the act of speech – one must both attempt to persuade and be open to persuasion to engage in political discourse. The Court does away with the multidimensional plurality of politics when it concerns itself with “the size of the audience reached” and not with the size of mutually engaged citizenry.

Rather than expand political speech, unlimited independent expenditures thus stifle free expression by placing de facto limits on who is allowed the loudest voice, viz., whoever has the most money to spend. The Citizens United ruling is thus the modern-day equivalent of giving bullhorns to a handful of Roman citizens, such that their rancor effectively precludes the participation of others. And since neither the rogue shouter nor the mega-rich SuperPac is accountable to any standard of truth or logical consistency, the predictable and necessary effect is to dilute true political speech with senseless chatter.

James Madison, author of Federalist no. 10 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The First Amendment exists to protect against a tyrannical government by guaranteeing the relatively equal ability of citizens to create and disseminate content critical of government practices and elected officials. It operates on the theory, expressed by Madison in The Federalist No. 10, that many, relatively equal factions will balance one another to prevent minority rule. When we allow economic success to translate into political prevalence, factions comprising the very wealthy gain disproportionate power over government, threatening the delicate balance that keeps our country free. Speech is not a good for purchased, but an activity in which to engage. Only be recognizing that truth can we ensure a healthy and vibrant democracy for future generations.

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*For a fairly insightful, albeit at times obnoxiously polemic, analysis of the Internet’s potential for furthering democratic participation, see The Assault On Reason by Al Gore. In an infamous interview during the 2000 presidential campaign, Gore allegedly claimed to have invented the Internet. He of course did not, and was actually referring to two pivotal pieces of Internet research legislation, the Supercomputer Network Study Act of 1986 and the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (also known as the “Gore Bill”) that he sponsored and advocated as Congressman and, later, Senator. Both acts were critical to developing the Internet as we know it, leading Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn to remark that “Congressman Gore… was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship.” In other words, polemic or not, Al Gore has been an expert on Internet communications and telecommunications policy for over 30 years.

Money in Politics

Since the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, the United States government has treated anonymous monetary contributions to political organizations as constitutionally protected free speech. Much has been made of the practical implications of Citizens United, especially in criticizing the potential for plutocracy inherent in the Court’s majority opinion. While I am generally sympathetic to such criticisms, I am writing this Money in Politics (MiP) series to evaluate a different premise of the Citizens United ruling: that independent expenditures are a form of constitutionally protected speech; simplistically, that money equals speech.

In fairness, the Court does not adhere to this premise directly. It cites the majority opinion from another case, Buckley v. Valeo, which reasons that money is a necessary prerequisite to political speech, therefore monetary outlays need protection in order to protect speech:  “A restriction on the amount of money a person or group can spend on political communication during a campaign necessarily reduces the quantity of expression by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached. This is because virtually every means of communicating ideas in today’s mass society requires the expenditure of money. The distribution of the humblest handbill or leaflet entails printing, paper, and circulation costs. Speeches and rallies generally necessitate hiring a hall and publicizing the event. The electorate’s increasing dependence on television, radio, and other mass media for news and information has made these expensive modes of communication indispensable instruments of effective political speech.” In other words, money is not speech per se, but because we live in a society that has privatized and commoditized major segments of the public forum, we should constitutionally protect persons’ ability to purchase space in such forums.

Its commission of the naturalism fallacy notwithstanding, the Court ignores substantial reasons to differentiate between monetary expenditures (a market transaction) and political speech (a political interaction). The very interests that the Court cites in establishing the historically contingent relation of money to speech – i.e., it’s ability to create broad, deep, and inclusive discussion of issues of public importance – are precisely those interests that no market transaction can achieve. In the three parts that follow, I will demonstrate the inadequacy of money in general, and anonymous contributions and dominant forms of mass media in particular, fail to obtain each of these three interests.

Part 1: Money and Speech discusses the nature of substantial political discourse and the differing capacities of independent campaign expenditures and actual political speech to add useful content to public discussions.

Part 2: Money and Citizenship discusses the role of the citizen in shaping political discussion and taking ownership of the political system generally and American democracy in particular, as well as how legal equivalence of money and speech erodes the traditional citizens’ ownership of democratic practices.

Part 3: Money and Spontaneity discusses the central role of political speech to the expression and achievement of human excellence, and how equating money with speech threatens the shared reality that forms the backdrop of the political realm as well as devalues the essentially creative nature of true political expression.

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(Photo courtesy of thevoterupdate.com)

A Case for “Big Government”

“Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

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In a previous post, I alluded to political action being a public act of persuasion. This is so first because the hallmarks of humanity are rationality and spontaneity, and second because only in a public space can rationality be conditioned or spontaneity acknowledged and recorded. I hold with Hannah Arendt that acts taken in a void are essentially meaningless – it is the interaction of one’s creative will with others that gives it substance. Moreover, politics must be uniquely interpersonal in that it takes humans as its primary object, whereas labor and work are concerned with natural resources and physical capital, respectively.

One consequence of viewing politics as persuasion is that only that which can be communicated can be political. Communicability, in turn, is simply the ability of one person to make himself or herself understood to another person, which is dependent upon a shared language through which we exchange ideas. Thus, a shared language defines the outermost bounds of the political realm that can exist within any given society.

This ability of social activity to create space for politics enables human excellence, but can just as readily restrict the potential for action. We can exclude communicable ideas from politics by declaring them private opinions. For example, religion in the United States (at least in the case of Christian denominations, less so with Islam since its re-politicization after 9/11) is now broadly considered a private issue, not fit for public critique and certainly not a matter on which others will publicly attempt to change your mind. Calls in the wake of the Aurora shootings that “Now is not the time to talk about gun control” similarly remove subjects from persuasive (ergo political) discourse and therefore from the potential for excellent human engagement. If one person decides not to buy a gun for the sake of principle, it will have little or no impact on other people and certainly will not garner public remembrance. Were the same person to organize a successful movement to reinstate America’s assault rifle ban, then he would create a permanent and public legal record of political achievement. Thus, while there may exist some moral or even practical case for a particular subject being excluded from political discourse, we must weigh all such cases against the lost capacity for human excellence in the field.

A large number of topics available to political discourse draws people into political activity, courtesy of the well-documented tendency to care more about issues directly relevant to one’s own experiences. When someone feels that the prevailing public discourse excludes the topics most important to him, it stands to reason that he will be less likely to participate in that discourse. For example, if I am an ardent believer in transparent school boards, but nobody else thinks the issue is important, then I cannot easily engage in political activity to attempt to enact my agenda. At best, the opportunity cost of creating a dialogue where none exists could dissuade me from pursuing political excellence in the area of administrative accountability. My beliefs about transparency are, albeit innocently, marginalized and therefore privatized: I can believe that, but I should not attempt to persuade anyone else to join me in acting on it. Thus can social priorities limit political activity even without intent.

The ultimate triumph of the social over the political occurs when there ceases to be a plurality of persuasive voices. Tyranny achieves this singularity via propaganda and centralized control. The most extreme plausible example of this is George Orwell’s Newspeak, which goes beyond simply excluding topics from discussion but actually makes it impossible to discuss complex ideas by removing the vocabulary needed for their communication. However, radical liberty can also eradicate politics by emancipating people from persuasive activity and employing government purely as a mechanism for supporting the private sphere.

It may be argued that market transactions, being based on individual choices, can constitute a form of speech. However, merely economic forums, like markets, or social forums, like the Church of Scientology, cannot replace politics. Money is not speech, and economics is not persuasion, because economics is fundamentally the science of necessities, and it follows necessarily causal laws. Markets do not allow for creativity or persuasion, only accounting. Likewise, purely social forums, those that are self-selected and cannot enforce law, lack the elements that drive political activity, namely, divergent opinions and an incentive to guide the institution’s use of force by influencing its agenda. The lack of heretics within the Church of Scientology is precisely the evidence that it is an apolitical institution.

Deciding what to purchase or what groups to join can, of course, be connected to political action, as in boycotts, but only insofar as it conveys a recognizable and persuasive message. A boycott sends a recognizable message only when publicized alongside the reasons for the boycott; publishing reasons, of course, is political speech. The boycott itself adds no substance to the speech, it merely adds pathos by conveying the actors’ willingness to sacrifice economic benefits for the sake of moral sentiment. This, in turn, presupposes the primacy of economic, apolitical interests in our decision-making process, and so is itself an apolitical, or even anti-political gesture.

Unlike markets or social clubs, democratic government is an institution based entirely on persuading others to act together towards some common purpose. Such persuasive activity is the paramount human behavior. Therefore it is through democratic institutions that we express our humanity. The hastened emancipation of personal choices from public debate limits the accessibility and relevance of this forum and therefore marginalizes truly human activity. To best enable human excellence, we must expand, not contract, the scope of topics assailable in the public sphere.

We can start by recognizing that nearly all of our choices impact other people, therefore nearly all of our choices are worth considering in an unselfish manner. This does not mean that we must abandon our principles to the whims of the majority; indeed, defending one’s convictions politically is itself an excellent act. Nor do I believe that “big government” means lots of red tape, high taxes, and expansive welfare, but rather that any given regulation, tax law, and welfare program be subject to reasoned and public discourse that shapes the prerogative of the relevant authority.

Finally, recall that politics depends not upon the government, but upon persuasive speech. If one acts through persuasive speech to limit or remove government involvement in one area or another, that is itself a political act. One must merely be prepared to defend that limitation ad infinitum in further political discourse. The problem of small government arises from the categorical rejection of discussing government action in one area or another, in the deliberate exclusion of whole subjects from public debate. Insofar as broad governmental prerogative brings these questions back into the fold, we might consider a potentially expansive state as a worthwhile opportunity to fulfill our unique human potential.

Maybe government is really just about the same size as its citizens.

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(Photo courtesy of political-humor.org)

Why Americans Hate Politicians (And Why We Can’t Live Without Them)

“We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.” – Frank Hubbard

“Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.” – Saul Bellow

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.” – Ernest Benn

“Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.” – W.C. Fields

…

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” – Plato

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Plato seeded the Western political tradition that treats political action as a necessary evil. After seeing his mentor, Socrates, sentenced to death for revealing his fellow citizens’ ignorance, Plato founded the Academy as a refuge from the hostile, anti-philosophical public. To Socrates and to those before him, political engagement was the highest human activity, enabled by the material surplus that granted freedom from striving for sustenance. From Plato onwards, politics became a subordinate realm to academia, itself a way of organizing society such that philosophers could escape the necessity of politics, experience truth, and find intellectual fulfillment.

In modern America, we have instead subordinated the political to the economic, with the consequence that many of our brightest minds find more attraction in investment banking than in politics. Our accepted measure of success is no longer areté, Greek “prowess,” by which one became worthy of public remembrance, but accumulated wealth, the monetary value assigned to your actions by market forces. Indeed, though we may each consider ourselves as beholden to non-economic values, we consider other people’s finances as distinctly separate from and superior to public considerations. So-called “social issues,” like same-sex marriage, religion in schools, medical marijuana, and physician assisted suicide are considered valid political questions, because supposedly who one loves, which god (if any) one worships, which pain relievers one uses, and one’s very continued existence are matters on which society ought have a say. How one disposes of an amassed fortune, on the other hand, is a largely secretive affair, even among otherwise public figures, as Romney’s ongoing tax return saga attests. At the same time, we view government as essentially a steward of the economy, with personal real income growth the best predictor of presidential vote tallies and highly correlated with presidential approval ratings.

The nexus of the cult of wealth and its emancipation from political action forces politicians to adopt a strange double life. They are private, economic individuals, judged largely on their professional success. We tend to elect disproportionately wealthy politicians not only because they have more time and resources for campaigning than other candidates, but also because we attach implicit respect to the accumulation of wealth over the course of a professional career. We relate to, partially envy, and understand the private, quiet figure cut by the economic side of the politician. At the same time, however, we elect our representatives into institutions that are designed with Athenian-style prowess in mind, to speak and persuade and act in a public. What it takes to govern is different than what it takes to earn money: government is a luxury, money-making is essential for survival. Governance is noisy, messy, and unpredictable. In contrast to the economic laws of animal necessity, the political laws of spontaneity embody and lay bare the very essence of humanity.

A person can stand in one of three relations to a democratic system: an agent of action, a voter for action, and an observer of action. The entire voting population falls into the second category, and does not often engage in politics in the proper sense of persuasion in a public forum. Instead, this second category elects from amongst its own willing members agents of government who act as the sole actors the political system, debating, issuing, enforcing, revising, and repealing laws. We simultaneously respect and detest these individuals’ uncommon tenacity. We hold them to the standards of economic behaviors in which we ourselves engage while demanding that they handle the distinctly non-economic affairs of politics. Faced with this impossible double-standard, politicians can do nothing but attempt to please their constituents as best they can by reinforcing the image of government as a primarily economic agent, by bragging about their achievements bringing money to their districts, creating local jobs, and supporting local businesses. By removing government from politics, they further the dissolution of human spontaneity and the broader acceptance of economic standards of behavior.

Thus, without government, our economic system suffers, but against government our economic impulses rebel. Perhaps the best man is never a candidate, and the dumb engage in politics, only because we prejudge political worth and acumen by definitively apolitical expectations.

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(Photo courtesy of house.gov)