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

—–

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.

—–

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.

—–

*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.