MiP 2 – Money and Citizenship

George Orwell – Author series (Photo credit: New Chemical History)

Part 2 of the series Money in Politics.

“The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition… the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly.” – George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling” from Fifty Orwell Essays

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Democracy has at its core the equitable consideration of the needs of all of its citizens. An a moral level, this recognizes their individual worth. At a practical level, this provides an institutional outlet for citizen’s frustrations, thus keeping the people from resorting to violent revolution. A defining feature of democracy is the loyal opposition, which challenges the ruling interests in the hopes of one day gaining control of the government. The governing coalition will naturally portray each of its policies as a successful step forward for the country, so the depth and rigor of the public discourse is primarily determined by the opposition’s reactions to government claims. If the opposition resorts to mudslinging, little constructive discourse can be found; if it engages the substance of the government’s position, then the necessary groundwork for political vitality has been laid.

Mubarak’s Reform will open “new doors” for political participation (Photo credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy حسام الحملاوي)

It is also a feature of modern democracy that not everyone is a political actor. The logistical struggle of a national referendum on every major issue is simply too costly to serve as an administrative system. Instead, we elect representatives and join political parties, with a vote for a candidate or party usually interpreted as a broad endorsement of its policies. Consequently, we rely on the institutionalized opposition to provide a serious alternative to government policies.

The democratic check on a shallow opposition, as well as the defining feature of democracy, is 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, its reputation seriously, perhaps permanently, damaged. 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.

Raise A Finger (Photo credit: boris.rasin)

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. The Republican party establishment could never get away with repeating claims with no grounding in policy or in reality, though admittedly a handful of Republican candidates do. Apolitical organizations, those that do not hope to ascend to power, have no such inhibitions because they will never be held electorally accountable. Such attacks, do, however, serve to ingratiate the candidate or party that they aid, allowing these near-libelous organizations additional access to candidates, and perhaps winning benefitting candidates’ support for some narrow policy goals, like lower corporate taxes or protectionist labor laws. This is why the Koch Brothers can get away with bankrolling Tea Party nonsense like the dribble above, and why the Democratic Super PAC, Priorities USA, can get away with implying that Mitt Romney made his fortune killing workers.

A left-wing apolitical actor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Independent contributors’ evasion of electoral accountability might yet be remedied if speakers were at least subject to public scrutiny. However, inherent in speech is the idea of a speaker, and the political nature of speech depends upon publicly claiming ownership of one’s ideas. Absent an identifiable source to clarify and defend them, ideas remain too nebulous to constitute political discourse. While an idea presented anonymously may be taken up by a political actor,  until such a time as a political actor claims the idea it does not constitute a form of speech, much less a form of political engagement. Thus, while media pundits like Rachel Maddow (left) and Sean Hannity (below-right) remain apolitical in their official capacities, subject to economic markets and not political forums, their concrete identities at least enable them to become political agents. Anonymous contributors lack even this possibility.

A right-wing apolitical actor. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Moreover, unlimited campaign expenditures can crowd out speech, amplifying a few voices but diminishing or eliminating others. Speech requires multiple points of view because, though it is caused by a person, speech can exist only between people. “You have Fox and I have MSNBC” does not create discourse, because discourse requires a bilaterally accessible medium of communication. It is in the interest of democracy to create such a forum by ensuring relatively equal access to speech from all citizens. Equalizing economic conditions within politics promotes a meritocracy of ideas better than a system that equates economic success with political profundity. Only this meritocratic system ensures the ultimate stability of democratic states.

While a political sphere entirely separated from the economic sphere may, in fact, contain some inequality – e.g., in speakers’ background knowledge or rhetorical skills – these skills are at least political in nature, 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.

Democracy exists only where opposition forces guarantee a high-quality political discourse. When we surrender that discourse to apolitical, economic actors, democracy itself must surely suffer.

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.

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

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“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)

Why Blog?

“[A] political question of the first order… can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.” – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

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When the ancient Greeks built city-states, they centered on a public meeting place, or agora, where the citizens (slave-owning males) would meet to discuss the affairs of the city. Indeed, it was the nature of the citizen to own slaves, not because he needed to show mastery, but because only a man so emancipated from working the land could participate in a genuine act of politics. One who must pursue basic animal sustenance cannot, at the same time, transcend selfish needs and address abstract questions of state. It is no wonder that even today, the poor vote less and engage in fewer political activities than their wealthier fellow-citizens. It’s not just that the poor have less money than the rich – they also have less time and energy. For people living from paycheck to paycheck, immediate practical concerns are just more important than long-term, abstract political ideals.

In the U.S. and other wealthy democracies, there exist relatively few people who are incapable of political participation, but the propensity for engagement remains strongly correlated with income and wealth. At the same time, our civilization has stretched far beyond the geographical confines of a small city, incentivizing political hermitage and overcrowding modern political forums. As being heard among the masses has become increasingly difficult, more and more people choose not to try; as the affairs of state become ever broader and more abstract, a class of professional politicians and bureaucrats has arisen to replace the citizen-senators of the past. Put another way, the opportunity cost of efficacious political action has risen beyond the ken of many of our citizens. They have become the political equivalent of Greek slaves – the surplus from the labor of the poor enables the political participation of the wealthy.

The “democratic ideal” presumes that every member of society can be politically efficacious. We now allow most residents of our country the rights of citizenship. However, despite the dramatic broadening of the franchise, some segment of the citizenry may always be subject to de facto alienation from the centers of power. If there exists inequality, then there exist some people who can exercise their disproportionate influence at the expense of others; if the resources of each citizen are exactly equal, then the huge number of modern citizens makes all of politics a giant collective action problem – any single person has approximately zero power and therefore approximately zero incentive to act, even though everyone benefits from an organized polity.

Perhaps a very small degree of inequality is necessary, then, to motivate political action. The Internet has become a political forum as well as an academic, social, and commercial one, and those with a close connection to it, a strong understanding of it, and a healthy respect for it can bring themselves closer to the levers of power. The human mind is at its best when it mutually influences the minds of others (a subject for a later post), and this influence I term political (as distinct from legal or governmental) action. Blogs are one way to engage in ongoing conversations about the abstract interests of a variegated society. My hope is that this blog will serve first as a forum of exchange, second as an organized record of my thoughts for later use. Combined, these two functions both constitute and enhance political action.

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(Photo courtesy of denniskam.blogspot.com)