The media teaches us that democratic politics is ultimately a contest over conflicting interests. Like-minded people get together, form an association/trade union/lobbying group (thank you First Amendment), solicit donations, generate media hype/controversy and then ultimately pressure elected representatives to vote a certain way. Our hapless representatives are then besieged with money from “political action committees,” corporations and individual donors all demanding they act on issue X (Farm subsidies anyone?).
The lifeblood of this kind of democracy is cash. Cash is king where there can constitutionally be no king. The current lamentable state of our politics then results from the belief that cash is somehow equivalent to speech.
The Supreme Court, most recently in its notorious Citizens United decision, has affirmed again and again that monetary donations to candidates and political action committees are all forms of speech and therefore protected under the First Amendment. Essentially, people vote with their wallets. Or rather, I should be able to pay someone else to speak on my behalf because I, as just an ordinary American, don’t have the time to participate as myself, emphasis on myself. Better yet, corporations, a nebulous conglomeration of people with varying interests–from the CEO down to the secretary–can somehow act as one “person” and donate anonymously to political action committees that seek to influence elections.
The first problem this engenders is that corporations and individuals don’t have the same sense of personhood. One person has individual interests, values and desires that are subject to change. A corporation has shareholders, a board of directors, a CEO and everything else running down a company’s organization chart. Do these people always have the same interests? No. That’s why corporate fraud occurs. That’s why CEOs embezzle and sell their stock options for private profit. The variety of conflicting interests in a corporation resembles schizophrenia more than a relatively coherent and singular set of beliefs within the individual.
Thus, corporate speech has in principle no way of reflecting the totality of wants and desires and preferences an individual monetary donation to a specific cause does. In fact, corporations often delegate their political functions to their “government affairs” or “public relations” department, leaving the average employee blissfully unaware of the machinations their company may be involved in.
But the more important and more crucial problem of the idea that money, from anyone or any organization, is the equivalent to speech is that free speech presumes the possibility of reasoned and rational persuasion. In Athenian democracy, for example, every citizen (a small minority that excluded foreigners, women and slaves) had a right to speak and persuade every other citizen in a common forum. Political speech was not a matter of drowning people out like the flood of corporate cash but is a matter of making persuasive arguments that could change the very minds of other citizens.
Now, ask yourself, how can corporations have their minds changed? What mind is there to change? Better yet, if money is the vehicle by which we “participate” as free citizens, then what does that do to our conception of speech and the possibility for honest persuasion?
When money becomes speech, the temptation for each of us and each corporation is to form interest groups and pool our money together so we can scream louder to drown out the other party on TV and radio airwaves. If money is speech, then speech is just expression. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, expression is only about making your wants known. Actual communication presupposes the possibility of actual genuine agreement in a democracy. Now, can money persuade people to genuinely agree? Or does money just compel us to dig in our heels and try harder to win, try harder to be right, rather than admit the possibility that we might be wrong and therefore be open to persuasion.
