It’s Fascinating that so many Democrats are preoccupied with the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.
Elizabeth Warren denounced it Monday and so did Bernie Sanders, who even indulged in a denunciation of the Koch brothers. But the fact is that the corporate political spending, which the Supreme Court ruled is protected by the First Amendment, had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s nomination victory and very little to do with Republican victories in congressional races in 2010, 2012 or 2014.
If you’re looking for a candidate who depends on big contributors, it’s Hillary Clinton; Bernie Sanders certainly didn’t do well with them (his followers chanted $27 when he asked what his average contribution), and Donald Trump didn’t either. He raised relatively little money and spent his own personal (not corporate) money on his campaign. Even Jeb Bush’s colossally unsuccessful $100 million super political action committee was financed by personal contributions from very wealthy individuals, not from corporations.
Here’s my theory: Many Democrats like to imagine that they are fighters for a virtuous working class against an entrenched and selfish corporate elite. You could make an argument that that was the case in the Michigan where I grew up in the 1950s. But it isn’t true any more. The working class — approximated by non-college-graduates in exit and other polls — votes by race: whites about 2-1 for Republicans, Hispanics 2-1 Democratic, blacks 9-1 Democratic.
Indeed, post-Republican convention polling shows Trump winning white non-college-grads by an even wider margin than that. As for corporate elites, they are dominated internally by their human resources departments, which insist on all sorts of political correctness due to their desire for approval from college-educated liberal elites. This moves them to do things like cancel contracts with Trump organizations and threaten to boycott Indiana and North Carolina because of laws limiting men’s rooms to biological males, even though they tolerate far more egregious violations of civil rights by maintaining business operations in China and Saudi Arabia.
Publicly traded companies certainly do not make a practice of funneling more to Republican or conservative causes, certainly not as much as they do to liberal if not to Democratic causes. No sensible person running a corporation with a public brand wants to limit its sales to half the population.
Nevertheless, Democrats absolutely love this image of the virtuous working person being oppressed (or fooled) by the vicious rich fat cats (never mind that obesity today is more common among the poor than the rich). It makes them feel virtuous themselves. Even transparently sincere people like Maine state representative Diane Russell, who spoke on the rules controversy Monday, cling to this inaccurate picture of reality.
Of course, what Citizens United says is that corporations have free speech just as individuals do. They can spend their money on their own political speech (not on candidates, though). Remember that the case was about a movie criticizing Hillary Clinton; the government wanted to prevent that movie from being seen in the October of an election year. The Obama administraton assistant solicitor general, in response to a question from Justice Alito, said that in the government’s view, the government could prevent a book from being published if it was paid for by a corporation. (Silly me, I had thought Democrats were against book burning.)
Most congressional Democrats and all their presidential candidates are on record as favoring revision of the First Amendment so that both the federal and the state governments may limit political speech. That’s a little odd when you think about it, since protecting political speech is what was on the Framers’ minds when they wrote and ratified the First Amendment.
They didn’t know and may not have imagined that the Supreme Court would interpret the First Amendment as protecting student armbands, nude dancing and flag burning. Most Democrats are fine with those decisions, and I have to say they don’t really bother me — certainly not enough to advocate truncating the First Amendment. But Democrats, in homage to their image of themselves as the protector of working people against the depredations of the rich, favor removing the First Amendment’s protections of political speech, including the movie critical of Hillary Clinton that became the subject of Citizens United.
