Campaign contributions don’t buy elections, but liberals have clung to that myth and established a dangerous argument that could harm free speech for everyone, regardless of political orientation.
“Liberals want to empower the government to silence those who advance political ideas come election time,” John O. McGinnis wrote for the Los Angeles Times.
The growth in opposition to Citizens United, the 2010 ruling which allowed corporations and unions to engage in political speech in line with the First Amendment, threatens the basis of free speech for everyone in the United States.
Despite the uproar that equated the decision with selling American democracy to the highest bidder, political scientists have found little evidence that money subverts the preference of voters. Political donations don’t make winners — they chase them.
The 2016 election has made that clear, even if that fact has been ignored. The self-funded and small-funded campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have outlived the big-donor campaigns of Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, and Marco Rubio, among others.
Limiting the First Amendment based on unfounded fears from corporate influence sets a dangerous precedent. Justifying the suppression of expression in politics is easy to extend to the press on the basis of fairness.
“The 1st Amendment guarantees freedom, not equality. Rights are exercised to radically unequal degrees, and the right to speech is no exception,” McGinnis noted.
The more conspiratorially minded might cast the United States as an oligarchy controlled by vested interests who buy politicians, but the argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. The United States, after all, is a republic, not a democracy. The numeric majority doesn’t control the state in every instance. The reality of policy battles in America point to a struggle between the rich and the middle class, but neither side controls the government outright.
Arguments about oligarchy and a corrupt system obscures what Citizens United defended.
“What’s ultimately at stake in the battle over campaign regulation is the 1st Amendment’s empowerment of civil society over the prerogatives of the state, a virtue — central to our constitutional republic — that liberals once defended,” McGinnis wrote.
The defense of free speech and expression is the greatest barrier to money buying politicians and instituting an oligarchy. The sooner that liberal myth passes into obscurity, the better individual rights will be defended.
