Voltage blog entries tagged with: stanley fish

In a great blog post for the NYTimes, Stanley Fish tries to tease out the basic idea behind the two sides in the Supreme Court decision on whether restricting corporate (that is, non-individual) campaign spending is contrary to the first amendment. I fall into the ‘consequentialist’ camp that he names – that there is a reality to things, and ideological opinions, while nice in discussion, do not fit the messiness that is the campaign process.

I am always amazed that this country has a guiding document that is still so relevant, and can still be looked to and quoted for major issues of the day. The constitution is great – but it is not perfect. And the world is a different place today than it was 230+ years ago (see for instance the continuing fight over the 2nd amendment). It seems pretty well accepted that financial markets, along with most other ‘markets’ of ideas and commerce in general, do not function fairly without regulation. The ideal world of a self-regulating market never happens in practice, because information does not flow freely and instantaneously, and large players can quickly game things in their favor.

I think that this well applies to the market of ideas and speech that constitute political campaigns. I know that the corporation is considered a person legally, but in reality the corporation and the individual are not equal. Very few people have the resources that corporations have – not just money, but people, market reach, and the layer of anonymity that comes with the ‘corporate person’ not actual being a person (and the people with resources of corporations are often the leaders of the same corporations, negating the counterbalance that could result). The reality of campaigns is that money talks – it buys ads and tv time and etc.. – and the individual is easily drowned out by the larger sources of money.

To me, enabling the outsize influence of one group does not forward democratic principles and that is what the first amendment should ultimately be trying to protect.

Hopefully I’m wrong, and this decision doesn’t have a bad effect on campaigns. I guess we’ll see.

Note: I say corporations, but that means unions and other entities also.