← Return to search results
Back to Prindle Institute

campaign politics

Posted on

Aging Empires

photograph of lawmakers voting

The 2020 presidential election saw 77-year-old Joe Biden overcome 74-year-old Donald Trump, with Michael Bloomberg (78), Bernie Sanders (79) and Elizabeth Warren (71) all competitive in democratic primaries. Biden, who will be 82 when the next presidential term begins in 2025 (and 86 when it ends), has not yet decided whether he will run again, while Trump’s campaign is already in full swing. Nancy Pelosi recently lost her speakership at the age of 82, while the oldest sitting senator, Diane Feinstein, is a remarkable 89 years old and has held her position for over 30 years. Last year, septuagenarian democrats Carolyn Maloney and (76) and Jerry Nadler (75) battled it out over New York’s 12th congressional district, with 38-year-old Suraj Patel finishing a distant third.

All this means that the current American government is the oldest in history. Recent suggestions to reverse this trend include term limits for senators and age limits for judges like we have in Australia, where the mandated age of retirement is 70. Business Insider has published a whole series of articles – Red, White, and Grey – on the dangers of gerontocracy, arguing that a country run by the elderly will be uniquely unrepresentative. In the U.S. as a whole, about 17% of people are over the age of 65. In congress, this rises to a whopping 50%. Elderly people tend to be whiter and wealthier than their younger counterparts.

A recent poll found that more than half of Americans support an upper age-limit for public officials. But even considering a limit of this sort raises serious ethical considerations: is it justifiable to exclude people from public office based on nothing more than their age?

One concern with gerontocracy is that elderly people will avoid long-term planning in favor of short-term gain. Why plan for 50 years in the future when you won’t be around to see the consequences? Elderly people are less concerned about climate change, for example, comfortable in the belief that it won’t “pose a serious threat” in their lifetime. But accusations of short-termism have their limits. Consider, for example, 80-year-old Mitch McConnell’s decades-long plot to capture the Supreme Court, overturn Roe v. Wade, and, in doing so, cement his legacy as a champion of the pro-life movement. Liberal opposition to his efforts has less to do with the short-term consequences of legislative flux than the long-term future of a country where women’s bodily autonomy is heavily restricted. McConnell has even suggested, without a hint of irony, that the Roe v. Wade decision is outdated. So, for better or worse, elderly leaders can retain a focus on the future.

Michael Clinton, writing for Esquire, argues that accusations of gerontocracy are simply ageism: a surprisingly socially-acceptable form of discrimination against elderly people. Ageism itself is nothing new; indeed, even Aristotle showed a prejudice against both the youthful and the aged. Philosopher Adam Woodcox presents a version of Aristotle’s approach to the elderly:

The elderly character… is pessimistic and cynical. He is distrustful since he has been let down many times; he covets wealth since he knows how difficult it is to acquire and how easy it is to lose; and he lacks confidence in the future, because things have so often gone wrong.

Age limits on public service would not only institutionalize discrimination but also risk losing the experience and “gravitas” that can only come with age. But Clinton is quite happy to endorse a minimum age on important positions – indeed, he is in favor of raising the minimum age for the presidency from 35 to 40.

Age discrimination against younger people is widespread and generally uncontroversial. Voting, drinking alcohol, driving, serving in the military, even riding on rollercoasters – all sorts of activities are locked behind age barriers. These restrictions are accepted because humans don’t fully mature – physically or mentally – until about the age of 25. But evidence also suggests that cognitive capacity declines later in life: although speech and language functions remain largely intact, executive functions – including decision-making and problem-solving abilities – decline with age.

If we have a minimum age for the presidency, why shouldn’t we have a maximum?

It is also worth considering the personal element. Loneliness and social isolation pose huge health risks for the elderly, and restricting their political involvement might have serious consequences in this regard. But this is not so much an argument against age limits on public service as a note of caution about their introduction: any initiative that restricts the ability of the elderly to run for office would have to be matched by an initiative to get them involved in other ways.

Notoriously in-touch, spacefaring, tweeting ego-machine Elon Musk thinks that the elderly are simply out of touch. He might have a point. But it remains unclear whether age limits are the best remedy. Perhaps efforts to increase active political participation among the youth might be more fruitful, as they are consistently outvoted – and out-represented – by their elders. Indeed, there are signs of change on the horizon, with a drastic increase in the youth vote at the 2020 presidential election. Unfortunately, their only options were to vote for their (great) grandparents. With Biden poised to decide on his future, the age question is certainly not going anywhere.

Posted on

Considered Position: Flawed Democracy – Money in Politics

cartoon image of man speaking into megaphone made of money

This piece is part of a Considered Position series that reflects on the United States’ claim to being a “flawed democracy.” To see the earlier segments, start here.

We’ve spent a great deal of time here and here, discussing ways that the current US electoral system leads to the abuse of minority rights. However, certain minorities hold an enormous and disproportionate influence on politics. In previous sections, we’ve tended to use “minority” to mean a group that has a minority of the political power, regardless of its share of the population. In this next section we will be considering a different kind of minority, one that comprises only a tiny fraction of the population but which holds a significant amount of the political power. I am speaking, of course, of the rich and of corporations and the influence of their money in politics. We will consider in turn how money is used to influence politics, the fairly recent Citizens United decision that greatly increased this influence, and some potential solutions that minimize the difference in political power between the rich and the poor.

Lobbying

Once, the US federal government was a lot more corrupt than it is now. People complain nowadays about lobbying but lobbyists only offer, or threaten to take away, campaign donations. And while sometimes politicians use their campaign money on personal expenses, this is not terribly common. Back in the late 1800s, in the so-called “Gilded Age,” politicians were wildly corrupt. In 1886, the President Rutherford B. Hayes wrote in his diary, referencing Lincoln, “This is a government of the people, by the people and for the people no longer. It is a government by the corporations, of the corporations and for the corporations.” This was the most explicit form of corruption, quid pro quo, literally “this for that.” Corporations consciously bribed politicians who gladly took the bribes. Nowadays, thankfully, quid pro quo corruption has been greatly reigned in. However, a systemic and more subtle sort of corruption remains.

Citizen Lobbying

This is the institution of corporate lobbying. Lobbying isn’t a bad thing. Anyone can lobby. “Lobbying” just means taking action to persuade an elected official to vote one way or another on a certain piece of legislation. And it is central to American democracy. The practice is protected by the First Amendment (not Article the First) where it is written that “Congress shall make no law. . . abridging . . . the right of the people. . .  to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Anyone can do it, either by calling or writing individually to your congressperson or as part of a group, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving. That organization successfully lobbied the federal government to raise the drinking age to 21. This was a good example of lobbying gone well. Increasing the drinking age was widely popular and remains so today.

Now all sorts of lobbying does have certain broad problems too. In general, lobbying results in politicians acting not according to the will of all of their constituents, or even the majority. Rather, politicians will tend to act in accordance with whichever citizen lobbying groups are most vocal. See, polls are expensive and sometimes inaccurate. But some people will voluntarily call their congressperson, or write to them, and make their opinions known. This may also be inaccurate but at least it’s cheap. Suppose that only 20 percent of a district’s constituents really support defunding Planned Parenthood. But if those 20 percent all call and write to you while, of the other 80 percent, only 10 percent contact you, it will seem like more than two-thirds of your constituents want Planned Parenthood defunded and so maybe you the congressperson will vote in support of some legislation doing just that. This is undemocratic. The minority is having their interests put ahead of the majority. But, on the other hand, it’s not the fault of the citizen lobbyists. Other, less-vocal citizens are free to speak up. They just don’t. And if a congressperson votes in accordance with those who speak up, she might be justified: those who call or write may care more and maybe those who care more should have their interests represented more commonly than those who don’t care enough to reach out.

However, economic circumstance, rather than just care, can affect who lobbies too. Consider this: everyone has the time to call or write their congressperson every once in a while. But who has the time to lobby for hours a day? The only ones who can do this are the ones who don’t have to work a normal job. And these will be the wealthy, non-working spouses, and those who are retired. These groups will have their interests overrepresented. Even if you care, if you have to work many hours a day, you’re not going to be able to make your interests known as effectively as these groups can. This seems to be unjustly undemocratic. Conventionally, we don’t think you deserve more political power just because you have more money.

Small Business Lobbying

The bigger problem, then, comes with groups that tend to have lots of money. I mean of course corporations. In 2018, $3.4 billion dollars, an unimaginable sum, was spent on lobbying at the federal, state, and local level. In its most basic form, corporate lobbying can be as innocuous as citizen lobbying. A small business, with only a handful of employees donating a few thousand dollars to a candidate who supports small businesses doesn’t seem to be doing much wrong. Now that’s still more money than most people will contribute to political campaigns. In fact, the vast majority of people don’t donate any money to political campaigns.

And, while there seems to be little problem with small businesses spending small amounts of money on local elections, when those small businesses ally with other businesses, large and small, and pool their money through large lobbying organizations, they can have enormous undue influence. The largest lobbying group is the deceptively named “US Chamber of Commerce,” which is an association of 3 million businesses of varying sizes. This group spent nearly $100 million on federal lobbying in 2018. They consistently support Republicans, having spent 93 percent of their lobbying money supporting them in the 2010 elections. And, 94 percent of those they support deny climate change.

Given that climate change is a problem that hurts all of us, including business owners, we are also forced to wonder, in whose interest are these corporations, or associations of corporations, acting? If not in the interest of their owners, then in the interest of whom? And, notice: in the previous sentences, it seems natural to attribute a responsible action with intent and all to a corporation or group of them. We treat corporations like people in the way we speak and in fact legally they have a certain kind of personhood. So maybe, given that people can act in their own interests, the corporation is acting in its self-interest. But that’s not quite right, right?

Ultimately, corporations aren’t really people. They are associations of real people. So it must be that the corporation is acting in the interests of those who compose it. But most people who are part of a corporation day-to-day are the people who work for it. But they rarely have real power over the decisions the corporation makes. Rather, that power belongs to the owners. In a small corporation, that’s usually just a person and the few employees might have a personal connection to him or her and can exert influence that way. But in larger corporations, ones that are publicly owned, responsibility is diffuse.

Public Corporation Lobbying

A CEO has token power over the company, but he doesn’t own it. He can be replaced. Ownership, and the responsibility it entails, is diffuse throughout all the stockholders. Many of these stockholders are people with retirement accounts who don’t have a great deal of their assets tied up in a single company, so they don’t care all that much about individual corporations’ actions. They just want the value of their retirement accounts to increase. So, then, these publicly-owned corporations tend toward acting, in a sense, in their own self-interest, toward increasing their own value and profits without much regard to anything else. Furthermore, these corporations tend to prize short-term profits over increasing value in the long-term. This can be most readily by the difficulty humans in general have with delaying gratification.

As a result corporations tend to always place profits over any set of values, even if following those values would benefit the corporation in the long run. While the economic costs of climate change are believed to be enormous, companies like Exxon have been happy to lobby against taking action to stop it, even while they have known since the 1980s that it was a problem. Like climate change itself, this is a problem of collective action with individuals carrying little blame and having minor incentives to act against the group interest. And so, like climate change, it is a difficult problem to solve. It is difficult to expect the millions of Americans who invest in the stock market through retirement accounts to have intimate familiarity with the ethics of every company their account has investments in.

So it seems the really bad sort of lobbying is when large, public corporations lobby the government so as to maximize their short-term profits without regard for any set of values or the general interest. But, this is also exactly the sort of lobbying that we cannot blame on any one individual. It is a systemic issue. Removing individual CEOs who advocate lobbying will do us no good. Like the ancient hydra, cutting off the company’s head will cause more to grow in its place. If that’s true, we need a systemic solution; we need the government to pass laws to limit this sort of corporate behavior. However, this solution too is difficult to accomplish. Elected representatives have strong incentives to tolerate corporate lobbying. And, unlike amoral public corporations, these congresspeople can have good reasons for their actions.

Imagine being a congressperson. You just won your first election and already people are talking to you about your next election. You promised a lot of groups a lot of things to get the money to finance your campaign. You’ve got big ideas for serious changes you think you can make for the better in this country. You want to make people’s lives better! And if you lose your election, well, who knows if those changes will ever get done? Plus, you’ve not worked a non-political job in quite a while. And being a congressperson pays very well, especially if you stick around long enough and become popular enough to become a party leader. Of course, you’d rather be totally independent of those nasty “special interests” but it’s a lot harder to build your political war chest from small-dollar donations. You want to be certain of your reelection so you can get your goals accomplished, all of them in service of your constituents. So when that lobbyist from Exxon calls you up and offers a huge campaign donation in exchange for a promise that you vote down that upcoming bill. It’s something about opening up some remote part of Alaska for oil drilling. And you’re just a Senator from Iowa. Your constituents don’t care. You’re dedicated to serving them! So you promise Exxon whatever they want. You’re not a bad guy, just someone trying to change the world for the better.

In this admittedly charitable view of the relationship between politicians and lobbying, the congressperson is not deliberately doing wrong out of his own self-interest. Self-interest plays a role, and it will always play a role in politics so long as being a congressperson is a paid job (which it is for good reason) and so long as there are personal benefits to having power. People can desire to remain in office purely out of self-interest even without any more explicit bribes going on. However, it’s not hard to believe most politicians accept lobbyists’ money for good reasons as I’ve described above, at least some of the time.

Politicians do frequently care about their constituents. And so the desire to do good in one domain (whatever a politician’s personal policy goals are) can inhibit their ability to make decisions in the sort of unbiased, unmotivated way we expect good leaders to follow. Parochialism is an important factor in these decisions too. We ask congresspeople to make decisions whose consequences may not fall on them or their constituents. As with the Exxon example, it’s all gain, no pain, so-to-speak. And yet our process of having local elections incentivizes congresspeople to act only in that local interest, not in the general interest. Importantly, then, the fault isn’t so much on the congresspeople for individual acts of deferring to the will of lobbyists. Rather, the fault lies on those who created and who perpetuate the institutions which provide the incentives for these acts.

The question of blame often poisons discussions about lobbying. Some place blame on corporations for lobbying, but the businesses leaders who make decisions are beholden to their shareholders. Others blame the congresspeople and think of them as greedy and self-serving when they listen to lobbyists. But as we’ve discussed, this need not be true either. The blame is very diffuse. It’s the fault of disinterested 401k holders. It’s the fault of parochial constituents who will vote out a congressperson who puts the national interest ahead of the local one. Some blame lies on congresspeople and business leaders, but their decisions are a reflection of competing obligations. A corporate executive may recognize the harm of lobbying, but still want to provide for his family and lobbying is a fantastically effective way to help the business which pays his salary. A congressperson, too, would be naive to think lobbying did not corrupt his decision-making, but he wants to provide for his constituents and without corporate money it’s very difficult to win elections. I want to be clear: some corporate employees and some congresspeople are corrupt. They act to benefit one another, not the citizenry. However, even if every executive and every congressperson acted in good faith, lobbying would still exert a corrupting influence. Such is the nature of a corrupt system. As the saying goes, don’t hate the players, hate the game.

Citizens United

So, like we’ve concluded in many other pieces, the system itself is to blame. How did it get this way? I mentioned before how the Gilded Age was the high point for corruption in politics. And one would hope that every new day would be a lower and lower point as we continually reform the system for the better. But of course, the news isn’t that cheerful. The amount spent on Congressional elections increased by 600 percent from 1980 to 2012 while the amount spent on presidential elections has increased by over 1,200 percent in the same period, adjusted for inflation. Now those of you who would blame this increase on just ordinary population growth, consider this: the population has only grown 25 percent from about 247 million in 1980 to about 308 million in 2010, when the most recent census was conducted.

There is an enormous, complex history to the state of campaign finance and lobbying regulation. The battle between regulators and those who would seek to influence elections with money have raged since near the beginning. However, in this section we are going to focus only on a single piece of this history. It’s a Supreme Court decision that you have probably heard of. It was controversial from the very beginning when the court voted 5-4, sharply along ideological lines, to remove all limits on independent expenditures by corporations toward political campaigns. This was, of course, the Citizens United vs. FEC decision, Citizens United for short.

Wow, that sounds boring. It’s hard to imagine something as boring-sounding as “independent expenditures by corporations toward political campaigns” was a “controversial” decision. I suppose we should begin then by considering what these expenditures are. After that, we can consider why there were limits on them and how the removal of those limits has affected our elections. In doing so, we will predominantly focus on the arguments made by Justices on the Supreme Court since both sides made arguments for their side not based just on the law, but on the morals and values they believed to underpin the laws. In other words, this was a decision based on conflicting interpretations not on the letter but on the spirit of the law.

Also important to remember is that this was an example of judicial activism by the conservative bloc of the court. Long-standing precedent was overturned. Chief Justice Roberts compared the decision to the overturning of Plessy v. Ferguson with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, saying that, “stare decisis,” that is, the idea that precedent should be left alone, is not an “inexorable command,” and that “If it were, segregation would be legal.” He also lists a few other instances of precedent being overturned. However, Brown v. Board was a unanimous decision, another he mentions was decided 7-1 and only one was contentiously decided 5-4 along ideological lines like Citizens United. Thus, there is some reason to be suspicious of the esteemed Chief Justice Roberts’ claim. That being said, we will be charitable to the majority’s arguments and will get to them in due time. But first, let’s begin with trying to understand what Citizens United actually did before we consider whether what it did was justified.

Suppose you are a wealthy individual. It’s 2007 and it’s time to elect the president. You’re not a big fan of that Senator from Illinois but you like that maverick from Arizona. He really seems to get you. So, you want to help him get elected. This is prior to the Citizens United decision in 2010, so your options are somewhat limited. You can donate to what is called a PAC (Political Action Committee), 527 group (its name coming from the section of the tax code under which it is regulated), and directly to a campaign.

There are benefits and drawbacks to each of these. You can only donate $2,300 directly per candidate (feel free to donate to as many candidates for Congress as you want), but the campaign can then use that money to “expressly advocate” for your preferred candidate. Express advocacy includes statements like “Vote Sheev for Supreme Chancellor” or “Defeat Macbeth at the ballot box or you’ll be next!” This is in contrast to “issue” advocacy which can only provide information about a candidate. It cannot direct those who are exposed to it to act in one way or another. PACs are also allowed to coordinate with candidate’s campaigns to maximize the effectiveness of their advocacy.

If you’ve still got some money left, you might try donating to a 527 organization. Technically, PACs are 527s too, but the term is usually used to refer to organizations that do not engage in express advocacy. 527s’ issue advocacy simply provides “information,” either about a general issue (“abortion is murder and here’s why…”) that might be a point of contention during the election, or about a candidate. For example, you might run an ad that says “Abortion is murder and Democratic candidate Soranus is a big fan! But Republican candidate Severus wants to make it strictly illegal!” They have to stop short of actually saying “Vote Severus!” This can still be very effective, and prior to the advent of Super PACs, it was the most popular way to make a big difference in elections. 527s are also not allowed to coordinate with candidates.

You can make some other donations, mainly to party committees on the local, state, and national level, and the limits on these are much higher. But that’s not going to be as effective at getting that lovable Vietnam veteran into the Oval Office. If you happen to run a business, your corporation will unfortunately not be able to contribute to any campaign or 527 group (you can actually thank McCain for that), but some of your employees can contribute to PACs associated with your corporation which can contribute to campaigns. However, there is a fairly strict limit on the total contributions these PACs can make. Whether your business has one PAC or ten, the limit is the same.

It didn’t work out. Maybe if you had just been able to donate more and McCain could have won. Fortunately, it’s 2012 and you have another chance with the charming bloke from Maine. And now, thanks to the Citizens United decision, you can do a lot more. First of all, PACs have been superseded by super PACs. These PACs can engage in express advocacy and can accept unlimited donations from both individuals and corporations. You read that right: that’s not from employees contributing to a corporation-associated PAC. Corporations can contribute straight from their treasuries. The last remaining limit is that super PACs cannot coordinate directly with candidates’ campaigns. But, as would be confirmed in 2016, the FEC doesn’t much care to stop this communication and any attempt to stop it would have to go up against the First Amendment’s free speech protections.

Plus, if some of your more liberal friends were offended by your large campaign contributions toward McCain last time, just find or start a non-profit corporation, give your donations to it (your business can do this too!) and have that non-profit donate to a super PAC supporting Romney. Normally, any individual contributions over $200 and all contributions from organizations (corporations, super PACs, etc.) have to be publicly disclosed. However, non-profits aren’t legally obligated to reveal their donors to the public so no one but the government will know you or your company contributed. (Post-2018, these non-profits aren’t required to tell even the government). So, the super PAC will have to reveal that that non-profit made a donation but it’s completely untraceable to you! You can just tell your friends you’re not that interested in politics anymore. Coincidentally this also allows foreign nationals to bypass laws that ban them from contributing to US political campaigns.

That last sort of contribution is what is frequently referred to as “dark money” since it’s ultimately untraceable and oftentimes, non-profit corporations, “ghost companies,” are formed for the express purpose of hiding contributions. And these non-profits spend a lot of anonymous donations: about $1 billion since 2010. That’s part of a total of $3 billion spent by super PACs in general since 2010. This is the result of that boring little decision to remove limits on independent expenditures by corporations toward political campaigns.

So why did five Supreme Court Justices vote to allow all this to happen? Well, there are basically two arguments they made, one legal, one moral. We’ll cover these in turn. The legal argument is simple: as Justice Antonin Scalia writes about the 1st Amendment, “The Amendment is written in terms of ‘speech,’ not speakers.” In particular, the Freedom of the Press clause, they argued, protected the free speech of associations of speakers.

“Now wait,” you might be thinking, “this is about money, not speech.” However, it has been long recognized by the Court that a right to spend money is intimately connected with the right to speech and communication more broadly. If you want to have any sort of communication except literal spoken speech, you require a medium and that medium usually costs money. If you want to write a letter, that takes pen and paper. Speaking on the radio requires a radio station. Running a TV ad requires recording equipment. Money is speech. Rather than denying that, the Court has historically judged that certain types of this kind of “speech” are worth limiting. The typical standard has been that the influence of money is worth limiting when it is used for the purpose of corrupting candidates and elected officials or when its influence leads to the appearance by the public of corruption. It is in the interest of the government that the populace not believe their votes are worthless and that money rules when it comes to elections.

So Scalia is undoubtedly right about the First Amendment. And, strictly speaking, he’s right to say it’s difficult to interpret the First Amendment as limiting any sort of speech. But of course, all sorts of speech are restricted. The Court has found grounds to limit speech despite the lack of explicit restrictions in the text of the amendment itself. The more important argument, then, is the moral one.

The moral argument the conservative majority made has two parts: first, that the ability of businesses, especially small businesses, to engage in free political speech is important; and second, that independent expenditures never give rise to the sort of quid pro quo corruption that warrants limiting said political speech. That second piece, by the way, implies that only quid pro quo corruption warrants censorship.

In defense of that first claim, the majority utilized a classically liberal claim: “that there is no such thing as too much speech.” This idea goes all the way back at least to John Stuart Mill in the 1800s. The idea, familiar to us all, is that in the “marketplace of ideas,” the expression and discussion of all ideas is important. According to our power of reason, the true ideas will stick in our minds more readily than the false ones. And each new exposure to false ideas will only strengthen in us the confidence we have of the truth. It’s a noble idea, but one that has failed every test of human psychology in the modern era.

For one, people have a confirmation bias, which leads them not to preference true ideas over false ones, but ideas they have over new ideas and new evidence they don’t agree with. People also accept and hold beliefs based on a heuristics which leads to an availability cascade where claims reiterated frequently enough in the public sphere are more readily accepted, even when demonstrably false. This holds especially true when the claims made fall outside of the listener’s area of expertise. If you don’t have much knowledge one way or the other concerning, say, climate change, and you haven’t done any research on the topic, but you more often hear that it’s fake than that it’s true, you will probably think it is fake. From this comes the famous saying, attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” The majority would have it that most political speech by corporations is meant to spread ideas in good faith. The more cynically minded, however, will readily accept that corporations are acting right in line with Goebbels. Indeed, Justice Stevens echoes this sentiment in his dissent:

“If individuals in our society had infinite free time to listen to and contemplate every last bit of speech uttered by anyone, anywhere; and if broadcast advertisements had no special ability to influence elections apart from the merits of their arguments (to the extent they make any); and if legislators always operated with nothing less than perfect virtue; then I suppose the majority’s premise would be sound. In the real world, we have seen, corporate domination of the airwaves prior to an election may decrease the average listener’s exposure to relevant viewpoints, and it may diminish citizens’ willingness and capacity to participate in the democratic process.”

In fact, this same practice has been applied to the validity of the Citizens United decision itself with many politicians who support it denouncing all opposition as being opposed to “free speech.” Senate Majority Leader McConnell commented on the decision saying that it constituted “an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups.” Importantly, he never specified that those groups are corporations. And, of course, being against free speech makes you un-American and renders your arguments invalid.

The second moral argument that the majority relied on is that there is corruption, or the appearance of corruption, damaging to the electoral process when there are or appear to be quid pro quo agreements between donors and candidates. Fortunately, since this is a question of appearances, we can rely on polls of Americans. We can ask Americans if they think the sorts of donations the Citizens United decision would allow would corrupt the electoral process. And in fact, in Justice Stevens’ dissent, he cites such a poll, writing that:

“a large majority of Americans (80%) are of the view that corporations and other organizations that engage in electioneering communications, which benefit specific elected officials, receive special consideration from those officials when matters arise that affect these corporations and organizations.”

And we can confirm this with more recent polling that suggest more than three-quarters of Americans, across both parties, want the Citizens United decision overturned.

Now there remain serious questions: perhaps the standard concerning the “appearance” of corruption should be thrown out. Shouldn’t it matter more whether there is actual corruption? And, as we have discussed in many previous pieces, unfortunate outcomes may be the result of a rational, morally justifiable act. The main role of the Supreme Court, many people agree, is not to exact their or any values on the law. Rather, their role is merely to interpret and apply the law. It may very well be that the conservative majority got this case right, that the Constitution really cannot allow limits on corporate independent expenditures. In obeying their duty, they may have enacted a terrible consequence upon the nation.

And here comes the classic question of civil disobedience: if the laws are unjust, should they be followed? Perhaps the Supreme Court is obligated to do what’s best for the nation, regardless of the Constitution or past laws. It’s a radical view but one that follows fairly naturally from a broad conception of civil disobedience. And according to one poll, most people think that the Supreme Court should at least “interpret the Constitution based upon changes in society, technology, and the U.S. role in the world” instead of allowing “ONLY what’s exactly spelled out in the Constitution.” The originalism of Scalia, it turns out, isn’t so popular.

Citizens United was a very complex case. We have barely scraped the surface of the history behind it and have considered only a few of the ramifications of it that will extend far into the future. Once again, it seems at least possible that a problem with our electoral system (corporate individual expenditures) is not the result of malice or stupidity but rationality and duty. Furthermore, while public opinion is pretty solidly against Citizens United, there are at least some legitimate arguments for it that are based in views of free speech that have shaped our nation’s history and the history of liberal government for centuries. One definite result, however, is this: we should not lose faith in democracy and submit to the idea that corporations run the show. Citizens United, love it or hate it, needs to be discussed despite its complexity. If we are in fact a democracy and not a corporatocracy, the rules around elections ought to be up to us. The Supreme Court certainly holds a great deal of knowledge and wisdom but it does not always accurately reflect the people’s will. If Scalia is even a little bit right about the value of speech, we ought to debate their decision and decide collectively whether to keep it or overturn it and we ought to elect Representatives who believe the same.

Continue to Part IV

 

Posted on

The Uses and Abuses of Political Hypocrisy

photograph of pinocchio sculpture atop puppet theatre in Kiev

Accusations of hypocrisy are so common in American politics that one usage of the term “politician” is as a near-synonym for “hypocrite” (“what’s your supervisor like?” “he’s a real politician.”) And for the most part, the hypocrisy of politicians is not considered laudable. Immanuel Kant famously condemned what he called the “political moralist” who “fashions his morality to suit his own advantage as a statesman,” paying homage to morality while devising “a hundred excuses and subterfuges to get out of observing them in practice.” Like Kant, most of us seem to prize integrity in our politicians.

Yet throughout history, other philosophers have argued that hypocrisy is a necessary part of politics. Niccolò Machiavelli defended hypocrisy as an indispensable tool in a world in which “a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good.” Much more recently, Judith Shklar argued that hypocrisy is nearly inevitable in political systems premised upon competitive elections, since candidates will employ persuasive rhetoric that requires a certain degree of dissimulation. Ruth Grant went further, arguing that without a plausible alternative for achieving comparable goods, hypocrisy in politics may very well be a moral necessity.

Thus, there appears to be disagreement about the inevitability and justifiability of hypocrisy in politics. In this column, I will focus on the kinds of hypocrisy politicians exhibit, and the question of whether and when political hypocrisy is morally preferable to non-hypocrisy.

It is important to note that hypocrisy is not a mere inconsistency between one’s words and deeds. For example, I would condemn many things I did as a teenager, but that does not automatically make me a hypocrite. One hallmark of hypocrisy is that the hypocrite pays homage to morality not out of genuine concern, but for self-serving reasons — to gain some undeserved advantage, to excuse himself, or to hide from blame. It is for this reason that we cannot trust that the hypocrite’s utterances reflect what he truly cares about, rather than what he believes to be advantageous in the moment.

It follows from this that many instances of political behavior that some might be tempted to call “hypocrisy” are, on reflection, not hypocrisy at all. Suppose that a politician publicly supports policy A, but then reads more about the issue and ends up voting for policy B. His former supporters might accuse him of hypocrisy, but this does not seem to be apt: the inconsistency between his public support of A and his eventual vote for B is due to a change of mind about the issue, rather than some self-serving reason.

Nevertheless, there are certainly many instances of true hypocrisy in politics. And while we tend to value integrity in our politicians, it can be plausibly argued that hypocrisy in the service of morally good ends is preferable to integrity in the service of morally bad ends. Politician A, while secretly racist, campaigns for office on an anti-racist platform in order to attract the support of minority constituents. Politician B, who is also racist, believes that one should stick to one’s principles even when doing so might hurt one’s electoral prospects, so he supports a racist platform. I would rather have A as a player in my political system, since A’s hypocrisy will help his minority constituents, unlike B’s integrity.

On the other hand, compare politician A to politician C, who genuinely holds anti-racist views and supports the same anti-racist platform. C seems morally preferable to A, but on what grounds? One answer is that, since C supports the anti-racist platform because it is right to do so, his support is morally creditworthy in a way that A’s is not. This might be Kant’s view, as he famously distinguished between actions in accord with and actions from duty; according to him, only the latter have moral worth. Another answer is that C’s proper anti-racist motives will more reliably lead him to promote anti-racist ends, whereas A would abandon those ends whenever it suits him politically. Some consequentialists might adopt this line. A third answer is that C’s behavior arises from virtuous motives while A’s does not; this is one position that a virtue theorist might take.

The trouble with the Kantian or virtue theoretical positions is that, while they can distinguish between A and C, they give no reason for us to prefer A over B. As we have seen, A’s support of the anti-racist platform is not morally creditworthy. Furthermore, because it involves deception — A knowingly causes others to falsely believe he supports an anti-racist position — its underlying maxim could not be universalized, which is Kant’s test for whether an action is morally permissible. So, on Kant’s view the deception practiced by A may make A worse than B; A’s behavior amounts to a “double iniquity.” If B’s integrity is a virtue, then the virtue theorist may also have to say that B is preferable to A; and if it is not, then at best A and B are morally equal, as in neither case does their behavior flow from virtuous motives.

Now consider politician D, who is secretly anti-racist but panders to his racist constituents by supporting B’s platform. This character seems obviously morally worse than A or C, but what about B? I think a common reaction is that B is less loathsome than D, but it is difficult to explain this judgment in consequentialist terms. After all, D’s anti-racist values will lead him to support a racist platform less reliably than B, just as C’s anti-racist values will lead him to support an anti-racist platform more reliably than A; so consequentialist reasoning seemingly should lead us to prefer D to B.

On the other hand, it may be that D’s stance undermines something that we care about very much in politicians: namely, transparency. Because we can only vote for or otherwise support a politician on the basis of what they say and do, we want their words and deeds to reflect their actual commitments. This is precisely what is not the case when it comes to hypocrites. Of course, we do not value transparency above everything else: as between a hypocrite who insincerely supports the good and an outright villain, we prefer the former. But as between B, an outright villain, and D, a hypocrite who insincerely supports the bad, we seem to prefer the villain’s integrity, because at least we know where we stand with him. Thus, consequentialism can explain our ranking of politicians A, B, C, and D in terms of the interplay between our desire for transparency and other values we want to promote, such as justice.

Perhaps a useful way to think about this disagreement between consequentialists, Kantians, and virtue theorists concerning political hypocrisy is in terms of two political virtues Max Weber famously distinguished: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The ethic of conviction involves a “constancy of [a person’s] inner relation to certain ultimate ‘values,’” or in other words, integrity. The ethic of responsibility, on the other hand, involves a proper understanding of the consequences of one’s actions and a practical ability to promote one’s ends. Those who favor the latter will likely believe that hypocrisy is no great sin (although still problematic, because transparency-negating), so long as it can be directed toward good ends, as in the case of politician A. By contrast, political hypocrisy is likely to deeply offend someone who places more emphasis on the ethic of conviction. Put another way, those who think an excellent politician is one who effectively promotes policy goals will not care about her reasons for pursuing those goals, except insofar as those reasons make her a less reliable advocate of them. On the other hand, those who think an excellent politician is one whose actions reflect her values will care deeply about eradicating hypocrisy from politics.

Yet, a too-fervent attachment to the ethic of conviction can lead to a dangerous kind of anti-hypocrisy hypocrisy. Consider politician E, who sincerely believes, and often publicly declares, that (1) a country should never start a land war in Asia and (2) a politician should always stick to his core principles. When his party starts a land war in Asia and he, without a hint of self-consciousness, votes in favor of a war resolution, he explains that the resolution authorizes a police action, not a war. This kind of self-deceived hypocrisy is particularly dangerous in politics, since it is very difficult for the politician herself to limit or check. It is also frequently a symptom of a kind of self-righteousness that may, in the politician’s own mind, license her to operate outside the normal bounds of morality. Thus, in a quest for purity of intention, politicians can fall prey to a hypocrisy more insidious than that which they seek to avoid.

We arrive, then, at a few conclusions. First, there are occasions where hypocrisy is morally preferable to non-hypocrisy. In particular, there is reason to prefer the hypocrisy of insincere politicians who support morally laudable ends to the integrity of our sincere villains. At the same time, the most morally problematic hypocrites are the anti-hypocrisy hypocrite and the hypocrite who espouses bad values without believing them. These judgments assume, or are rather supported by, a consequentialist style of moral reasoning that places emphasis on the ethics of responsibility over the ethics of conviction. Kantians and others, who elevate the significance of intention and motive in their moral judgments, may come to different conclusions.

Posted on

Operation Chaos; or, How to Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

photograph of voter filling out ballot

War is politics by other means, we are told. It seems true also that politics is war by other means. American politics embraces a sort of total war credo, where any method it takes a party to advance its political agenda is on the table. This is manifested by so-called “Operation Chaos,” the military-inspired name for a strategy by Republican activists to influence the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. However it’s not clear that strategy advances the interests of those voters involved in the way they hope it will.

Operation Chaos aims to influence the Democratic primary by getting Republican voters to cast ballots during the elections in open primary states. Open primary states, like South Carolina, are states in which a voter does not have to be a registered member of the political party whose primary the opt to vote in. So ahead of South Carolina’s Democratic primary on Saturday, February 29, 2020 the organizers of Operation Chaos urged Republican voters—or at least those who want to see Trump re-elected in November, 2020—to vote for the Democratic contender who will have the worst head-to-head chance against Trump in the general election. More specifically they argued that helping Bernie Sanders, the Independent senator from Vermont, win the nomination would ensure a Trump victory. This idea, referred to as “party raiding,” is not new, having long been one of the possible downsides of open primaries pointed out by critics.

This strategy is dubious on several fronts. The first problem is that there is no evidence that party raiding is either common, extensive, or particularly effective. Second, according to a panoply of polls, Bernie Sanders is projected to beat Trump in a head-to-head, general election contest. However these polls don’t provide any certainty about the outcome of a general election contest, and there is no way to know at this point how a Sanders nomination would affect the American electorate. Two competing arguments paint starkly different pictures. Sanders supporters argue that his nomination would motivate young and progressive voters, who might otherwise stay home in November, to turn out and give Democrats the bump the need in contested states, like Pennsylvania. The contrary argument is that Sanders will turn-off, rather than turn-out, moderate voters and Trump-dissatisfied Republicans who might be enticed to vote Democrat in 2020. In any case, any effort to hand the Democratic nomination to Sanders is not the sure bet for Trump that the organizers of Operation Chaos seem to think.

But there is a deeper problem with the party-raid strategy of Operation Chaos. Their plan, because of the risk of undesired results, fails to maximize the interests the voters who cast these attempted disruption ballots. It may even be too generous to portray the plan as operating under risk, and instead more appropriate to see it as a plan operating under genuine uncertainty. American economist Frank Knight distinguished between risk, where we are aware of the relative odds of success for various course of action, and genuine uncertainty. Under genuine uncertainty we either don’t know all of the possible outcomes (if we know any of them), or we don’t know what the odds of success are (even for a known set of outcomes). In the aftermath of the 2016 American presidential election, and other events that have surprised pundit predictors, we are becoming more aware of how often we mistake genuine uncertainty for mere risk.

Suppose, however, we are charitable to Operation Chaos and concede that the relative probabilities of success for different head-to head, general election contests against Trump are known. Does party raiding now stand vindicated as a good plan? No, it doesn’t. The remaining problem has to do with how the different possible outcomes affect the Operation Chaos voters’ interests. If they are right about Sanders’ chances, and they succeed in handing him the nomination, they get the outcome they most want. However if they are wrong about Sanders’ chances, but still succeed in handing him the nomination, they get what they least want. Voters would maximize their chances of getting something they want if they voted strategically in such a way so that no matter who won, Democrat or Republican, they would get (some of) what they want.

This is similar to the decision strategy promoted by John Rawls in his well-known A Theory of Justice. He constructs a thought experiment in which people devise a social system from an “original position” behind a “veil of ignorance.” The gist of the Rawls’ thought experiment is to demonstrate what a fair and just social system would look like. He reasons that people, because they are rationally self-interested, will work to create a system that maximizes their own self-interest. To make sure that they also create a system that is fair to their fellow citizens, Rawls asserts that people should design this system while ignorant of certain facts about themselves (e.g., their skills, racial/ethnic characteristics, gender, etc.). That is, he creates a a situation involving genuine uncertainty rather than mere risk. When subject to such strictures, Rawls argues that people will distribute social goods across all the possible social positions they themselves might inhabit once the system they have designed gets going. This then produces a fair system for all people.

In the case of Republican voters cast ballots in open Democratic primaries, they would better maximize the extent to which the next President promotes their own self-interest. By voting for a Democratic candidate who, if elected, would act to promote policies that Republican voters prefer, party raiders would ensure that some of their preferred policies are promoted in the case of either a Democratic or Republican victory. That is they create a win-win situation for themselves. However if party raiders hand the nomination to a candidate who, upon winning the general election, would promote policies that are counter to the raiders’ preferences they create a situation a win-lose situation for themselves.

To all appearances, Operation Chaos didn’t work in South Carolina. Former Vice President Joe Biden won the state’s primary by a wide margin over Bernie Sanders. If Operation Chaos continues their efforts in subsequent open primary states, like upcoming “Super Tuesday” states Virginia and Texas, they should vote for the Democratic candidate who would best represent their interests—not the one who they think is most likely to lose against Donald Trump in November.

Posted on

Bloomberg: Biasing Elections With Billions

photograph of Mike Bloomberg speaking at political rally

There are few things as closely connected as money and politics. In the 2016 election alone, $6.5 billion was spent. Of that, $2.4 billion went toward the presidential race and $4.1 billion went toward Congressional races. In the 2010 election, about half of the money spent on Congressional races was from large donations (more than $200) by individuals and about a quarter came from organizations known as PACs. About ten percent came from candidates self-funding. There is a sort of nobility to a candidate funding his own campaign. Most candidates accept money from organizations, companies, and rather well-off individuals and end up feeling an obligation to act in their interests. But those funding their own campaigns, in contrast, are beholden only to the people who they receive votes from.

Nonetheless, few candidates are able to fund their own campaigns. While a reasonably well-off individual might be able to completely self-fund a campaign for Congressional office in a small district, virtually no one can afford to run for President without accepting money from other people and groups. In 2016, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton spent around a billion dollars. Little of that was their own money. This is a little surprising when it comes to Trump, who is himself a billionaire. That even Trump did not finance his own campaign shows the difficulty of doing so. However, in the 2020 election, one candidate is trying to do just that.

Michael Bloomberg has spent $450 million of his own money trying to win the Democratic Primary, so far. That is more than all the other candidates combined. And yet, few have lauded Bloomberg for the nobility of being unbeholden to special interests, financing his own campaign for the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg’s top campaign adviser, Howard Wolfson, has promoted this very idea, saying that Bloomberg “cannot be bought” and that he is “wholly independent of special interests.” Even so, Bloomberg has been criticized for attempting to “buy his way to being president.”

There are a few moral objections that people might raise to the Bloomberg campaign that might outweigh the value of the independence of his self-funding. These can be more clearly explained by consideration of why it might be good for a candidate to fund his own campaign. A candidate who funds his own campaign for noble reasons, who wishes to avoid being bound by special interests, typically accomplishes this feat through great personal sacrifice. Most Americans make much less over the course of many years than the cost of a single election. So for the few who do self-fund, it often represents an enormous financial burden. But, Bloomberg has a net worth of over $60 billion. The money he has spent so far represents only 0.7 percent of his net worth. The median American has a net worth of $97,300. For him, an amount comparable to Bloomberg’s spending on the election would be around $700. Thus, this is no great sacrifice for Bloomberg.

Another objection to Bloomberg’s campaign has to do with the self-funding candidate’s desire to avoid ties to special interests. We typically define a special interest as “a person, group, or organization that tries to influence government decisions to benefit itself.” These may be large lobbying groups for, say, tobacco or oil companies. Or, they may be extraordinarily wealthy individuals who wish to advance the interests of their companies, or to limit their taxes. The problem with Bloomberg may be that he is, himself, a special interest. Or perhaps, as Jim Newell argues, the issue with Bloomberg’s campaign is not its avoidance of special interests, but of “indifference to ‘interests’ altogether.” The practice of politics in a democracy assumes as axiomatic the idea that change cannot be accomplished on one’s own. Only through working together, compromising, and acting in accordance with the harmonized interest of a great deal of citizens can elections be won and change be wrought. Bloomberg’s campaign is an affront to this idea of democratic politics and is thus objectionable on those grounds.

But, what does this matter anyhow? In some sense, it is absurd to say that Bloomberg, or anyone, could “buy” an election. Unless the election process is wholly corrupted, elections are won in democracies by votes. Those votes can be affected by campaigns and advertisements for candidates, but an unlikable candidate whose political positions are antithetical to the majority of voters’ values cannot win at the ballot box, regardless of the amount of money they spend. People are not mindless drones whose votes are determined by dollar amount of campaign spending: Hillary Clinton spent nearly fifty percent more on the 2016 election than Trump and still lost. Furthermore, voters have a number of other ways to learn about candidates besides advertisement. And, in Bloomberg’s case, these have proven harmful.

At the debate just prior to the Nevada Democratic caucuses, all the other candidates thrashed Bloomberg for minutes on end. While there is no objective measure of victory in a debate like this, The Washington Post placed Bloomberg under the “loser” category, particularly for coming off as “technocratic,” a word that signifies that Bloomberg seemed out-of-touch or elitist. If The Washington Post is right, it does not matter how much Bloomberg spends: if the people don’t like him, they won’t vote for him. And, if they do, they should vote for him, regardless of the money he spent, since citizens of a democracy are assumed to vote for the candidates they think are best (though this doesn’t always play out).

Bloomberg has the right to free speech, to advocate for himself, and to encourage others to vote for him. As the Supreme Court has consistently ruled, campaign spending is protected speech up until it is, or implies, corruption. Essentially, the debate comes down to how one believes candidates, and ultimately those in power, should be selected. Citizens of a democracy should obviously vote for who they think is best. But, that judgment of “who is best” is complicated by the various factors that go into it. Ideally, voters would make their decisions with perfect knowledge of the candidates’ positions and characters. In reality, only a small amount of the relevant information makes it to most voters. And, when that is the case, it matters who has the largest loudspeaker to communicate. Money matters because it allows candidates to reach voters more effectively. In some cases, this means money can decide elections, not because citizens are unable to decide for themselves which candidate is best given what they know, but because political advertising can affect what it is they know in the first place. Particularly if the political advertising is deceptive as to the positions and character of a candidate, or as to the positions and characters of their opponents, voters will be making bad decisions. They will make rational decisions, but not well-justified ones. Since lying in political advertisements is legal, this is a grievous concern.

When June rolls around, we will know if Bloomberg’s self-funded campaign was ultimately successful. Voters will decide, even if their decisions are not based on facts. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from February 14-17 shows Bloomberg being most popular among 15 percent of the national population, second only to Bernie Sanders, a man known for decrying the billionaire class, and equal to former Vice President Joe Biden, thought only months ago to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination. Whether Bloomberg wins or not, it is safe to say his actions will shape the status quo for the future, showing other billionaires that it is possible to participate in elections in a significant way, just by spending huge amounts of money.

Posted on

On Political Purity Tests

photograph of Trump at Catholic church

With the 2020 presidential election less than a year away, talk of “purity” tests for political candidates – so-called requirements, expectations, or “deal-breakers” for voters’ support – has become curiously common.

On the Democratic side, where more than a dozen contenders are still vying for their party’s nomination (and have begun to challenge each other more openly about their progressive bona fides), concerns about flexibility and eventual electability have led some figures to warn against holding impossibly high standards for the eventual Democratic standard-bearer. Just before Thanksgiving, at a question-and-answer session in California, Former President Barack Obama explained that “We will not win just by increasing the turnout of the people who already agree with us completely on everything – which is why I am always suspicious of purity tests during elections. Because, you know what, the country is complicated.” Instead of requiring a political candidate to perfectly match your ideals in every way, this position suggests a more pragmatic approach that allows for (at least some) ideological compromise.

Meanwhile, the Republicans have spent much of the last three years practicing precisely that sort of compromise, frequently (and sometimes even proudly) admitting that President Donald Trump is, in many ways, far from the conservative ideal in his personal life, but is, nevertheless, the most useful figure for accomplishing politically conservative goals. Despite long-popular rhetoric amongst Republicans about faith and family values, the children of the Moral Majority have committed themselves to defending a thrice-married philanderer because, for example, Trump’s ability to appoint conservative judges to federal positions outweighs his inability to name a book of the Bible. When Christianity Today, a leading magazine for Evangelical Christians, recently published an opinion piece arguing, in part, that Trump’s unapologetic immorality damages the credibility of his religious defenders, it was lambasted amongst the party faithful as proof that the periodical represents the “elitist liberal wing” of their denomination.

The question of purity indeed poses an interesting (potential) ethical dilemma: either you get your hands dirty to take what you want, or you find that your clean hands remain empty in the end – which is preferable?

In its crudest form, this dilemma is not unlike the classic “trolley problem,” where a person is tasked to choose whether it is better to act in a way that condemns one person to die or, instead, to refrain from action in a way that results in five deaths. Although the former requires bloodying your own hands by involving yourself in a causal chain resulting in the death of a person, it brings about a set of consequences which involves fewer deaths overall; the latter allows you to avoid direct responsibility, but results in a significantly less palatable end. Which of these options is the right one to choose?

Instead of circling debates around various ethical theories, Alexis Shotwell, professor of sociology, anthropology, and philosophy at Carleton University, offers a different solution altogether: rejecting the possibility of “purity” as an attainable quality, period. In her 2016 book Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, Shotwell argues that the perception of moral purity as a genuine goal is, in principle, illusory, so the sort of clean-cut options supposed by trolley-style dilemmas are simply unrealistic. Instead, our embeddedness in social contexts requires an amount of interdependency with others that will always, as a general rule, require ideological compromise to at least some degree. Given that everyone has slightly different desires, interests, and goals, “an ethical approach aiming for personal purity is inadequate,” and, ultimately, “impossible and politically dangerous for shared projects of living on earth.”

This sort of approach neither draws lines in the sand across which certain people are not welcome, nor does it try to give some ends-based excuse for allowing deplorable people into one’s inner circle: instead, it recognizes that – like it or not – we’re already all in this together. As Shotwell explains, the idea is rather that

“I’m going to work on this thing and I’m definitely going to make a mistake. I’m already part of a really messed up situation, so I’m not going to be able to personally bend the arc of the universe toward justice. But I might be able to work with other people so that all together we can do that.”

Perhaps the main way that someone can ethically fail on such a model is to reject trying to work together at all.

So, importantly, Shotwell’s approach does not license an individual to behave however they choose: the emphasis on collective and relational approaches to problem-solving (as not only pragmatic requirements, but as the logically prior element of moral exchanges altogether) means that moral agents are inextricably bound to certain moral expectations based on the communities in which we find ourselves – these relationships (more so than our individual intentions or the direct consequences of our own actions) ground our moral judgments – as well as our political choices. So, candidates who transgress these sorts of communal expectations for cooperative and mutual care can indeed still be held accountable, but in a manner notably more ecumenical than either the myopic purity tests of the Democrats or the sycophantic apologetics of the Republicans.

Although the outcome of the 2020 election cycle is still far from determined, one thing seems clear: it’s messy already and the chaos will only get worse. Rather than pretending that “the Right candidate will be Good” or that “the best candidate doesn’t actually have to be good,” Shotwell’s “politics of imperfection” suggests that everyone needs to hold each other accountable to work together in the project of creating a world for us all.

Posted on

Should Musician’s Intent Matter to Political Campaigns?

This article has a set of discussion questions tailored for classroom use. Click here to download them. To see a full list of articles with discussion questions and other resources, visit our “Educational Resources” page.

One should never underestimate Donald Trump’s taste for showmanship. Long synonymous with his brand, the candidate’s tendency towards spectacle was on display throughout the Republican National Convention in Cleveland last week. Seasoned politicians like Paul Ryan shared stage space with sports stars and soap opera celebrities. Highly stylized film trailer-esque clips emphasized the nominee’s expertise in a variety of areas. And, when Trump made his first appearance, he walked onstage to blinding lights and fog, a podium rising from the floor in front of him. In the background, Queen’s “We Are the Champions” sounded throughout the convention floor.

For a convention with no shortage of controversies, music choice probably seemed unassuming at the time. Yet observers were quick to note the irony of a candidate with strong conservative support using a song by an openly gay man who supported progressive social causes. Television host John Oliver, for instance, devoted a segment on Last Week Tonight to lampooning the campaign’s poor music choices throughout the convention – choices that also included playing The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the nominee and his family took the stage. And as Queen released a statement condemning the campaign’s unauthorized use of the song, it became clear that the seemingly innocuous choice had become a controversy of its own.

While Trump’s use of Queen’s music drew scorn from many commentators, his campaign is hardly the first to breach the norms of unauthorized song use. In recent years, prominent candidates like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Paul Ryan have all used or referenced music in a manner that ran afoul of the works’ creators. Perhaps most famously, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign attempted to embrace Bruce Springsteen and his song, “Born In The U.S.A,” despite the lyrics’ blatantly anti-government themes. Springsteen himself disavowed Reagan’s fondness for his music, noting that he strongly opposed the economic policies that the campaign juxtaposed with the song. In this context, it seems that controversies over music choice have practically become a perennial issue for political campaigns, especially when the music’s creators disagree with the politicians walking onstage to their songs.

But was Trump’s campaign wrong to appropriate Queen’s music for their own ends? Your answer probably depends on how you read literature.

Legally, of course, the practice of using music in political campaigns without permission has its own problems. The permissions needed to play a song at a rally vary depending on the specific use and the publisher’s policy, a fact that has not stopped some politicians – including Trump – from using unauthorized music regardless.

Legal issues aside, however, the question of music at political campaigns speaks to a greater context in which we view creative works. And while examples like Reagan’s use of “Born In The U.S.A.” are no doubt relevant, misunderstanding of lyrics alone is not always at the heart of the issue. Of particular note is the ideological divide undergirding tensions between musicians and the politicians who use their songs. Contemporary examples – Paul Ryan citing Rage Against the Machine, Donald Trump walking out to Queen – make clear that the use of this music is controversial not because of its lyrical content, but of the context created by author’s intent. As musical guests put it during Oliver’s segment, misinterpretation of a song is another matter; at the heart of the issue is whether “you used it wrong,” as one of his guests sang. And as another artist in the segment put it, “we didn’t write these songs to make your campaign stops seem cool.”

Clearly, then, the debate around campaign use of songs is about more than licensing or misinterpretation. Author’s intent and the musicians’ own political views also matter; indeed, both are used to condemn the  politicians who ran afoul of musicians hostile to their policies. Using musician’s intent in this manner might seem like second nature. Yet, when other forms of media are examined, the role of creator’s intent is not so easily parsed.

Take literature, for example, where it is commonly argued that a work should be considered irrespective of author’s intent. While the author’s intentions traditionally have held some sway in literary analysis, some argue that consideration of a work should be partitioned from such considerations. According to this viewpoint, literary works are “boundless “texts,” to which no fixed or final meaning could be assigned,” as put in The New York Times. Writers and philosophers alike continue to argue whether the notion is accurate, but the issue of author’s intent continues to provoke controversy. For example, J.K. Rowling’s 2007 reveal that she wrote Albus Dumbledore as a gay character sparked debate around to what degree the revelation should play into readings of the Harry Potter books. Even in literature, then, such ideas are hardly settled. Yet applying such questions to campaign music choices reveals how much the debate is influenced by authorship itself.

Introducing the comparative lens of literature to understand unauthorized use of music also reveals how differently we treat the art form compared to other media. With music, lyrics are generally thought to be understood or misunderstood, not interpreted. There is usually a recognized and largely fixed meaning to many popular songs. And musician’s intent, unlike that of the author in literature, is seen as paramount in decoding what a piece of music might mean. Certainly, there is flexibility in this regard, especially in certain genres of music. Yet the boundaries for interpretation seem to be narrower for songs than literary works, explaining why the unauthorized use of music by politicians has proven so controversial.

It would seem, then, that the morality of using certain songs in political campaigns largely depends on one’s view of authorship. On one hand, it seems ironic that a politician as mainstream as the current Speaker of the House can espouse support for a decidedly anti-government group like Rage Against the Machine. So too would it be unethical to represent the interests of the two as one and the same, a point central to the view that juxtaposing certain songs with political campaigns is ethically suspect.

However, if debates around author’s intent from other media are taken into account, politicians’ use of certain songs could reasonably seen as a reflection of the disconnect between the creator and her work. Legal issues aside, if author’s intent is no longer central in interpreting a work, could the use of music in political campaigns be seen as justified? Or should the style of interpretation of music be considered, allowing musician’s intent to guide use of a work?

Posted on

Putting Politics Aside: A Lesson in Common Courtesy?

President Obama has been making headlines lately for missing the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Anton Scalia, who passed away unexpectedly on Febuary 13th. When asked why the president would not be in attendance, his aid deflected the question, instead relaying that “Vice President Biden and Dr. Jill Biden will be attending Justice Scalia’s funeral.”

Continue reading “Putting Politics Aside: A Lesson in Common Courtesy?”