Author: AdamRowe

Claremonsters and The Shipwrecked Mind

Back in the day I was a student for a year at Claremont Men’s College, today known as Claremont-Mckenna, in Southern California. My father sent me there hoping I would be influenced by Leo Strauss and some of his famous students, who had somehow ended up in the Los Angeles suburbs. A few ideas rubbed off but for the most part I treated Claremont as a chance to enjoy what I saw as Californian freedom, little of which involved studying political theory. Ironically, as it turns out, many of my best friends were Hispanics who were trying to organize and agitate their way (this was 1970 after all!) into Claremont’s conservative Anglo heart.

This was long ago and only lasted a year, but still I am surprised that I had not heard the term “Claremonster” until today, when I read a review in the New Yorker of Mark Lilla’s new book The Shipwrecked Mind. ‘Claremonster’ refers to the militant wing of West Coast Straussians who inhabit the Claremont Institute and publish the Claremont Review. Among the things that they oppose and loath (they are defined for the most part by their dislikes) are political correctness, Ivy League elites, and Barack Obama, not necessarily in that order. A number of them are close to Clarence Thomas, and Thomas has acknowledged the influence of the ur-Claremonster, Harry Jaffa. Jaffa is famous for penning parts of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech but in Claremonster circles is better understood as the founder of the Abraham Lincoln cult that most subscribe to.

The Shipwrecked Mind deals with a slew of 20th century thinkers, including Strauss, who were backward looking and obsessed with discovering ‘where things went wrong.’  That something awful is wrong with modern life is the starting point for their thinking, and while for a Strauss or Eric Voegelin who lived through Nazi Germany and WWII this is not hard to understand, it seems problematic to apply the same dire lens to the United States, as is the habit of many of today’s Straussians. (And not, in my admittedly limited understanding, of Strauss himself).

Now, in the Claremonster universe someone must be to blame for today’s American horror show of political correctness and federal overreach and rule by unelected intellectual elites, and after searching high and low they have hit upon…Woodrow Wilson. Wilson it seems is the symbol of Progressivism and the creator of the modern bureaucratic, technocratic state. (Whether this is true, or a bad thing, is debatable, but since it isn’t debatable that Wilson was an unadulterated racist, perhaps the Claremonsters can make ironic common cause with Princeton agitators who want Wilson effaced from campus).

Lilla distinguishes ‘reactionaries’ from conservatives because of their revolutionary inclinations—to set things right by correcting whatever the great historical error was. Here is where the danger of Claremonsterism comes to light, because it is one thing to do intellectual battle with Machiavelli or Gnosticism or Hegel’s historicism or whatever intellectual trend you think is undermining Western civilization, but another to think, with the Claremonsters, that Donald Trump is a potential savior of the Republic. They believe Trump’s shortcoming—things like chronic lying, racist scapegoating, threatening political opponents with violence, and conspiracy-mongering–are forgivable because he is right on the Big Issue, rejecting the political correctness and identity politics that are the products of progressivism.

What is the Claremonsters’ not-so-secret dream?  A central figure of the cult, John Marini, wrote in July that “Regardless of his motives, therefore, Trump has gone to the heart of the matter and made a political issue of these intellectual and social crises. Trump has not attempted a theoretical justification for doing so. That remains to be made by the thinkers.”   Once one stops laughing at the idea of Trump attempting a theoretical justification of anything, the historical mission of the Claremonsters becomes clear. Look soon for an essay on the “inner greatness” of Trumpism.

Tribes, Neoliberalism, and Public Service

A few weeks ago I heard a talk by Sebastian Junger, the journalist and documentary filmmaker who wrote The Perfect Storm. He was talking about his latest book, Tribes, which draws on his time embedded with a US platoon at an isolated outpost in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. Junger is trying to understand why our troops coming home from today’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have such high rates of PTSD and often find it so hard to re-integrate into society. Studies suggest PTSD rates are higher now than for Vietnam vets, which were higher than after World War II—an odd trend since the average level of violence was greater in Vietnam than in Iraq, and far greater in WWII than either.

Junger thinks the key problem is not that war has become worse, but that modern society has become worse: “Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it. It’s hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every possible ethnic and demographic boundary. The income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life, and rampage shootings happen so regularly that they only remain in the news cycle for a day or two…In combat, soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion, and politics within their platoon. It’s no wonder many of them get so depressed when they come home.”

Junger makes much of the experiences of Indian tribes and, by extension, other hunter-gatherers where people lived intimately in small groups and there was no gap between warriors and the larger community. If you fought, you knew who you were fighting for, and you returned to a group where everyone worked, played, fought, and loved together and for one another. As Junger points out, throughout American history thousands of Europeans ran off to join the Indians, but virtually no Indians ever voluntarily crossed over to join ‘us.’

Junger thinks we are products of a long evolutionary experience in which we evolved for this kind of life, and our deepest satisfactions come from intense experiences of group solidarity, often under threat. He says we get glimpses of this after 9/11 or a hurricane or an earthquake, when people forget their differences and band together against an enemy or to deal with the breakdown of normal life. When this happens suicide rates and instances of depression—terribly common in modern America, and virtually unknown in tribal societies—go down, despite the fact that life has objectively gotten worse.

It is easy to deride this sort of romanticism. Tribal life may be nobly egalitarian and communal, but it can also be stifling, cramped, and full of arbitrary decisions and restrictions. Anthropological studies of existing hunter-gatherers suggest levels of intra-tribe and inter-tribe violence are intense, with up to 1/3 of males dying in murders, feuds, raids, skirmishes, and wars. Indians, as Junger acknowledges, often inflicted stomach-churning tortures on captives. Not to mention famines, diseases, wild animals, floods, and countless other dangers. Human beings shifted to settled agricultural communities with strong hierarchical social systems for some very good reasons.

But I think Junger nevertheless has it partly right. There is a debate in Western thought between those who explain human brokenness—our own internal sense that we are divided from our fellow man or God or our own best self—as inherent in our flawed natures, and those who argue it is because we have somehow strayed from the right life for human beings. The Bible, and the Plato of the Symposium, with Aristophanes’ portrait of human beings cut in half and always seeking their missing self, are in the first camp. Man is born/created as a divided being. In this view, it doesn’t matter whether you live in a tribe or a city or a great empire—you take your brokenness with you.

But there is a second tradition that gives more weight to the type of society you find yourself in. In this camp are Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx and other moderns where the division is historical, not natural. For Hobbes the escape from the state of nature is a necessary tragedy; freedom is too dangerous to endure. For Rousseau it is an unnecessary tragedy that we need to repair. In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau imagines man in the state of nature as peaceful and content, but not really human at all—solitary and speechless. One cannot genuinely want to return to such a condition, however awful modern society might be. But Rousseau thinks a happy medium exists, and is not a utopia—it is a reality for many people, or at least it was when he wrote in the 18th century. Rousseau says that the stage of human development between the “indolence of the primitive state” [the pure state of nature] and the “petulant activity of our vanity” [modern life] was “the least subject to revolution, the best for man, and that he must have come out of it only by some fatal accident…The example of savages, who have almost all been found at this point, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain in it always; that this state is the veritable prime of the world…”. He points out in a footnote what Junger borrows, that no savage has ever voluntarily become civilized, while thousands of Europeans have gone the other way; even Christian missionaries have praised the calm and innocent days spent with savage peoples. Rousseau acknowledges that life in this state is imperfect, “bloodthirsty and cruel.” But it is simple, direct, and infused with natural sympathy and affections.

The industrial and scientific revolution generated a burst of enthusiasm that now at last we had found a way to square this circle. The abundance of the new productive economy would let everyone be equal and do away with the need for tyrannical government. Fighting over scarce resources, at the root of so much conflict within and between societies, would wane, and the martial virtues would be less esteemed. All men would become brothers.

These hopes have been partially realized. Violence has in fact dramatically dropped in advanced industrialized countries, contrary to popular opinion, and this despite extremely destructive interstate wars. Much of the world lives in unprecedented conditions of security against the vagaries of nature. Modern democratic governments are less arbitrary and tyrannical than any large-scale governments known in the past.

But no one would say modern society has recreated the closeness of the tribe or even of the agricultural village—quite the opposite. The drive to maximize productivity has rested on maximizing the individual and fostering competition, envy, acquisitiveness, and self-assertion. There have been many small-scale efforts to escape from this society and live by other rules in communes and collectives, most of which fail. The most successful seem to have a strong religious center that enforces a strict separation from the outside world, like the Amish and Hutterites in North America. The Soviet Union and other large-scale efforts to create socialist societies that foster group solidarity over individualism have been markedly less productive and have led to new forms of tyranny.

We aren’t about to give up the benefits of modern life to recreate tribal experiences or close-knit communities. But within these bounds we can do better. Think of the difference between WWII veterans and today’s. WWII was everyone’s war with mass conscription, where the hero was the average guy, GI Joe. People from all walks of life and all parts of the country served together and made connections that often endured long past the war itself. When soldiers came back they got little compared to the medical and psychological support available today, but they did get recognition from a society where most people had served and sacrificed. They got the GI bill that not only helped a whole generation move into the middle class but was a signal of how the country valued what they had done.

Soldiers now are volunteers, so whatever they suffer, the unspoken thought from fellow citizens is “well, you chose it.” By previous standards today’s soldiers are well-paid and provided for, and get a lot of post-service benefits, many of which are easy to abuse—as Junger painfully acknowledges. Just as many Americans see those in the military as individuals who have chosen a job with certain risks, no different than a miner or oilfield worker, so soldiers can easily see it as a transactional relationship where they are entitled to get every penny they can squeeze out of the system. A pat on the back and “thank you for your service” from a public that neither knows nor cares what they did only deepens the divide.

Junger strongly recommends some form of mandatory public service for all citizens. In an increasingly polarized country where we have segregated ourselves more and more by income, class, politics and race, he wants to ensure that everyone has at least once in their life a communal experience with a cross-section of fellow Americans. This remedy for selfishness has been regularly suggested ever since we ended the draft, but runs counter to the neoliberal individualism that has dominated public debate in the US for the last 30 years. Junger is scathing in his description of how our embrace of the most extreme versions of individualism has contributed to creating a society soldiers can’t identify with. His exhibit A is the 2007 financial meltdown where the perpetrators escaped without punishment, despite the terrible damage done to their community.

We won’t be able to consider fixes such as mandatory service until we shake off the idea that markets are the measure of all things. We can start by recognizing the abundant warning signs of social and political disarray, including the returning soldiers our country has sent, and continues to send, to war with so little care and with so little understanding of why they feel alone and adrift.

I have felt part-Hellene since I was young but had never visited. My father taught Ancient Philosophy and always held up Hellas and its thinkers and poets as nonpareil. I went to St. John’s College, where we learned Classical Greek and studied the Hellenes non-stop for an entire year, steeping ourselves in Homer and the Periclean classics. Few of us, and certainly not I, failed to identify with Hellas as our true home, more real by far than the contemporary world. Most of us knew the geography of Troy and Thermopylae better than anything in these United States. After St. John’s I renewed my vows to Hellas at the University of Chicago with more Greek language studies, more classes and seminars on the classics.

But eventually, like most of us, I strayed. Over the years I occasionally re-read the books, or went to a lecture or an alumni seminar that rekindled some of the old magic. Just enough to want more, but life intervenes. Then a few years back I had a chance to teach a class where I assigned Thucydides and Plato, and I spent a summer back at St. John’s reading classic histories.

At some point I wondered to myself, shouldn’t I go visit? Perhaps this should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, to me. The Hellas I loved was 2500 years ago. What if I was disappointed? What if today’s Hellenes didn’t measure up; what if they ruined the whole thing so that I could no longer enjoy my sweet memories? It was like thinking about going to your high school reunion—maybe it was better not to see what the Prom Queen looked like now.

So the long and short is we decided on short notice to take a guided tour last May, with three days in and around Athens, and six days cruising different Greek islands. Here’s what I learned:

Don’t say ‘Greek.’  Greeks aren’t fond of being called ‘Greeks.’ ‘Greek’ is a Roman appellation; for a long time under the Byzantine Empire, Greeks called themselves ‘Romaioi’ or Romans. Under the Ottomans, when Greece fell into decay, the term ‘Greek’ developed connotations of stupidity and banditry. Greeks today call their country Hellas, and they are Hellenes.

I learned this, as much else, from Roula Skoula, the intrepid tour guide for our group. Roula was from Crete and frequently reminded us of all the great things that Crete—which was, alas, not on our itinerary–had given to Hellas and the world. She had great energy and knew most of what tourists might want to know about Hellenes, but with just a hint of the weariness appropriate to an ancient and much-put-upon people going through some particularly hard times. We all loved Roula.

Hellenes are not Western Europeans. This is counter-intuitive if you are steeped in the story of Greeks-as-founders-of-Western-civilization. But modern Hellenes have a very different picture of the past than us Americans, who come at it through British and Western European eyes. For us, Rome fell and the world entered the Dark Ages, emerging fitfully via the Renaissance and and Enlightenment to pick up the broken tradition a thousand years later. But for Hellenes Rome didn’t fall until much later, in 1453. The Byzantine Empire was a period of glory and pride, combining Hellenic culture and language with Christianity. To be Hellene was to be at the center of things.

I noticed that when our guides mentioned the fall of Constantinople, they never said just “In 1453 when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” Instead, they always said “On May 29, 1453, when Constantinople was captured by the Turks.” The exact date of the fall is burned into Hellenic memory, like December 7, 1941 for Americans. It is the great catastrophe, the start of their Dark Ages under Turkish rule.

Hellas missed the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and to a large extent the Industrial Revolution. It was cut off from Europe and became a backwater, even though some individuals identified as “Hellenes” rose to high office under the Ottomans and others made fortunes as merchants. Ironically, it was these merchants and officials who, when they came into contact with Western Europe in the 18th century, discovered to their surprise that just being from Hellas or speaking Greek gave them special status among Western Europeans, who by this time had rediscovered Hellas and made classical Greece the symbol of learning and culture. Hellenes were eventually able to play on this connection to get help from the West to gain independence from the Ottomans.

Hellenes have some grievances. Since gaining independence, Hellenes have been striving to re-connect to the West. After many ups and downs they appeared to have succeeded in 1981 when they were allowed into the EU. Tragically this has not turned out well, causing anxious debate about whether this shows that Hellas is not at heart sufficiently Western (the German view) or that the Western powers took advantage of a small, weak country (the Hellenic view). There is a lot of very vulgar, pointed anti-German graffiti on the walls of Athens. It isn’t helped by memories of the tremendous suffering of Hellas under Italian and German occupation in WWII. We saw a number of memorials commemorating German massacres of entire villages.

A regular theme of Roula’s when visiting archeological sites was how Hellas has been exploited by unscrupulous outsiders. British Lord Elgin is a particular target for looting selected artifacts from the Parthenon to pay off his debts; the Acropolis Museum pointedly contains empty slots for the missing parts of the Parthenon frieze, still held in London despite strenuous efforts to get them back. The more-than-slightly-crazed German Heinrich Schliemann is another target. In the 19th century Schliemann used dynamite to excavate the site of ancient Troy and sent precious gold relics from Mycenae back to Berlin (many of them now in Moscow, having caught the eye of Soviet conquerors in 1945). When I was young I was taught that Elgin and Schliemann did a service to civilization by ‘saving’ precious objects and making them available to the world. Not how it looks to the Hellenes.

Hellas has many layers. My education taught me that ‘Greece’ meant mostly the short period in the 5th and 4th centuries when Periclean Athens was in full flower. It remains a staggering accomplishment. But Hellas has a long, long history and the Classical period is just one short episode. I loved our visit to Mycenae, Agamemnon’s hilltop fortress-home, built centuries before Pericles out of huge stone blocks. The Homeric poems and later tragedies that record part of his story superimpose an Olympian paradigm on top of a pre-Olympian past—more layering.

On the island of Santorini we visited an ancient town buried in 1500 BC by a huge volcanic explosion—like Pompeii, though it appears the people in Santorini had enough warning to get away—and closely connected to (or maybe an outpost of) the Minoan civilization on Crete. After Pericles came Alexander and centuries of Hellenistic art and study, followed by hundreds of years of Roman rule. At many sites like the Athenian Agora, or Delos, or Ephesus, extensive Roman-era ruins sit side-by-side, or on top of, earlier ‘Hellenic’ artifacts.

Our visit only touched on Hellas’ Christian tradition. Even so, for many visitors Corinth doesn’t signify the Peloponnesian Wars, and Medea’s revenge against Jason, as it did for me; it is the site where Paul preached. You can see the excavated Roman-period stage in the agora. We spent a day on Patmos, an island where the Apostle John was exiled and wrote the Book of Revelation (or not, depending on which scholarly interpretation you believe). The New Testament was written in Greek and Christianity became a universal religion when it jumped from the small community of Jews to the much larger and cosmopolitan community of the Hellenes.

Hellas is full of mountains and islands. Ok, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but you have to see it to get it.  No much of the terrain is flat, as far as I could tell; it is like having your whole country consist of West Virginia, or Western Colorado. So if you think about moving people and armies around in pre-modern times, it is incredibly time-consuming and difficult. The few flat areas good for agriculture are extremely valuable. We went to Delphi, about 100 miles from Athens and way up a mountain valley. It’s built on the side of a steep hill with temples and theaters and arenas carved into the mountainside—what labor! When you read in Sophocles or Herodotus that this or that city sent a delegation to Delphi to get a reading from the oracle, it’s not a hop, skip and a jump. It’s a long, arduous trip and not something you would do lightly–perhaps why Delphic prophecies were so valued. Traveling by sea would be much better.

And sea travel is eased by all the islands. What I realized traveling by boat through the Cyclades in the Aegean is that you are never out of sight of land. There is always an island of some kind in sight. So you can set sail in relative peace knowing you can get ashore if the weather blows up or you run short of water—though some of the smaller islands are pretty bleak.

On our way to Santorini we sailed close to, but not in sight of, the island of Melos. Melos is the notorious site of the “Melian Dialogue” described by Thucydides, which ends with Athens destroying the neutral Melians after they refuse to submit and join the Athenian Empire. The Athenians probably do not deserve to be let off the hook for this, but sailing through the region shifted my perspective on the Athenian demand. The islands are a chain that stretches out into and across the Aegean. Lose one link in the chain and it could break. Maybe Melos was right that its neutrality didn’t threaten Athens. But I could see an Athenian admiral, or just a plain ship’s captain, worrying that Athens needed every island, every part of the chain.

WHAT DARK MONEY BUYS THESE DAYS

In the Renaissance, as in some other times and places, wealthy patrons supported philosophers and scientists and writers; they endowed schools, funded scientific expeditions, paid for books to be published. Often there was a fairly clear quid pro quo—the struggling scholars and artists were expected to glorify and flatter their patrons, indulge their pet ideas, tutor their children. In return they had the opportunity to work on what they considered important. We may imagine the scholars had the better of the deal; they got the princes to support all manner of new ideas that ended up subverting the old order and leaving the prince-oligarchs in the dust. But what if the oligarchs want revenge?

This is something I’ve been thinking about because I recently finished reading Dark Money, Jane Mayer’s new book about the Koch Brothers and the network of rich politically active conservatives that they exemplify. The most important point I took away away from Dark Money is the importance the Kochs and their allies place on ideas. Their strategy started with trying to change the way American elites think about government, the private sector, individual liberty, and so on by making neoliberal or libertarian ideas—which when they started in earnest in the 1970s were viewed with scorn by policy experts and politicians, in both parties—acceptable and mainstream. They have largely succeeded. Today large numbers of people accept that government is inherently dysfunctional, taxes should always be lower, wealthy businessmen are heroic job creators, regulation stifles the economy, unions are the work of the devil, climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, and more. The Republican Party has been captured lock, stock and barrel by Kochean ideology. How did they do it?

As Dark Money (and another equally good account, Invisible Hands: The Businessman’s Crusade Against the New Deal, by Kim Phillips-Fein) tells us in detail, they did it through philanthropy. It was philanthropy that was sometimes scattered around, sometimes wasted, but with a strategic focus of supporting organizations and individuals that shared at least some Kochean views. One of the central goals was to insert neoliberal thinking into the most influential organizations in order to move it from the fringe to the mainstream. This meant into Washington DC think tanks, into major universities, and into the mass media.

So for instance, one of their first steps was to build up the Cato Institute in Washington. Though it is hardly a secret that it was founded and funded by the Koch Brothers (its original name was the Charles Koch Institute) to further their libertarian agenda, Cato has over time become seen as a valued voice in policy debates. Instead of being dismissed as the mouthpiece for a narrow, extremist ideology it is now one of the boys. Washington insiders tend to say “I don’t agree with them, but it’s a valid point of view. It adds to the debate.” Media outlets regularly use Cato analysts to give ‘balance’ to discussions. Cato papers and studies are quoted and taken seriously.

In short, build it and they will come. When you have jobs and grants to offer, leading to media exposure and policy influence, you can be sure to find eager takers. Some will be true believers; others will choose to believe to get on the gravy train. And from the Koch’s perspective, even if sometimes Cato doesn’t say exactly what they might want and a few voices go off the reservation, on balance it’s well worth it. The appearance of independence actually makes Cato more credible. While Cato is closest to the Kochean worldview, they and their allies support other DC think tanks like Heritage and AEI, organizations that reliably support conservative positions and together make up a network that creates, amplifies, and legitimates an overlapping set of ideas and policies.

Implanting game-changing ideas into the larger society requires more than just think tanks; it needs the imprimatur of academia. The largest single recipient of Koch money has been George Mason University in Fairfax, VA, just outside Washington. Thirty years ago GMU was a 3rd-tier state commuter school; today it is a well-endowed, fast-growing powerhouse that keeps getting bigger and gaining stature. People in the DC area are frequently amazed at GMU’s transformation—“I remember when it was just another glorified junior college. How did they get so big?” How indeed. GMU had an ambitious and entrepreneurial President who wanted to up GMU’s academic game, but Kochean money has played a big part. The Kochs have given $30 million to GMU, much of it to the Mercatus Center, a prolific advocate for libertarian views and Austrian Economics. Other parts of the Koch’s “donor consortium” have added substantially more.

Though not on the Mercatus scale, similar centers and think-tanks associated with major universities have blossomed with infusions of Kochean money. You can find them at Princeton and Brown, Florida State and West Virginia. In many cases the Koch network supports individual professors and graduate students to conduct research expounding free market ideology. It’s not just the Kochs, either: Western Carolina University is discussing a new Koch-funded $2 million “Center for the Study of Free Enterprise,” proposed by its very own “BB&T Distinguished Professor of Capitalism.” The retired head of BB&T, a major regional bank in the Southeast, has made it his life mission to use his considerable fortune to teach America’s youth the virtues of the free enterprise system, having had his own eyes opened by reading Ayn Rand.

“Philanthropy” has a nice ring to it, but it isn’t just donations to art museums and hospital wings. It can be a dangerous vehicle for oligarchs to use their enormous wealth to distort the public square (at the public’s expense, too, given the way our tax system turns these programs into tax write-offs) and further their private interests. In a recent paper (“The Koch Effect: The Impact of a Cadre-Led Network on American Politics,” Jan. 2016) one of our foremost students of the American Right, Theda Skocpol at Harvard, examines the Koch network in detail to try and understand why the Republican Party has moved so inexorably to the right, even when this runs against the interests of Republican voters and mainstream business interests. She concludes the Koch network has acted like a ‘force field’ pulling the Republican Party to more extreme positions. Its success has rested on the ideological networks built up over 40 years to create the illusion that there is a genuine constituency for libertarianism and for policies like slashing social programs, giving the rich more tax breaks, and ignoring global warming. There isn’t, but it’s hard to separate the signals from the constant noise generated by Koch-funded ideamongers.

It takes two to tango, and of course the Kochs would have no influence if so many university boards, ambitious administrators, and grant-hungry graduate students weren’t ready to be bought. Like politicians, none admit that the money will influence their research or conclusions (even though in private you can find multiple cases of alarmed academics complaining about Koch attempts to set ideological requirements for faculty, or mandate what is in the curriculum, often including Charles Koch’s peculiar management theories). We should note that the drying up of public funding for higher education—a policy zealously approved by free market enthusiasts—has greatly increased the vulnerability of colleges and universities to anyone with an open checkbook.

Other cases. Lest we think this is the only case where money is used to distort and influence, I mention several other scandalous influence-buying operations that have long operated in plain sight. In a recent Atlantic article on President Obama’s foreign policy, his national security staff was quoted as describing Massachusetts Avenue in DC (the K Street of think-tanks) as “Arab-occupied territory.” A VOX piece (“How Saudi Arabia Captured Washington,” March 2016) concluded that

“Many say a sort of taboo has developed against needlessly antagonizing Gulf states by criticizing them or by taking policy positions that those states consider red lines, for fear of upsetting a current donor or alienating a future donor. Even the money itself has become a taboo subject. Everybody knows about it, but no one likes to talk about it, because they all want the money too. ‘ Nobody wants to risk that their institution won’t get their share of the pie,’ one said.”

The Gulfies aren’t the only culprits here—the VOX article has examples of Japanese and Norwegian (??) influence—but they are by far the biggest donors (donations from the Gulf have risen sharply in the past few years) and have the most at stake in trying to influence an Administration that has been noticeably less enamored of the US-Saudi alliance than its predecessors.

One could draw a fascinating parallel between the Koch network and its 40 year effort to spread neoliberalism, and the Saudis and their 50-year effort to spread Wahhabism. Both actors leveraged massive wealth to take what at the beginning were marginal views held by a few zealots, and make them pervasive and influential. In both cases the results have been disastrous, and in both cases the perpetrators remain active, powerful, and unbowed.

Politicians and those who bankroll them dance a similar minuet. We all know that today’s politicians take money, mostly from companies and wealthy interest groups, but also from unions, rich individuals and so on. And we all know what they say if they’re accused of doing anything in return, of being bought and paid for: “Of course not! I have NEVER changed a vote or introduced a bill or (fill in the blank) in return for any donations from anybody!” Why then do organizations do this? If you believe the politicians, it’s all because the money-givers just think he/she is a swell person and they see eye to eye on the issues.

Of course if you do believe the politicians, you are a sap, and hardly anyone does. But it’s hard to nail down exactly how the system works. Politicians are right that only very rarely is there an explicit quid pro quo—a bag of money here, a favor there, clearly linked. Maybe that’s what happened in the bad old days, but not now. But clearly donors and lobbyists get a good return on their political investments, and careful analysts have explained it in detail. Lawrence Lessig, for instance, in Republic, Lost gives us chapter and verse in how money buys access, gets particular views a seat at the table, and builds up personal relationships that end up affecting the views and actions of politicians and people around them. The donors end up shaping the agenda, defining the options, setting the terms of the debate. Politicians know exactly what they need to do to keep the money coming. It’s still corruption, but it’s subtle.

In fact, it’s so subtle that the practitioners on both sides of the transaction can easily convince themselves that they’re doing nothing questionable. The recipient of the money and favors, like the Renaissance-era patronizer, can even go further and say—“Let them think they’re manipulating me! I’m my own man/woman, and I’ll use their resources as I see fit. I’m using them, not the other way around. If they want to throw $600,000 at me to give a speech, well, why not?”

It’s not hard to see that this is usually a dangerous fantasy, a justification for doing something politicians desperately want to do without admitting that there is a price.

Liberal Shortcomings. The manipulative and cynical attitude towards political ideas taken by the Kochs is unfortunately matched by the indifference and dismissiveness of the liberal establishment. While conservatives seek to appropriate the American founding, Christianity, and Western Civilization generally as one long march towards free markets, liberals by contrast often seem indifferent, or worse, determined to deconstruct these traditions into oblivion. Intellectual and religious traditions of great power and meaning are too easily dismissed as outdated, insufficiently enlightened, racist, sexist and irreparable.  This leaves the field to the terrible simplifiers.

Part of the reason for conservative success has been because Americans, like all people, have an appetite for a coherent account of things. What is our country all about? What does its history tell us? What is its government for? Neoliberal dogma, honed to a fine edge by the Kochean idea factory, presents a seamless story that offers followers clarity and principle: Government is bad, so the less the better. Markets should decide, not governments. Most importantly, we are all about individual liberty; the other guys are all about restricting it.

There is no real liberal equivalent. It is not enough for liberals to say that liberalism is undogmatic, or pragmatic, or that it avoids either-or dichotomies and recognizes ambiguity and grey areas. True, but also a flag of surrender. Most damaging, liberals have largely ceded the ideal of liberty to the libertarians. Liberals have been good at explaining specific benefits voters will get from liberal programs, but not how these programs add up and how they will make us more free.

Even though in the aggregate liberal and progressive-leaning think tanks have a lot more money, and liberals seem permanently embedded in many parts of academia, they are constitutionally unable to focus their efforts. According to a 2005 study, “The War of Ideas,” by Andrew Rich:

“Nonconservative foundations – what might be labeled “middle of the road,” “mainline,” or “liberal foundations” – have devoted far more resources than conservatives to influencing thinking about public policy. This spending simply has not been as deliberate or effective. Conservative think tanks have quite successfully provided political leaders, journalists, and the public with concrete ideas about shrinking the role of the federal government, deregulation, and privatization. They are succeeding by aggressively promoting their ideas. By contrast, liberal and mainstream foundations back policy research that is of interest to liberals. But these funders remain reluctant to make explicit financial commitment to the war of ideas, and they do relatively little to support the marketing of liberal ideas.”

Rich concludes that while liberals and progressives support objective research that they hope will influence public policy, without knowing in advance what the research will show, conservatives support the propagation of ideas in support of what they already know to be true. Conservative think tanks tend to spend much more on communications and hire people with business backgrounds to run focused influence campaigns aimed at politicians; liberals hire academics and prioritize links to non-profits and government bureaucrats. Liberals tend to be foxes who look for solutions to an array of particular problems, while Kochean conservatives are hedgehogs who fight for One Big Idea.

Conclusion.  I am frightened at the ease with which today’s versions of the old Renaissance patrons have been able to use their money to have their way with our democracy. We have become the Koch’s science project.  Like Russian hackers, the Kochs and their cadre of well-paid professionals circle our democracy, probing ceaselessly for vulnerabilities, ways to take control of the operating system without alerting the clueless owners.  Here is how Jane Mayer summarizes their plan:

During the 1970s, a handful of the nation’s wealthiest corporate captains felt overtaxed and overregulated and decided to fight back. Disenchanted with the direction of modern America, they launched an ambitious, privately financed war of ideas to radically change the country. They didn’t want to merely win elections; they wanted to change how Americans thought. Their ambitions were grandiose—to “save” America as they saw it, at every level, by turning the clock back to the Gilded Age before the advent of the Progressive Era.

I suspect that in their annual get-togethers with their billionaire peers the Kochs share a hearty guffaw at the stupidity of the people, for whom libertarians generally feel contempt; and at the many useful idiots in the intelligentsia who are willing to be bought. So far, unfortunately, the defenders of democracy have not been able to prove to them that these low opinions are not deserved.

The death of Judge Antonin Scalia has occasioned much commentary and reminiscing. About a number of things there seems to be consensus: he was extremely smart; he was a ‘happy warrior’ who reveled in argument and intellectual combat; he wrote and spoke eloquently; he was funny; he was a good friend and mentor, even to those with whom he disagreed; he was a committed social and political conservative; and he claimed to make legal decisions in accord with a detailed theory of originalism designed to counter individual subjectivity.

The challenge I think Scalia poses is whether he was really able to contain this explosive mix of brilliance and partisanship in the tight confines of his judicial method. Our reasoning is always in danger of being corrupted by a range of biases: self-interest, past experiences, prejudice, unexamined suppositions, commitment to a cause, and so on. People seem to assume that the more intelligent you are, the more able you are to recognize and overcome these, but I don’t think this is true, or rarely so. What is more common is that great intelligence is used to confirm our bias and prejudice. We become better at marshaling arguments in our favor and demolishing those of our opponents. If we are exceptionally talented communicators, like Scalia, the danger only increases, because the praise we get for our skillful presentations confirms we are right.

A 2014 Vox article by Ezra Klein called ““How Politics Makes Us Stupid” makes this argument in detail, drawing on psychological research, such as experiments that ask people to estimate probabilities and do math problems; people who are perfectly objective at problem-solving begin to make ‘mistakes’—always in their favor–when the problem is given a political spin. The researcher, Dan Kahan, a Yale law professor, calls this Identity Protective Cognition, a fancy way of saying that people fight fiercely against evidence and arguments which, if accepted, would undermine their basic sense of who they are. In fact Kahan, when pressed by Klein about the potentially disastrous implications for our ability to be objective, cites Scalia as an example:

“At one point in our interview Kahan does stare over the abyss, if only for a moment. He recalls a dissent written by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in a case about overcrowding in California prisons. Scalia dismissed the evidentiary findings of a lower court as motivated by policy preferences. “I find it really demoralizing, but I think some people just view empirical evidence as a kind of device,” Kahan says.

But Scalia’s comments were perfectly predictable given everything Kahan had found. Scalia is a highly ideological, tremendously intelligent individual with a very strong attachment to conservative politics. He’s the kind of identity-protector who has publicly said he stopped subscribing to the Washington Post because he “just couldn’t handle it anymore,” and so he now cocoons himself in the more congenial pages of the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. Isn’t it the case, I asked Kahan, that everything he’s found would predict that Scalia would convince himself of whatever he needed to think to get to the answers he wanted?”

I will admit that this has been for some time my view of Scalia—a really smart guy with many attractive characteristics who unfortunately uses his big brain to validate a set of conservative policy preferences. Since he is on the Supreme Court and not blogging from his basement, this has done tremendous damage to our country on issues such as money in politics, gun control, and voting rights.

But could I be selling Scalia short? Maybe Scalia, knowing that he has strong views, is trying to counter his own prejudices. One piece of evidence is that Scalia had a practice of always having one liberal clerk on his staff (out of the standard four for Supreme Court justices) to offer a different point of view. Several of these liberal clerks have praised Scalia and said he challenged them and made them better thinkers and better lawyers. Lawrence Lessig, who clerked for Scalia in the early 90s, says that on a number of occasions, when Scalia’s ‘originalist’ method produced an outcome that went against Scalia’s conservative principles, Scalia would grit his teeth and go with originalism, saying “I don’t believe in an originalism of convenience.”

If this were consistently the case it would paint a different picture. Scalia knows he needs to hear contrarian voices, so he puts liberals on his staff. We know he was good friends with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a strong liberal voice, and had many friends with different views. Perhaps more importantly, he adopts a method of interpretation designed to rein in his policy preferences by forcing him to follow the method wherever it leads—sometimes to a liberal, sometimes to a conservative conclusion.

There are two questions we have to answer to decide if Scalia was a clever partisan or an admirable jurist. First, how consistently did Scalia allow his method to deliver unwelcome (to him) conclusions? In particular, did he do it for big, important cases? It’s common to try and defuse criticism by acting against expectations on some small, secondary issues and then pointing to those decisions to prove lack of bias. If most of the consequential cases go the other way, it calls the impartiality into question.

The second question has to do with the nature of Scalia’s ‘originalism.’ Is the theory itself fair, or is it a method that puts a strong conservative thumb on the scales? Does choosing that approach guarantee conservative outcomes, not in every case, but for the most part? Even if it does, that might not prove Scalia is biased—perhaps he holds conservative views because that’s where the method leads him, not the other way around. But it would make me suspicious.

On the first question, whether Scalia overruled originalism or otherwise ignored evidence that went against his conservative ideals, the evidence is somewhat mixed. We saw above where Kahan (himself a law professor and Supreme Court clerk) claims Scalia ignored factual material. Lessig, the liberal clerk who praised Scalia for being principled, goes on to say that later on he told Scalia “that he had ruined me as a constitutional lawyer, because I was constantly predicting he’d choose originalism over conservatism. Yet too often, I said, when the decision came down, I felt like Linus waiting for the Great Pumpkin.” Lessig doesn’t specify which cases he has in mind, but the implication is that it was unwise to bet on Scalia adhering to originalism when it contravened his conservatism.

William B. Gould, a Stanford professor of law and former head of the National Labor Relations Board, claims Scalia was inconsistent on the rights of unions; in a 1991 decision, according to Gould, Scalia backed the right of public sector unions to require dues, while in the recent California case (before the Court and undecided at the time of Scalia’s death) he signaled his support for the argument that all public sector bargaining is ‘political’ and hence we cannot require people to support it. Gould says Scalia shifted because in 1991 there was no chance of success, while in 2016 the conservative majority saw the chance to cripple public sector unions, a core conservative policy goal.

Those who see Scalia as more principled point to his support for 4th and 6th amendment rights. Justice Ginsburg regularly pointed out in defending Scalia from charges of conservative bias that he had written a number of strong decisions on the 4th amendment protection against “unreasonable searches and seizures” (Kyllo vs. United States, 2001; United States vs. Jones, 2012), and defended the free speech right to burn the American flag.  While significant, I would argue that on the questions that matter most for political and social conservatives, like gun control, voting rights, equating money and speech, abortion, gay marriage, and so on–not to mention a decisive vote to make George Bush President in 2000–Scalia stayed true to his partisan roots.

The second question on the merits of originalism is harder to untangle. (Not being an expert on constitutional interpretation I will happily accept correction if this is off-base, but it’s the best I can do with what I’ve got). Originalism is defended by Scalia and his supporters, as stated in his 2012 book Reading Law, as necessary to “reject judicial speculation about both the drafters’ extra-textually derived purposes and the desirability of the fair reading’s anticipated consequences.” Otherwise constitutional interpretation becomes an assertion of preferences or a consequentialism that looks to results rather than rights. (The slippery slope is very steep in the arguments of originalists. I hypothesized that Scalia may have embraced originalism in part to check his own strong conservative views, but it is certainly true that originalism is largely designed to check the views of liberal believers in a ‘living Constitution.’)

Is originalism necessarily conservative? Defenders say no, or only incidentally. But critics argue that this is disingenuous. The most pointed argument that I know of comes from Judge Richard Posner, who wrote a scathing review of Reading Law in The New Republic called “The Incoherence of Antonin Scalia.”  Posner, also a conservative but with a much more libertarian bent than Scalia, says:

It is true, as Scalia and Garner [Scalia’s co-author Bryan Garner] say, that statutory text is not inherently liberal or inherently conservative; it can be either, depending on who wrote it. Their premise is correct, but their conclusion does not follow: text as such may be politically neutral, but textualism is conservative.

A legislature is thwarted when a judge refuses to apply its handiwork to an unforeseen situation that is encompassed by the statute’s aim but is not a good fit with its text. Ignoring the limitations of foresight, and also the fact that a statute is a collective product that often leaves many questions of interpretation to be answered by the courts because the legislators cannot agree on the answers, the textual originalist demands that the legislature think through myriad hypothetical scenarios and provide for all of them explicitly rather than rely on courts to be sensible. In this way, textualism hobbles legislation—and thereby tilts toward “small government” and away from “big government,” which in modern America is a conservative preference.

To Posner’s objection one could add that in a Groundhog-Day interpretive world where it is always the late 18th century, judges will remain tethered to views and values that do not reflect changes in the understanding of the basic rights articulated at the time. Few today would defend the prevalent views in 1787 about the status of women, or blacks, or Catholics, or the propertied. Originalists argue logically that if mores have changed, we should change the laws to match—but amending the Constitution is hard, and we count on judges to re-interpret it, without doing violence to our respect for the text.

Even Scalia acknowledged that he was sometimes a “faint hearted originalist,” because the implications of a consistent originalism are so troubling. Under originalism, for instance, Brown vs. Board of Education would have gone the other way. The Court would have been unable to step in to help the nation overcome its centuries-old logjam over race; and since the Court’s conservative shift in the 1970s, it has largely ceased to play that role.

This tendency is stronger under Scalia’s specific form of originalism. While I suspect most Americans assume that seeking the original meaning involves trying to understand what the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights intended, this is not what Scalia has in mind. He is four-square against any attempt to base interpretation on “original intent,” or on the legislative history, or what the legislators who wrote and debated the law said they meant. What matters is what the text meant to the average reader at the time. So if Madison or Franklin or others at the Constitutional Convention agreed to value slaves as 3/5ths of a man, but perhaps did so in the hope that in time American views of slavery would evolve—under the influence of an upbringing shaped by the new understanding of individual rights and popular government—this is irrelevant to Scalia. The law becomes operative when it is voted on and approved by the states, and what matters is what they think they are approving, which we can know by seeking out the common understanding of words and phrases. Scalian originalism is characterized by detailed historical research into dictionaries and thesauruses and finding how many times a particular phrase is used and in what context, at approximately the time and place when the Constitution and Bill of Rights or whatever law under discussion was approved.

This is why, in addition to its conservative bias, Posner criticizes originalism as epistemologically flawed:

The decisive objection to the quest for original meaning, even when the quest is conducted in good faith, is that judicial historiography rarely dispels ambiguity. Judges are not competent historians. Even real historiography is frequently indeterminate, as real historians acknowledge. To put to a judge a question that he cannot answer is to evoke “motivated thinking,” the form of cognitive delusion that consists of credulously accepting the evidence that supports a preconception and of peremptorily rejecting the evidence that contradicts it.

If you want to test this for yourself, try reading one of Scalia’s most famous decisions, his majority decision in Heller vs. District of Columbia on the 2nd Amendment, the case that sharply expanded the right to keep and bear arms.  I did, and came away convinced that Posner’s critique is on target.  Scalia takes the reader on a galloping tour through late 18th and early 19th century texts in an effort to define each of the key terms of the Amendment (what are ‘arms’? what did ‘bear’ mean? what were the different definitions of ‘militia’?). One is left with a good deal of interesting information, along with assertions that the particular texts and examples cited are exhaustive and determinative. But no one who is familiar with historical research or textual interpretation in other contexts (philosophy, religion, literature) can doubt that different researchers could unearth other texts and other examples and come to different conclusions. Or as Posner says, citing the author of Reading Law’s Preface, Judge Frank Easterbrook:

“Easterbrook goes on: “When the original meaning is lost in the passage of time…the justification for judges’ having the last word evaporates.” This is a version of the doctrine of judicial self-restraint, which Scalia and Garner endorse by saying that a statute’s unconstitutionality must be “clearly shown”—which it was not in Heller. Justice Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment probably is erroneous, but one who doubts this should conclude that the relevant meaning of the amendment had been “lost in the passage of time,” and so the Court should have let the District of Columbia’s gun ordinance stand.”

As many Scalia critics have pointed out, a genuine conservative would be inclined to follow precedent and defer to legislatures, but Scalia has been aggressive in using his method to challenge and overturn established understandings.

These are the basic reasons why Posner concludes, after examining many specific cases in Reading Law, that Scalia’s arguments don’t add up and that in fact they provide a convenient excuse for furthering his policy preferences:

A problem that undermines their entire approach is the authors’ lack of a consistent commitment to textual originalism. They endorse fifty-seven “canons of construction,” or interpretive principles, and in their variety and frequent ambiguity these “canons” provide them with all the room needed to generate the outcome that favors Justice Scalia’s strongly felt views on such matters as abortion, homosexuality, illegal immigration, states’ rights, the death penalty, and guns.

Scalia also defends originalism from a different direction that we should consider. When Scalia and liberal Justice Stephen Breyer conducted a series of debates over their competing approaches, Scalia often justified originalism by using the well-known joke about the two campers attacked by a grizzly—you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other camper.  In other words, originalism may be far from perfect, but it’s better than the subjective alternatives.

If the conclusion is that originalism should be the only or dominant mode of interpreting the Constitution, I would disagree, but I do think that having a tough-minded originalism in the mix of competing approaches is a good thing. I want judges and scholars to take the original meaning of the text and the intentions of the drafters seriously. I want them to clearly justify an interpretation that stretches the original meaning. Many observers credit Scalia and other originalists with raising the level of debate and challenging argle-bargle liberal thinking. We have nine Supreme Court justices and we’re better off with someone like Scalia on the bench, making their case forcefully and keeping the rest of us on our toes. But given originalism’s shortcomings, Justice Breyer’s more eclectic approach that includes six interpretive tools—text, history, tradition, precedent, the purpose of a statute, and the consequences—is a better model for the Court as a whole.

I would describe Scalia as like an alcoholic who knows he has a problem, goes to occasional AA meetings, but regularly falls off the wagon. Much of the time he is charming and funny and great company at the bar. But when he goes on a bender, it’s a doozy and there’s a lot of smashed-up furniture. The American people will be paying the bill for decisions like Heller and Citizen’s United for a long time to come.

Conclusion. I think at bottom we have an issue that depends on which aspect of the American founding you want to emphasize. Was the great innovation at our country’s birth the discovery of rights, eternal principles that, once discovered and properly defined, don’t change and need to be protected in their pristine vigor? Or was it representative democracy, the idea of basing government on the will and interests of the people, making use of what Hamilton in the Ninth Federalist calls a new and improved “science of politics” to create new institutions to guard against the dangers of popular rule?

If the former you will lean towards originalism, because the great danger is that as we become more distant from, and forgetful of, our origins, as conditions change and immediate interests come to the fore, we will infringe on these rights. The original meaning should be our constant rudder as we move into the future.  (And a pox on democracy, too, if it gets in the way. Case in point:  David Harsanyi, who wrote a shrill conservative rebuttal to Ezra Klein’s argument about politics making us stupid, is the author of a recent book called The People Have Spoken (And They Are Wrong):  The Case Against Democracy.)

If the latter you will want a living Constitution that responds better to the people’s will. You will side with Thomas Jefferson’s intent (if not necessarily his exact prescription) in proposing that the Constitution be rewritten every generation to keep society from being tyrannized by the past.  You will not want the original intent or the meaning of a piece of text in the eyes of people in 1787—which you may think is impossible to know in any case–to be an anchor that prevents us from moving at all.

 

I have been reading “Dark Money,” the very good new book by Jane Mayer that details how the Koch Brothers and other wealthy conservatives have put together an effective coordinated national network to influence elections. The Kochtopus plans to spend $900 million this election cycle, more than the Republican or Democratic parties.  It’s not just the amount that matters–when you read the story of the 2010 elections, for instance, it’s striking how even small amounts of money, strategically targeted, often made the difference in a close House race or, even more, at the State level.

So far it seems to me that the movement to fight political corruption has focused entirely on the supply side, not the demand side.  It’s been about changing laws regulating how much can be given to candidates or spent on political advertising, and increasing transparency so the public knows what individuals or organizations are providing support. You do this by putting together new laws, getting people elected who back them, and by creating a mass movement to protest and vote for these candidates and put pressure on elected officials.

This is a hard sell because it asks people to act indirectly; hardly anyone is immediately affected by campaign finance rules. It’s complicated and wonky and requires collective action. Is there anything you can ask citizens to do immediately, themselves, to change this dynamic? I think there might be and I wish very much that some of the organizations dedicated to this issue would explore it.

What I have in mind is a campaign to educate people about political advertising and encourage them to ignore it. When you look at how money affects elections, it’s clear that the main vector is through television advertising. Advertising is expensive—it costs big money to buy airtime for ads, to pay the consultants and advertisers to prepare the ads, and to pay the pollsters and political advisers to identify the issues and themes to put in the ads. In a fast-moving campaign, ads need to be changed and updated frequently. Money does lots of other things too, but TV advertising is usually by far the most expensive part of a campaign. Therefore, it’s the need to pay for TV that is perhaps the single biggest reason politicians need to raise money; and it’s the effectiveness of these ads that makes them irresistible to politicians and to outside groups seeking to influence the process.

It would seem possible to inoculate many viewers against being manipulated by advertising, especially the kinds of negative and misleading ads that are often the specialty of PACs and issue groups not officially connected to candidates. An educational effort might include a bipartisan appeal from well-known politicians (Al Gore and John McCain?) who could say, here’s how this game works—I should know!—and here’s why you should ignore what you see on TV.  Tell people not to watch, or at a minimum to mute the sound (I see a big MUTE button as the symbol of this effort), because these advertisers are very skilled at getting inside your head and your best defense is to avoid the message altogether. Don’t assume you can’t be manipulated! Explain that ads with the actual candidate explaining his/her position, and clearly paid for by the candidate, are OK; but any other ‘issue’ ad or ad that is paid for by some other organization should be shunned.

A good way to make the case is by comparing political advertising to other types of advertising. Does anyone imagine that advertisements for cars, or beer, or drugs are telling us the truth? Or are they carefully crafted attempts to mislead us by playing on our lust, our fears, our greed? Haven’t you watched Mad Men, we should ask the American people; think of armies of advertising experts sitting around drinking martinis and figuring out how to sell you on a candidate. Explain the advertising tricks that are commonly used. Emphasize that the people making these ads are cynics who have contempt for voters and think they can be manipulated. Make the picture as repulsive as possible.

This could be spread by op-eds, by community meetings, even by TV ads (yes, the irony…), any way to get the basic argument into people’s heads and change their behavior. It could be supplemented with a pledge that individual voters can make, the “I will not be manipulated” or the “I MUTE for political ads” pledge, with buttons and bumper stickers and Facebook pages and Twitter handles. Individuals and families could display this pledge on their cars, in their homes, and online as a sign to politicians that any money they spend on this sort of advertising will be wasted, and a warning to friends and neighbors that passing on rumors or supposed ‘facts’ derived from political advertising will be met with skepticism. It will also make it harder for candidates to try and have it both ways by benefiting from over-the-top attack ads, while trying to seem not responsible.

And a further step: a pledge to vote for the candidate who does the LEAST amount of objectionable advertising. An organized watchdog group could track advertising for particular candidates and publicize how much (how many ads, how many minutes of ads, how much money on ads) is associated with candidates in each race. Those who make the “Less is More” pledge would commit to voting for the candidate who has had the least amount of unsourced advertising, or perhaps the least amount of TV advertising period. I see hundreds of people showing up at rallies with signs saying “Less is More, and I Vote”.

Candidates could make a similar pledge to reject all outside advertising and messaging (recognizing that under current law, they may not be able to stop all of it). A promise not to invade people’s living rooms would be well-received in many primary states and in the battleground states that get saturated with advertising in October and November.

It is probably true that even the best campaign of this sort would only affect a minority of voters. But in many races that’s enough. TV advertising campaigns now may only shift a few thousand votes, and campaigns are often targeted at very specific demographics. If a counter-campaign can cut into their impact and make large amounts of TV advertising a measurable negative for more voters, Big Money will have to worry more and more that their spending will backfire.

 

America’s Inequality Spiral and the Argument for a Welfare State

We make equality a founding principle, meaning equality of rights–everyone should be treated the same under the law and by major institutions. We also want equality of opportunity so everyone has an equal chance to achieve success, get ahead, realize their potential, etc.. But we generally deny that people are equal in intelligence, talents, character, drive, and skills. Madison in the 10th Federalist asserts people differ in their ability to accumulate wealth and property. So treating people equally and giving them a level playing field will produce unequal results. What then?

It would be contrary to experience and human nature not to expect that high achievers won’t try to tilt the playing field in their favor and in favor of their children, families, and friends.  If they succeed, there is no more equality of opportunity. So some kind of intervention is needed to prevent this. This is what redistribution by the government does–it corrects to some extent for the inequalities that come about in a free society and tries to make sure that there is at least some minimum level of opportunity available to all. It tries to make sure that all the pathways to success, like access to top colleges, are not monopolized by the sons and daughters of the privileged.

We need to make sure this extends also to political choices. The rich and powerful will try to control the political process and influence elected officials; it’s critical to make sure their advantage in resources doesn’t translate into too much of an advantage in influence.

Does pushing back against the privileged class run the risk of discouraging risk-taking or investment by limiting the rewards that come with success? This is really an empirical question; the answer seems to be that you can do a lot of redistribution without blunting ambition, though of course there is SOME level where it becomes counterproductive. But high marginal tax rates in the 50s and 60s didn’t seem to hurt the economy, and lower rates and skyrocketing CEO salaries havn’t seemed to help it.