{"id":15251,"date":"2015-05-21T12:38:23","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T16:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15251"},"modified":"2015-05-21T12:38:23","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T16:38:23","slug":"making-big-donors-part-of-the-political-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=15251","title":{"rendered":"making big donors part of the political debate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Beinart quotes<\/a>\u00a0an estimate that $5 billion may be raised from private donors for\u00a0the 2016 election, much of it coming from extremely rich individuals who are able to keep relatively low profiles. Some of these donors\u00a0may personally give amounts in the hundreds of millions. Here is a case for forcing them onto\u00a0the public stage.<\/p>\n

On one hand, there is no doubt that their\u00a0money conveys power. You can’t make a serious run at the White House without raising\u00a0hundreds of millions of dollars. Barack Obama did\u00a0comparatively\u00a0well at raising\u00a0small contributions, yet (according to our good friends at the Center for Responsive Politics<\/a>), 68% of his support–almost half a billion dollars–came from “large individual donors” in 2012.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the only true power is the vote, which is distributed to adult citizens equally (leaving aside felony disenfranchisement and a few other exceptions). Billions are\u00a0spent to persuade voters how to use their power. But voters have the ability not to be persuaded, and they have–collectively–far more persuasive power over their fellow citizens\u00a0than all the big donors and professional campaigns in America.<\/p>\n

So campaign money is both a massive force and a kind of phantom, theoretically susceptible to being ignored and therefore becoming irrelevant.<\/p>\n

Of course, there is something romantic and bootless about that latter point. It’s like saying that HIV has no real power because we could all just stop having unprotected sex and the virus would go extinct. Its power is very real because human behavior is predictably imperfect.<\/p>\n

Likewise, we\u00a0could imagine, per Habermas, that the only power becomes\u00a0the power of the stronger argument. But real people (including me)\u00a0will miss\u00a0valid arguments unless they are loudly and repeatedly\u00a0delivered,\u00a0and we will accept\u00a0invalid<\/em> arguments that are effectively transmitted. Since expensive political\u00a0communications\u00a0are generally\u00a0untrustworthy, it would be better if everyone ignored them all and decided how to vote based on personal discussions and reflections and high-quality news media. But as long as they are pervasive, they will matter.<\/p>\n

The question, then, is how to break the spell of money.\u00a0Beinart has a suggestion. He observes, “Right now, while presidential candidates experience proctological scrutiny from the press, mega-donors experience relatively little. As a result, they wield enormous power over government policy without facing the public glare that, in a democracy, those with great political power should have to endure.” His proposal: the news media should put the\u00a0mega-donors under close scrutiny, reporting\u00a0all their statements and positions and financial interests. Then a candidate who takes money from Billionaire X would gain\u00a0power to communicate but also become associated with the embarrassing personal opinions and interests of the said Billionaire.<\/p>\n

This is not\u00a0a direct strategy for getting people to ignore what\u00a0money buys. It actually makes money\u00a0more central (while perhaps discouraging candidates from taking\u00a0funds\u00a0from some sources). The reporting that Beinart recommends will encourage ad\u00a0hominem<\/em> arguments, i.e., not “You are wrong because your premise is mistaken” but “You are wrong because you took money from a guy who said offensive things.” But once you are using large amounts of money to purchase influence over voters, your motives and goals do become relevant. If campaign spending is “speech,” then\u00a0a donor is a speaker in the public sphere who can be\u00a0held to account. And Beinart’s\u00a0proposed strategy could be a disruptive move that, while it does not create an ideal political conversation, breaks the spell\u00a0of the current one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Beinart quotes\u00a0an estimate that $5 billion may be raised from private donors for\u00a0the 2016 election, much of it coming from extremely rich individuals who are able to keep relatively low profiles. Some of these donors\u00a0may personally give amounts in the hundreds of millions. Here is a case for forcing them onto\u00a0the public stage. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-election","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15251"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15308,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15251\/revisions\/15308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}