After using the Fourteenth to the constitution to repeal federal legislation restricting the use of money in elections based on the fraudulent precedent, first established in the 1880s, the corporations were “persons” whose rights could not be abridged by local or state laws(a view that was regarded as a major distortion of the intent of the fourteenth amendment even then, and had nothing to do with campaign financing legislation) the Supreme Court has gone much further and declared all restrictions on the use of money in elections to be a violation of the first amendment.
When I first read this, two things popped immediately into my mind. The first was a line from a song in Marc Blitzstein’s classic political opera, The Cradle Will Rock. “The press, the press, freedom of the press, for the one who pays the best.” Then I thought immediately of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, where a slaveholder dominated Supreme Court in league with a slaveholder dominated national administration, repudiated an abolitionist inspired attempt to roll back the expansion of slavery with a decision that removed all restrictions on slavery in the western territories and potentially the existing free states.
There was widespread outrage in the free states against the Dred Scott decision, but the outrage itself meant little. The Republican Party, which had only come into existence a year earlier, organized that outrage politically, running against the decision everywhere and, with the help of a major economic crisis, what would in the 20th century be called a depression, won the congressional elections of 1858. The times were of course very different. They were revolutionary times, as the slaveholders sought by force to expand slavery into the Kansas territory with the support of President Buchanan, the abolitionist John Brown gained fame nationally by his role in the armed struggle against the pro slavery forces in Kansas, and the future of the Republic itself was very much in doubt.
Today, while I don’t want to exaggerate, there are some important parallels. The “tea party Republicans,” like the pro slavery Southern Democrats, are demanding more and more concessions from the “regular” rightwing Republicans who have appeased and collaborated with them, as the pro slavery Southern Democrats were demanding more and more concessions from the Northern Democrats who had long appeased and collaborated with them. The Supreme Court is clearly on the side of these ultra-right Republicans, who to a considerable extent are the creation of two neo Robber Baron capitalists, the Koch Brothers, who individually are two of the richest men in the world. To permit the decision to stand is to join a wake for representative government and what used to be called “liberal democracy” in the United States.
What can be done? First, all forces of labor and the left, particularly the CPUSA can and must organize and educate working people, district by district, neighborhood by neighborhood. Democratic congressional candidates through the country should, in their own interest, make opposition to the decision a major part of their campaigns. The decision will, without any restriction on the use of money in elections, enable the Koch Brothers and their ilk to flood media with an endless stream of propaganda to elect and re-elect politicians like Paul Ryan, who will pay them back with crippling cuts against social security and Medicare, further tax reductions and exemptions for corporations and the rich, more inequality and real poverty in society . They will continue to consolidate a society of, to quote the New Deal economist John Kenneth Galbreaith in his classic work, The Affluent Society , “private wealth and public squalor”---with of course far else “private wealth” in terms of money incomes and assets for working people then they had when Galbriath wrote The Affluent Society, in the 1950s, when unions represented around thirty percent of the work force and could bargain successfully for wage increases and today’s mountain of consumer debt did not exist.
It is important also to understand that merely reversing the decision, restoring the old largely ineffectual restrictions on the use of money in politics, is no real answer to the crisis, something that abolitionists understood when organizing against the Dred Scott decision and against all other slaveholder maneuvers to expand their power. Fighting these slaveholder attacks had to be done immediately. Continuing to organize and educate that the only solution for everyone was the abolition of slavery had to continue, because without that campaign, even non abolitionist Republicans, “moderate anti-slavery men” would compromise with the slaveholders.
Here I am not speaking about the long-term necessity of abolishing capitalism and replacing it with socialism. I am speaking about what most of the world considers “political democracy,” which has long been well below average by international standards in the U.S. and now faces possible extinction.
It is agreed upon globally that political democracy rests upon a foundation of “free and fair elections.” What are “free and fair elections?” Elections based on effective, not only formal universal suffrage, meaning elections where voter registration and access to voting is both simplified, (in a number of countries made a requirement for citizens), and various attempts at voter suppression and or ballot box fixing are both banned and punished if they are discovered.
Free and fair elections also in most countries mean restrictions on the funding of such elections since, as one conservative Englishman, as I remember, ironically, a member of the House of Lords, said decades ago, without such restrictions the parties spending the most money would be assured of victory most of the time
These restrictions vary from country to country, some strictly limiting the spending of major parties to maintain equality, others allowing major parties or individual candidates to spend more than their rivals through various loopholes, but no developed country that calls itself a democracy permits unchecked spending in political campaigns. Many countries also have limited time periods for campaigning, six weeks for example, where money can be spent.
Finally, many countries have “equal time “provisions in electronic media for political parties and access to media for minor parties and candidates. The U.S. had in a very limited form such equal time provisions in terms of access to public affairs programs on radio and television, even providing very limited access to minor parties, but Supreme Court decisions in the Reagan era ended that.
What would U.S. politics be like if all television advertising for campaigns could only begin after Labor Day, about two months before the election? If that advertising were limited to a fraction of what it presently is by serious campaign funding limits? If minority parties and candidates would be included in public affairs programming and given at least some access to television advertising through a public fund, perhaps through a surcharge on the major parties?
If, as existed briefly in New York City Council elections in the 1930s and 1940s, a system of proportional representation was instituted to permit minority parties to articulate their issues and gain some representation. In New York, proportional representation led to the election of a number of union supported American Labor Party candidates and two CPUSA candidates, Benjamin Davis, Jr. in Harlem and Peter Cacchione in Brooklyn, because voters could safely vote for those candidates, whose policies they supported, without risking the election of Republican candidate whom they feared, as they would in “winner take all” electoral systems.
If U.S. politics functioned like this, it would be a serious first level political democracy. And that is what we should organize and educate for now. Is that possible under the capitalism we currently have? If and when we have the mass support to advance and implement such a program, that will depend on the capitalists, just as the victory of the Republican party in the 1858 congressional elections and Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, put the onus of accepting the democratic will of the people as expressed in elections, even it seriously undermined their political power, on the slaveholders. They of course chose secession and rebellion against the Republic and in the process destroyed themselves.
The Koch brothers and their ilk would probably do something like that if they were faced with a serious first level democracy, but I doubt that most of the rest of their class would join them and their "tea party" henchmen
