Our Road to Oligarchy Was Paved in 1976
Greetings from Abu Dhabi, where it's not quite scorching yet—but plenty warm. Today’s high is 39 degrees, or 102 in freedom units. But that’s not this Sunday’s Indicator of the Week. This week, I want to draw your attention to a different number: 13.
In a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll, the headline was that the President’s approval rating has dipped to 42%. But buried in the poll was the data point that 13% of poll respondents believe the “President should disregard Supreme Court rulings he disagrees with.” That number is a proxy for the percentage of the electorate who are 1000% on board with a full on dictatorship (or at least they want that when their faction or clique is in power).
For context, 13% of the voting age population in the US is equal to the entire population of Malaysia or Peru.
My students are writing their AP exams next month and we’re currently learning about the US system of campaign finance and the various laws and court precedents that regulate it. It’s our final topic in our current study of interest groups in US politics before we end the year with a deep dive into media literacy and misinformation.
This week during an office hours conversation, I showed some of my students a video (below) of Russ Feingold, the former Democratic senator from Wisconsin, talking about his signature piece of legislation: the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act of 2002 — better known as the McCain-Feingold Act. The act was co-sponsored by the late Senator John McCain of Arizona, who worked closely with Feingold to push the reforms through.
The video feels like it’s from another planet when compared to our political moment. We all know that our politics have degraded and our institutions are dysfunctional but the decay that’s now so apparent has been slow, like mold growing in an overly damp house. Feingold’s descriptions of the bipartisan consensus around campaign finance and the desire to reduce the influence of corporations in politics in 2002 sound like an Sorkin-esque monologue from the West Wing.
The McCain-Feingold Act was largely overturned by Citizens United vs FEC but the roots of our political morass and oligarchic state of affairs are older.
One place to trace the rot to is the Watergate era. In addition to the burglaries and wiretaps, it also exposed a web of campaign finance abuses. Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President, called CREEP for excellent reasons, hoovered up millions of dollars in undisclosed, often illegal donations from corporate interests and wealthy individuals.
Some funds were laundered through fake donors; others came with the quid-pro-quo expectation of political favors. The revelations shocked the public, back when we were capable of being shocked by criminality, grift, and misconduct, and led directly to the creation of the Federal Election Commission, and stricter disclosure requirements about political contributions.
But even as new post-Watergate laws were being written, wealthy interests were looking for ways around them. They challenged the rules created by the FEC in a court case called Buckley v. Valeo. Buckely is a mess of a ruling, you can see the court grappling with their desire to prevent the further consolidation of elite control and their desire to not limit political expression. The result set the groundwork for our state of affairs today. I use the website Oyez when teaching about court cases, so it makes sense to use it here as well.
Here are the facts of the case via Oyez:
In the wake of the Watergate affair, Congress attempted to ferret out corruption in political campaigns by restricting financial contributions to candidates. Among other things, the law set limits on the amount of money an individual could contribute to a single campaign and it required reporting of contributions above a certain threshold amount. The Federal Election Commission was created to enforce the statute.
So the court faced the following Constitutional question:
Did the limits placed on electoral expenditures by the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, and related provisions of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954, violate the First Amendment's freedom of speech and association clauses?
This was not a straight up or down question and in some ways the court tried to sit on two chairs at once. In its first precedent, the court ruled that to prevent corruption (or the perception of corruption), restrictions on donations paid directly to the campaigns of candidates are constitutional and such restrictions don’t violate the First Amendment.
But then the court blew a giant hole in that ruling.
It further ruled it was unconstitutional to put limits on “independent expenditures.” Independent expenditures are a fancy way of saying PAC ads. It is here the court created a doctrine that defines our era: money is speech. Therefore limits of campaign spending—other than donations directly to the candidate—are limits on speech, and thus violate the First Amendment.
If you are alive with me in 2025, you know the result.
David Plotz, the longtime co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest explained our oligarchic reality in a way that has stuck with me for nearly a decade: we live under a system where the return on investment from political speech for the wealthy is among the best possible investments they can make.
Take, for example, a centi-billionaire facing a potential 1% wealth tax: To avoid a $1 billion tax bill, they’re incentivized to spend $10 million, $20 million, $30 million — hell, up to $999,999,999 — to carpet-bomb the country with TV, YouTube, and radio ads. If they succeed in stopping the tax, every penny they spend is effectively a positive return on investment.
In the absence of a reversal of the court’s money is speech ruling or an amendment to the Constitution, both of which are as likely as me sprouting wings and flying to Bangkok Monday morning, I can’t fathom how to unring this bell.
That means one of the core problems corroding the US political system and creating our oligarchic moment is fundamentally unchangeable.
That’s something.
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