Abstract
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a 2010 US Supreme Court decision that fundamentally transformed federal election financing. As a result, we have seen a drastic increase in the amount of so-called soft money that wealthy individuals and corporations contribute to political campaigns. Following a brief overview of the case and the precedent that formed the basis for the ruling, this chapter concerns philosophical stakes of the decision and what precisely it says about the public today and the role of philosophy within it. I argue that there are three basic issues here. First is the issue of corruption. Second is the question of propaganda and the potential dangers the Citizens United case might pose for a democratic polity. Finally, I examine the dangers this poses for a democratic polity.
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Notes
- 1.
“Public Trust in Government: 1958–2017,” Pew Research Center. May 8, 2017 http://www.people-press.org/2017/05/03/public-trust-in-government-1958-2017/. Accessed December 18, 2017.
- 2.
Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (NY: Anchor Books, 2016), 280.
- 3.
Chris Cilizza, “How Citizens United Changed Politics, in 7 Charts,” Washington Post. January 22, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/01/21/how-citizens-united-changed-politics-in-6-charts/?utm_term=.b9dfe020ad18. Accessed December 26, 2017.
- 4.
My account of the DeVos family in this paragraph draws upon Mayer’s in Chap. 9 of Dark Money, in particular, pp. 282–294.
- 5.
Dark Money, 288.
- 6.
Richard Posner, “Unlimited Campaign Spending-A Good Thing?” The Becker-Posner Blog, April 8, 2012. http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2012/04/unlimited-campaign-spendinga-good-thing-posner.html .
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Political theorist Sheldon Wolin makes a case for these antidemocratic tendencies throughout his work but especially in “Fugitive Democracy,” Fugitive Democracy and Other Writings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 100–113.
- 10.
Noam Chomsky, Requiem for the American Dream: The Principles of the Concentration of Wealth and Power (NY: Seven Stories Press, 2017).
- 11.
Jon Mahoney, “Democratic Political Equality and Corporate Political Speech,” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 27, no. 2 (April 2013), 137–156.
- 12.
Ibid., 138.
- 13.
Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
- 14.
Ibid., 3. Stanley is citing Victor Klemperer, Language of the Third Reich: LTI, Linguii Tertii Imperii. Trans. Martin Brady. (London: Continuum, 2006), 2.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 86.
- 17.
Ibid., 91.
- 18.
Ibid., 93.
- 19.
Ibid., 96.
- 20.
Cf. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. 136–142.
- 21.
Ibid., 100 citing W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (NY: Dover, 1994 [1903]), 89.
- 22.
Ibid., 123.
- 23.
Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 9–10.
- 24.
Ibid., 78.
- 25.
While this sort of historicism is typically associated with the postmodernists, it has naturalist roots as well. After Hegel and Darwin, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to the idea of human nature as something fixed and unchanging.
- 26.
Like Brown, Ian Hacking creatively extends the reach of Foucault’s thought. In Hacking’s case, his interests lie in the implications of Foucault’s thought for understanding this historicist conception of identity. See, inter alia, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) and Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
- 27.
Brown, 151.
- 28.
Ibid., 151–152.
- 29.
Ibid., 152–153.
- 30.
Brown writes that “more is at stake in these four decisions than support for capital in the name of freedom. Rather, an important remaking of the demos is taking place. The first decision permits large corporations to finance elections, the ultimate icon of popular sovereignty in neoliberal democracy. The second eliminates the primary legal means by which consumers or workers band together to fight corporate abuses. The third and fourth join a string of recent laws constricting the capacity of public-sector and private-sector workers to act in concert. Together, these decisions assault every level of organized popular power and collective consciousness in the United States: citizens, consumers, workers” (153).
- 31.
Cited by Brown, 157.
- 32.
For an analysis of the public sphere as a defining trait of Enlightenment reason and, by extension, of modern democratic societies, see Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]). This book examines the origins of the public sphere in the Enlightenment before turning to the decline of public sphere with the rise of mass media under industrial capitalism. In this respect, it can be seen as a complement to Undoing the Demos.
- 33.
Brown, 161.
- 34.
Ibid.
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McCall, C. (2018). Whose Public? The Stakes of Citizens United. In: Boonin, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Public Policy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93907-0_26
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