So Long As Corporations Are Treated As People, People Will Not Be Recognized As Citizens, So Long As Money Is Treated As Speech, Only Money Will Talk

Dahlia Lithwick is paying close attention to the oral arguments in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in the US Supreme Court, since there are real signs that this case may be used to overturn McConnell v. FEC (which in 2003 upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law) or Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce. There are real worries that the ever more rightward-leaning Roberts Court will undermine the few fragile scarcely effectual barriers to an outright suffusion of corporate billions into elections already creaking under the corrupting weight of money-grubbing.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the too-possible too-proximate dismantling of campaign finance laws in favor of corporations by the Movement Republican Roberts Court could transform the political landscape nearly as much as the too-unlikely too-distant implementation of Obama's public option to provide a real check and enforcement mechanism on corporate insurance's catastrophic stranglehold on healthcare provision would do -- and yet we hear little to nothing and understand even less about the one as compared to the other.

Liberal commentators cannot be content simply to expose the hypocrisy of corporate-militarist Movement Republicans who rant and rail against "activist judges" and then place market fundamentalist and Christianist fundamentalists on the courts who indulge in the most rampant imaginable activism.

All that's true, of course, but exposing hypocrisies and ironies isn't enough. Not nearly enough.

In fact, it's rather lazy and often utterly ineffectual.

Yes, Republicans accuse others of things they themselves do: They are racists who accuse others of racism, they are authoritarians who accuse others of authoritarianism, they celebrate deadly corporate healthcare rationing and then accuse others of forming "death panels," they revel in death -- via wars, guns, pollution, poverty, executions, back alley abortions -- and then call themselves "pro-lfe."

Yes, they're hypocrites, yes, they're liars, yes, it's always opposite day in Republicanland.

And, yes, liberals keep pointing this out, and assuming the higher ground... and these villains keep on doing it and doing it and doing it.

They will not stop. They do not care what we say, they do not care that we expose them, they do not care that we are smarter and better and more sensible than them (in fact they know this already and their resentment fuels no small amount of their villainy).

Documenting the atrocities is an inadequate check on -- and may even be something of an energizing prompt for -- the project of Movement Republicanism caught up in the global circuit of corporate-militarism, of neoliberalism/neoconservatism.

In political discourse, to expose the lies and hypocrisies of truly vicious or truly cynical or truly delusive opponents without offering up alternate content and proposals is to relegate yourself always only to reaction, passivity, tattling, gossip.

For too long too many liberals have been speaking truth to power always only in the tonalities of elegy. They have been sad or even smug spectators offering up an endless testimony to the senseless ongoing dismantling of democratic civilization.

It isn't enough to expose the hypocrisy of the radical corporatizing activism of the Movement Republican Roberts Court, one must expose the project for what it is and then offer up an alternate vision of the wholesome activism that will animate a liberal court to come.

So Long As Corporations Are Treated As People, People Will Not Be Recognized As Citizens. Thus we must resist and refuse Movement Republican corporatist activism to expand the power of these institution. This activism is indeed hypocritical given their endless histrionic handwaving about their "originalism" and abhorrence of "activism," but the hypocrisy occludes rather than clarifies the actual stakes at hand. Corporate charters must be re-circumscribed (as they have been in many other eras), their functions specified, their terms limited, their public impacts regulated and rendered accountable to more than their accountants, their liabilities re-figured. Institutions providing indispensable public services must be broken up whenever they grow too big to fail (much of what gets described as finance) or too concentrated to suffer competitors (much of what gets described as utilities and infrastructure), they must be subjected to public competition if they provide services that cannot pass muster as commodities subjected to market competition (much of what gets described as healthcare).

So Long As Money Is Treated As Speech, Only Money Will Talk. Thus we must find our way to public financing of elections to ensure that citizens have the power to restrain abuses through recourse to the regular re-election or overthrow of their representatives, but also through our ability to run for office ourselves with a chance of success equal to our qualifications, even if we lack personal fortunes or refuse to be beholden to moneyed interests. But in the shorter term we have to be able at the very least to track the connections between the fortunate few and those who are elected to represent majorities but who have been bought and paid for by moneyed minorities. Further, we need to regain some purchase on the fraud and fabulizing of the few, we need to be able to hold those who lie and deceive in the pursuit of short-term and parochial profit-taking, in their marketing and advertising and promotion and spin.

Yes, they are stupid. Yes, they are vulgar. Yes, they are mean. Yes, they are hateful. Yes, they are liars. Yes, they are deluded.

But it is not enough to endlessly illustrate their limitations to render ourselves otherwise, we must demonstrate ourselves intelligent, sensitive, generous, responsible, honest, reasonable through the alternate substance we offer up in making our own cases and efforts.