Campaign Spending and Candidate Backgrounds Highlight Midterm Primaries
When Money Hunts for Seats, Consent Must Hunt for Itself
The crowded primaries of this season show not the vigor of self‑government, but how easily consent can be bent when political power is auctioned by interests that mean to be judges in their own case.
The scene that is set before me in these midterm contests is at once busy and strangely narrow. In Florida’s 19th District, a crowded Republican primary has “attracted a lot of out-of-state interest”; in California’s 14th, a special election is drenched in super–political action committee spending, with one such committee, backed by a national interest group, laying out $1.2 million for one Democrat and against another, while an allied group adds $1.7 million more. Elsewhere, I see companies that control much of the fertilizer market accused of monopolistic practices, farmers in Iowa “crushed by tariffs and gutted by fertilizer costs,” and candidates who chiefly fund themselves with millions. It is not obvious where the people’s own voice sits in this din of purses.
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right to make laws only “for the public good,” I meant to fix a standard by which all such scenes might be tried. Men are by nature free and equal, made by one wise Maker and sent into the world about His business; none has a claim to rule another save by that other’s consent, given for the protection of his life, liberty, and estate. The burden of proof lies, therefore, not on an elector who is slow to trust, but on those who solicit a power to bind their neighbors. They must show that what they seek is a fiduciary power, held on trust, and not a bare opportunity to serve friends and factions.
In these accounts, however, the first thing that strikes the understanding is the scale and concentration of money. A super committee spends millions to lift one candidate and depress another. A committee tied to governors sends $5 million to a single campaign. Elsewhere, candidates supply themselves with loans of $2.5 or $3 million, while others raise little or nothing. This is called speech; perhaps in part it is. Yet when those who hope to govern are made chiefly by such patrons, and when those patrons often have business before the state, it is fair to ask whether we behold consent, or the early stages of usurpation by wealth.
I do not say that every large contribution is an injury, nor that the rich man is excluded from politics because he is rich. Property, rightly gotten, is itself part of that wide word by which I have meant lives, liberties, and estates together. But there is a difference, which any plain understanding can mark, between many men of moderate fortune combining in small sums, and a few vast interests—whether corporate, agricultural, or ideological—pouring out treasure to secure those who will be friendly to them. Where those interests are accused of monopolies, or are tied to tariffs and wars that “crush” farmers by raising their costs, it begins to look as if the same hands that injure men’s estates then hire the legislators who will judge their cause. That is to make them judges in their own case.
The matter is sharpened where candidates are strangers to the communities they seek to rule. In Florida, even a candidate favored by a former president is said to have moved into the state but lately, having run for Congress elsewhere “as recently as 2022.” Other contenders attack those who “don’t have deep ties to the state,” while an elector replies that it does not signify if a man is not from Florida, if only he “preserve conservative values.” Yet the point is not local affection, but knowledge and accountability. A people entrust lawmaking to those who know the particular ways in which tariffs, fertilizer prices, and regulations bear upon their livelihoods, and who will be answerable to them, not to machines headquartered elsewhere.
Still, I would be unjust if I turned every troubling symptom into a sentence of tyranny. There are, in these contests, multiple candidates; some incumbents are defeated; even long-held seats, as in Alaska after a congressman of nearly fifty years’ standing died, can pass to new hands without the dissolution of society. Voters in California have approved new maps by ballot measure; voters in Alaska have altered the manner of their elections. These are signs that legislative power, though pressured by money and machines, has not yet hardened into an absolute that leaves no peaceful path of correction. Fear of disorder is no argument for enduring a long train of abuses; but neither is every abuse yet a train.
What, then, may a conscientious citizen conclude? Not that elections are vain, but that consent must be vigilant and somewhat mistrustful when great sums, distant committees, and “burgeoning political machines” stand between him and his representative. He ought to ask each aspirant, not only, What party do you serve? but, Who paid for your hearing, and whom do you dare cross? Until those who seek power can show that they prefer the estates of Iowa farmers to the gains of monopolists, that they value the settled interests of a district above the ambitions of those who arrive “five minutes ago” to hunt a seat, and that they hold their commission as a trust revocable upon breach, the people may vote, yet not be truly represented. A ballot is an instrument of consent; it is not a guarantee that consent has in fact been obtained.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — Government by consent and majority decision, with the legislative supreme but itself bound: a fiduciary power, held on trust, forfeited by breach.