When One Man’s Money Drowns a Million Voices

I read that, in Texas, more than $158 million in outside money now presses down upon a single Senate contest, much of it flowing in one great torrent from the hands of the world’s richest man, passed through a super PAC, and delivered to a group favouring one candidate over another. The opposing campaign calls itself David against Goliath. The phrase is arresting, but I am less concerned with the stature of the two men who stand on the ballot, and more with the giant who never appears upon it, yet swings his purse as a kind of invisible club. Where so much money speaks, one must ask whose voice the government will, in practice, obey.

When I defined political power in the Second Treatise as a right of making laws, with penalties of death and less, only for the public good, I had in view authority openly entrusted to a known legislative, not influence purchased by private treasure. Yet the thing is akin. To determine who shall frame the laws is part of the law-making power itself. If one person, by reason of immense wealth, can so weight the means of persuasion that he makes one candidate’s speech thunder while his rival’s scarcely whispers, this is not mere participation; it is a species of dominion. All power that places some in a condition of subjection must justify itself as something free and equal men could have consented to; the burden lies on power, not on liberty.

Let me therefore suppose men in the state of nature, where every person has, by God’s workmanship, an equal title to his life, liberty, and estate, and where each may freely persuade another, so long as he harms not his neighbour’s property in this large sense. If they quit that condition to form a commonwealth, it is because known laws, and an indifferent judge, better secure them from force and fraud. Could they rationally consent to an order where one among them, by accident of fortune, may so overtop the rest that his money can remake the field on which rulers are chosen, while the ordinary citizen, like the bartender who says she “makes decent money” yet cannot dream of a house, finds that political influence is as far beyond her reach as land? I doubt they would think such a bargain an improvement on equality.

I do not say that the mere spending of money to express one’s judgment is in itself a violation of the law of nature, for that law forbids harm to life, health, liberty, or possessions, not the earnest recommending of one’s opinions. But the manner and magnitude matter. When outside spending, by party leadership and one mighty fortune together, rises so high that one campaign likens itself to David before Goliath, we approach a point where the wealthy few effectively place a price upon public favour. Then the ordinary voter is not convinced so much as surrounded. He faces not arguments addressed to his understanding, but an environment curated by those who can buy every vantage point. That comes perilously near to making men’s political judgment answer, not to evidence, but to another’s purse.

In my Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I urged that assent ought to be proportioned to the proofs that appear to the mind, and that believing without such grounds is a failure of one’s duty. If the means of information in an election are so skewed by a vast and sudden influx of private money that most citizens see only one side fairly presented, their understanding is abused. Outwardly they may vote; inwardly they have not been given a fair occasion to judge. This resembles, in the civil sphere, what I once argued about forced religion: penalties can produce outward conformity, but never true persuasion. Money, deployed on such a massive scale, risks becoming a soft penalty for dissent, not by throwing men in prison, but by consigning their voices to obscurity.

Some will answer that such giving is voluntary and, unlike the prince’s prerogative, answerable to law. Yet we must ask: what law here secures that those who thus interpose themselves between the people and their magistrates act for the public good, and not as judges in their own case? The man who funds a campaign that will shape the rules under which his businesses, properties, and causes are treated, effectively buys a chance to sit, unseen, beside the legislative. This is a kind of prerogative without office, discretion without charge, power without the declared trust of the people or any regular means of recall. It may be cloaked as generosity, but it bears the features of usurpation.

Whether this single episode amounts already to that long train of abuses which dissolves governments I do not affirm, for the facts before me are few. But the pattern is intelligible enough to warn us. If each great contest invites ever greater unchecked fortunes to pour through friendly channels into the work of choosing rulers, the commonwealth quietly shifts from a society of equal, independent proprietors into a theatre where a handful of giants arrange the stage. The dissolution of such corrupt practices need not dissolve society; it is rather their toleration that, in time, will dissolve the very consent on which government stands. Men cannot be expected to honour as their own a power whose first title is another man’s money.

uncertainty_note":"I write under the constraint of fragmentary reports, and cannot yet judge how far this immense spending is an isolated extravagance or part of a settled design tending one way."}```