Bankrupting Democracy

A deeply researched investigation that shows how the long-held ideas protecting unlimited campaign spending as free speech that once served the needs of political candidates and voters are now shaped to serve the desires of interest groups, threatening the future of American democracy.

In the 2010 Citizens United decision, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy stated that the precedent they were overturning “interferes with the ‘open marketplace’ of ideas protected by the First Amendment.” For the majority who ruled in this case, money was in some sense the equivalent of speech, meaning that spending should be allowed under the guise of a marketplace of ideas. But what does this actually mean? And what are the consequences?

Both critics and advocates of this marketplace of ideas often treat it as an abstract principle; one that focuses on competition among different voices that allows for the most popular, and therefore best, ideas to gain prominence. But the marketplace of ideas is not a single tool. There are multiple mechanisms at play, all of which influence the rules and regulations behind this competition. Therefore, the marketplace of ideas should be understood not as a single idea but as a collection of smaller norms that build a regulatory, market-like system.

Bankrupting Democracy traces the development of this system, which Nathan Katz calls the “money-speech paradigm.” Through a historical analysis of campaign finance reform discourses that have occurred within the legislative record and the Supreme Court, Katz demonstrates how these ideologies have caused radical changes to political speech. He pairs these data with an analysis of the changing patterns of political advertisers—the PACs, Super PACs, interest groups, candidates, and parties that all spend a large portion, often the majority, of their money on television advertisements. By combining these components, Katz shows how changes to the money-speech paradigm have shifted from a focus on political candidates and their right to public exposure to a system that focuses on supporting interest groups’ pursuit of social and economic dominance.

At each stage in the development of the current system, proponents of the reforms assumed the security of democratic institutions, leaving them unprotected against the consolidation of corporate power. Bankrupting Democracy illuminates this market system that threatens to unravel the very fabric of American society.

Nathan Katz is assistant professor of sociology at Louisiana Tech University.