Tech Paladin

Every once in a while, the Supreme Court decides to drop a real bombshell. The last big one we got was Roe vs. Wade, but yesterday was another one of those days, with the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission case that was decided yesterday. I think it promises to be the next big Supreme Court-created wedge issue. And what a wedge it is! On the Huffington Post, commenters are saying no less than that it represents a fascistic corporate coup, while the Drudge Report proclaims it a victory for free speech.

When one side sees it as an attack on democracy, and the other sees it as a triumph of liberty, you know there’s gonna be a fight. I found a couple good round-ups of the differing opinions regarding the decision. And as I read the articles and debates listed there, I noticed that the primary difference between reactions was not reflected so much in the writers’ political parties, but in the way they perceived and framed the issue itself.

Those who celebrated the decision generally spoke about free speech, and the dangers of regulating and privileging certain types of speech above others. They warned that once the ball on clamping down certain types of speech had gotten rolling, it would keep going until all speech was regulated. They decried the fact that a man who produced a political video had more rights to show it than a man and his friends organized as a corporation created for the same purpose. They wondered it was fair that GE’s political speech was protected because it owned NBC, but corporations that had no media subsidiaries were muzzled.

On the other side, people who viewed the decision as unfavorable focused in on entirely different aspects. They tended to talk about free speech very little, while talking about democracy itself quite a lot. They worried that corporations would dominate political discourses with infusions of cash. They felt that regulation or even banning of political speech can be justified if it furthers the goals of an informed polity. They ruminated on the substantial differences between corporations and individuals and sought to elevate individual voices while clamping down on corporate ones.

In short, one side focused on the process: Is it fair that men organized as corporations have fewer speech rights then other men? Does “free speech” really mean anything if congress can strip it from disfavored groups and entities at will, and enact laws about who can speak where, when, and about what subject?

The other focused on the outcome: What will unfettered corporate influence and money do to democracy? How will the common man’s political voice be heard in a sea of corporate cash? What does democracy really mean if money can speak louder than votes?

I encourage you to read the NYTimes debate here, but here are telling snippets from each contributor that I think illustrates my point that they focus on dramatically different elements:

The debaters opposed to the decision:

Heather K. Gerken: “The court has done real damage to the cause of reform[…]”

Richard L. Hasen: “The way the opinion is written will make it very hard for Congress or state legislatures to put effective controls on money in campaigns, or even adopt effective public financing laws.”

Michael Waldman: “What can be done to prevent this outcome? Given the huge power of corporations to tilt policy, at the very least it may make sense to pass laws saying that corporations and unions with government contracts cannot spend unlimited sums on campaigns.”

Fred Wertheimer: “Today’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case is a disaster for the American people. It will unleash unprecedented amounts of corporate “influence-seeking” money on our elections and create unprecedented opportunities for corporate “influence-buying” corruption.”

Now the ones in favor:

Eugene Volokh: “The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision simply means that other corporations, and unions, will enjoy much the same First Amendment rights that media corporations have.”

Joel M. Gora: “The First Amendment has always been based on the idea that the more speech we have, the better off we are, as individuals and as a people. The Citizens United case eloquently reaffirms and reinforces that core constitutional principle.”

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You see how all the writers opposed to the decision focused on its perceived negative political outcome, while those in favor focused on the perceived improvements to the process of free speech?

I am totally fascinated with this stuff. Ever since I read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions, I’ve been seeing patterns like this, and the reactions to this decision actually fall along very predictable lines. I encourage you to read his book, which completely changed my thinking about life, philosophy, and politics. Sometime I’ll write a real review of it.

The issues this judgement addresses are age-old and pretty irreconcilable. I think we’re going to be debating it for a very, very long time.

Update:

Here’s a set of word clouds from a Harvard social science blog showing the relative frequency of words used in the majority and minority opinions:

The majority opinion:

So say the Harvard social scientists: “Obviously, what we see is a strong consideration of “speech” interests — no doubt discussed in the context of First Amendment issues.”

And the minority one:

So say the Harvard social scientists: “The actual phrase “speech” is much less frequent, suggesting that the liberal Justices were more concerned with corporations influencing elections than free speech issues.”

Fascinating!

Can anyone explain to me what this is? Whenever I read anything about gays and the political battles surrounding them, there are always a few dudes who come out of the woodwork and start yelling about, “THE RADICAL HOMOSEXUAL AGENDA!” I would love for anyone to explain to me just what this is or means, because I’ve known and am friends with a whole bunch of gay people, and none of them had an “agenda” beyond simply wanting to be recognized as fellow human beings, entitled to all the rights and privileges as any other one, regardless of what who they prefer to share their plumbing with.

Ultimately it usually comes down to the fact that there are a lot of people who are scared of gays and don’t relish the thought of living in a world where homosexuality is considered acceptable or (shudder) normal. But their mistake is in thinking that their perceived right to inhabit such a world trumps the actual right of the people in question to peacefully live their own lives free from government persecution and discrimination. This is what the civil rights movement was fought about: blacks were legally and socially second-class citizens, with the local governments complicit in their repression. Such repression can’t happen without a government allowing or at least turning a blind eye to it, and the keys to ending it were normalizing blacks in society, and having a bigger government force the smaller ones to acknowledge and protect black people’s freedom just like they did for white people.

And that’s really what this is all about: anti-gay people basically admit that they want the government to discriminate against gay people and treat them like second-class citizens and allow them to do so as well, in the same way that blacks and women were treated for much of the last century.

Sadly, the bigotry engendered by the belief that you have the right to live in a country whose government represses groups you disapprove of doesn’t end with the modern right; I find about as many examples of the left doing it too. One I’d like to draw attention to is (surprise!) the Brady Campaign’s Doug Pennington. Buried in his latest post is a telling sentence:

An aside: isn’t it ironic how some libertarians want government to stay out of their lives, yet have no problem with forcing other people to live with loaded, concealed weapons everywhere they turn? The grocery store; the park; the school; the airport. Apparently, we have the “freedom” to live with what these so-called libertarians tell us to live with. After all, they have the guns, right?

Try replacing the words “loaded, concealed weapons” with “gays” or “negroes”. Looks a lot more bigoted now, huh? The truth is, we have to live with a lot of things that we might find distasteful. The Bill of Rights in fact ensures it!

For example, the First Amendment forces us to live with inflammatory newspaper articles that insult our beliefs, and fringe religions that blaspheme against all that we consider holy; it does this because each individual’s freedom to believe, express, and worship what he wishes trumps everybody else’s sense of offense and umbrage against same. Similarly, the Second Amendment forces us to live with our neighbors’ right to own and carry weapons, and the Fourteenth Amendment forces us to accept black people and other racial minorities as legally equal to white people.

No government can force freedom onto anyone; it can only force bigots to recognize others’ existing freedoms. That’s the whole point of the Bill of Rights, and that was the genius behind the American form of government — the idea that the government would act as a guarantor of liberty rather than its chief infringer, as was the case under theocracy and monarchy. Our history is a rollercoaster ride of coming closer and backing away from that ideal, as exemplified by highs like the civil rights movement or the decriminalization of sodomy, and lows like the Japanese-American internment during World War II or the normalization of the income tax in 1913.

But let no one believe that any one political party has a monopoly on this bigotry. It was beloved Democrat FDR who interned the Japanese-Americans by executive order as much as it was was racist Republicans who opposed civil rights. In this vein, I’ll end with one of my favorite Reason.tv videos:

Sebastian is absolutely right:

I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.

To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.

It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.

Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.