Archive Columns:Society and Politics

On Money in Politics (Metro Philadelphia, November 2, 2002)

    The other night, my friend was waxing wroth about money in politics. Because he works in the political realm, he sees firsthand the shameless exchange of lucre for attention, and he is given to bemoaning this in a well rehearsed but nonetheless heartfelt dudgeon.

    Against his eloquent warmth lay my goading nonchalance. In practice, the money game must seem tiresome and incessantly venal, one side constantly contributing, the other constantly requiring. Viewed theoretically though, money is morally neutral, a tool that makes exchanges convenient by creating a generic currency of value. If you want to buy a paint brush, you don't have to find something of equal value to trade for it. You pay $5 and are done.

    In addition to the currency of value, money more interestingly creates a currency of feeling. Just as in the economic realm money makes getting a paint brush more easy, in the political realm, money makes the interplay of ideas and of passions more efficient, because you can trade your money for communication and you can translate your passion by trading even more money. The ideas, like the desire for a paint brush, may be good or bad, but money doesn't create them, it provides a medium for their exchange, a proxy for desire.

    To use a more modern analogy, money exchanges are life viewed digitally. I have a computer program linked to a piano that will render anything played on the piano into a schema of numbered inputs. Unlike music, the schema is not pretty, or inspiring and as Keats said about Newton's prism and the rainbow, it disillusions one at first by seeming to strip reality of its poetry. But the schema isn't corrupting the music, the schema is the music. That is, it is the music quantified, a rigorously accurate reflection of the myriad phrases and feelings by the player.

    [In a similar way, money is political interest quantified. Viewed from its schematic side, politics looks like a ruthless, shameless system of monetary inputs. But these aren't corrupting the interplay of ideas, these are giving voice to the interplay of ideas by the purchase of communication. However disillusioning, however nakedly exposed, money contributions reflect with rigorous accuracy the interests, enthusiasms and passions of real people.

    I think that, to some extent, my friend imagines some more virtuous political life of election signs and exchanged ideas and thinks $500/plate dinners pervert the process. But, like my computer schema, the $500 dinner in some sense is the process, or at least, enables it by paying for the election signs and the spread of ideas. Money is political interest quantified.

    In addition to value and zeal, money also makes a commodity of power. When people complain about money in politics, they are really complaining about an imagined abuse of power, typically by corporations, unions or large lobbies against the individual. But what are these but groups of individuals with shared goals? The goal you agree with is a cause; the one you despise is a special interest. Money flows quite democratically to both and the complaint that some entities have more money and therefore more power in the political sphere is a complaint about a truism, namely that popular ideas have more support in a democracy than unpopular ones.

    People who want to restrict money contributions imagine that this will make political discourse, and access, more egalitarian. It is a lovely thought, but it relies on the mistaken notion that rich people (or institutions)are powerful because they have a lot of money, but this gets it backwards, i.e. rich people or institutions are powerful because in some way they are popular: they make a product or provide a service and have a lot of money because they are popular. This may seem like the same thing at first, but it is a question of chronology. Bill Gates, for example now has a lot of money, because he had a wizard invention that millions of people wanted. Without the powerful, popular invention, he wouldn't have the money. The money he has is the (exact) reflection of his powerful idea.

    There may be much to reproach in American politics, but to blame the influence of money is simply an accountant's way of blaming the influence of communication, enthusiasm, and, with rare exceptions, legitimate power. Limiting money's use will not improve discourse or equalize power, because money is not the source of power but its reflection. You can cover the mirror but this will not alter the beast before it.

    I think that my friend is seeing, so to speak, the schema side of politics, and finds it a disillusioning, ruthless, shameless system of inputs. He sees it as a corruption of politics instead of as the exercise of politics, the near perfect digital reflection of the thousands of interests, enthusiasms, feelings and opinions of individuals aligning for common goals.

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