http://www.thecommentator.com/article/1284/it_s_always_the_death_of_democracy_when_the_left_loses_an_election_isn_t_it_
I’m going to take another stab at Mitt Romney’s old ‘corporations are people too’ comment which has been lobbed around as a ‘gaffe’ for many months now.
Citizens United notwithstanding, the issue of campaign finance in a democratic society is potentially one of the greatest areas in which the United Kingdom and the United States will have their respective internal battles for decades to come. Constitutional reform can only deliver so much.
I’m sure you’ve heard all the arguments before: corporations and their management are wealth and job creators, the unions fund the left as much as private enterprise backs the right – so on and so forth.
So why do we still seem to be suffering from circular thinking when it comes to campaign and political finance? While the issues have been argued out in terms of balancing the scales of justice in such an area – perhaps we have done little to address the true driving force behind such emotional thinking on the topic: morality.
A conservative will tell you that morality in this area is defined by the effort exerted by individuals or groups who have consequently earned enough to influence elections. The application of your labour or indeed the fruits of your labour in the political sphere one might argue, is a fundamental democratic right.
On the left, it is often remarked that ‘fairness’ should be paramount – that everyone should perhaps be able only to give a capped amount (actually the system that the US has in place when it comes to direct campaign funding). In the United Kingdom, this is slightly more relaxed, with individuals able to contribute vast amounts to political parties, as author JK Rowling did when she gave £1million to the Labour Party in 2010.
But throw in Super PACS, external organisations, unions, corporate sponsorships, think-tanks and all the other appendages of political activism and soon you have, on both sides of the pond, a fine mess indeed.