Say Anything Blog

Brian C. Anderson:

The rise of alternative media—political talk radio in the eighties, cable news in the nineties, and the blogosphere in the new millennium—has broken the liberal monopoly over news and opinion outlets. The Left understands acutely the implications of this revolution, blaming much of the Democratic Party’s current electoral trouble on the influence of the new media’s vigorous conservative voices. Instead of fighting back with ideas, however, today’s liberals quietly, relentlessly, and illiberally are working to smother this flourishing universe of political discourse under a tangle of campaign-finance and media regulations. Their campaign represents the most sustained attack on free political speech in the United States since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. Though Republicans have the most to lose in the short run, all Americans who care about our most fundamental rights and the civic health of our democracy need to understand what’s going on—and resist it.

The most imminent danger comes from campaign-finance rules, especially those spawned by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act. Republican maverick John McCain’s co-sponsorship aside, the bill passed only because of overwhelming Dem support. It’s easy to see why liberals have spearheaded the nation’s three-decade experiment with campaign-finance regulation. Seeking to rid politics of “big-money corruption,” election-law reforms obstruct the kinds of political speech—political ads and perhaps now the feisty editorializing of the new media—that escape the filter of the mainstream press and the academy, left-wing fiefdoms still regulation-free. Campaign-finance reform, notes columnist George Will, by steadily expanding “government’s control of the political campaigns that decide who controls government,” advances “liberalism’s program of extending government supervision of life.”

Read the whole thing.

As I have said many times before, campaign finance reform is not really aimed so much at stopping political corruption as it is aimed at helping to keep incumbents in office by limiting the ability of challengers to collect money from supporters and level criticism of their opponents through the media. This regulation of political speech (for that is what it is at its heart) is subtle and has gone under the radar of most Americans. This is because rather than an outright ban on certain types of speech the laws simply dampen political speech by subjecting it to an incessant amount of regulation.

The Jack Abramoff debacle has shown us that a certain amount of campaign finance regulation is necessary, but the campaign finance reforms passed in recent years by our legislators go too far. Especially considering the fact that many are now seeking to extend that regulation to the free political speech exercised by bloggers and blog commenters.

Political money does need to be watched with a wary eye, but not at the expense of free political expression.

city journal, brian c. anderson, campaign finance reform, free speech