Future Now
The IFTF Blog
God Bless You, Mr. Corporation?
The recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. FEC has received more attention and soul-searching commentary about the nature of our democracy and the role of corporate spending in the political system than any other case in recent memory. This decision is big for many reasons, but what will it mean for how political influence and persuasion is practiced?
There has been a long history of critique of undue influence of money--rising to the level of out-and-out bribery--in American political history.
The Tillman Act of 1907 was intended to reduce the influence of corporate spending in politics by banning direct campaign funding by corporations.
Justice Felix Frankfurter recalled the sentiment that led to the Tillman act, noting the fact there had been a “popular feeling that aggregated capital unduly influenced politics, an influence not stopping short of corruption.”
The repeated legislative and judicial attempts to separate corporations from legislative affairs were well-intentioned, but their ultimate effect was limited, or (arguably) irrelevant. Like life, money and power seem to "find a way."
Kurt Vonnegut in his scathing satire on the influence of wealth in the construction of American political and social order, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , relates the story of the American power-grab thusly:
When the United States...was less than a century old, Noah Rosewater and a few men like him demonstrated the folly of the Founding Fathers in one respect, those sadly recent ancestors had not made it the law of the Utopia that the wealth of each citizen [including corporate persons!] be limited.
Noah and few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing.
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America.
So, whether or not one believes that corporations have undue influence on the decisions of lawmakers and the policies that set the rules of the game for success in the U.S., it is clear that the cost of running national campaigns and the ability of those with adequate funding to influence the outcomes of elections points toward a political landscape that will be inundated as never before with attempts at persuading voters and framing the conversation around critical issues.
The tried and true persuasive techniques we've seen in the media for decades will proliferate: fear, empathy, character assassination, innuendo, and occasionally rational argument. But with the influx of massive amounts of financial resources in the political sphere, we should expect a new generation of experimental techniques at influence, persuasion, and mobilization.
Will corporations be able to carpet bomb the media sphere with their messages and agenda, or will bottom-up, grassroots groups, like MoveOn.org be able to out-maneuver them and find ways to reach people and compete in this new era of political persuasion? What new technologies or techniques of persuasion that are in their incubation will be disruptive in this complex landscape?