I haven’t read the actual McCutcheon opinion yet (if ever). To be honest , the minutiae of campaign-finance law makes my head hurt, mostly because of the system’s artificial and inane complexity. To be more honest, I have generally always accepted that campaigns with more money tend to win, but I’ve never really understood the mechanics of why. Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money offers a bit of post-McCutcheon tough love that, I think, nails the real problem:

My thought on the McCutcheon case’s importance is as follows. Liberals need to quit whining about the money. I’m not saying the case isn’t a big deal. It is. But I am saying that the plutocrats have always had far more money than working people and they’ve always used it to control politics the best they can.

***

The problem today is that progressives believe the ballot box is where change is made, when in fact it is where change is consolidated. Organize on the ground to demand the change desired and the money can be overcome. But if you think a social movement is buying ad time on television or the right kind of media messaging, that’s a game that progressives are never going to win.

(Emphasis added)

How do political campaigns spend money? That’s actually a serious, non-rhetorical question. I know they pay for massive amounts of advertising, along with all the expenses of running a campaign. For the purposes of discussing how money influences politics, the advertising seems like the pertinent issue.

Paying money directly to a government official to influence a specific decision is, as far as I know, still considered “bribery” or “corruption” and is still illegal. What we’re talking about with Citizens United and McCutcheon are the payments made, directly or indirectly, to political campaigns. My simplistic understanding of how this works is as follows:

1. Donate money to campaign (or to PAC or whatever).
2. Money goes to pay for campaign advertising.
3. Voters see advertising.
4. Candidate who spent the most on advertising wins.

I think the real question, then, is what is actually happening during step 3, and that’s where Loomis thinks progressives have it all wrong. I’m inclined to agree. (Again, let me stress that I’ve taken one class at the college level or higher that might be construed as “political science,” and we didn’t learn squat about elections.) I don’t have all of the answers, or even any of them, but this seems like a good time to reevaluate some of the assumptions at the core of how we do politics.

Perhaps the over-simplified assumption that people will vote for the candidate they see the most on TV is incomplete. Maybe it is true that progressives are unlikely ever to beat the Republicans at the mass media campaigning game—especially considering how Republicans have shown time and again that they have no problem making shit up as they go along if it helps them win, damned be the consequences.

It is also fair to say that voters in general do not make decisions based solely on campaign marketing. Conservatives are still better at a certain type of community organizing (irony intended), which leads to Loomis’ suggestion that progressives need to “organize on the ground to demand the change desired.”

I have long held that modern-day conservatism rarely survives a head-on collision with empathy, and empathy is generally fostered by personal knowledge and experience. Just look at the caricatures that so many conservative voters believe about people who follow various progressive causes, be they reproductive rights advocates, advocates for actual religious freedom (both “freedom of” and “freedom from”), labor advocates, and so forth.

It is probably (okay, certainly) naive to think that massive amounts of outreach seeking to remedy these blatant misconceptions have much short-term viability, but what the hell. Progressives have done crazier stuff before.

Now, how do we do it? Hell if I know. Anyone?

Photo credit: “Corporate PAC Campaign Contributions Have Tripled Over the Last Two Decades” by citizens4taxjustice [CC BY 2.0], via Flickr.