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Scott has a new post on AI and money in politics. I'd like to take a step back and talk about how we got here.
In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United that there are essentially no constitutional limits on political spending and advertising. At the time, it was widely anticipated that this would turn American politics into the wild west of corruption, crony capitalism, and corporate propaganda. But in the years after the decision, the feared corporate catastrophe failed to materialize. Trump didn't win in 2016 because of corporate support. In the primary, he bragged that he was self-funding his campaign and so wasn't beholden to special interests. On the Democrat side, Bernie Sanders got a lot of milage out of constantly reminding people that he didn't have a SuperPac.
In 2019, Scott wrote the prophetic Too Much Dark Money in Almonds, in which he pointed out that wealthy actors are probably underspending on politics and then brainstormed ways to turn money into political influence. By 2022, we started to see serious attempts at using previously-unheard-of amounts of money to systematically affect the political process. Sam Bankman-Fried was too-clever-by-half donating money he didn't technically own, but Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter ended wokeness overnight and likely won Trump the 2024 election. If Scott is to be believed, the cryptocurrency and AI industries are well on their way to fulfilling SBF's dream of rooting the state.
Why did it take 10+ years for this to happen? My hypothesis: cultural inertia (and shame).
Despite being purported as the main beneficiaries of Citizens United, big corporations weren't really trying to spend large sums of money on politics. Exxon Mobil didn't park an oil tanker full of cash in the Chesapeake waiting for the signal to shower Washington in oil money as part of their dastardly plan. That just wasn't how buisinesses operated. It took time to develop both a theoretical framework for how to turn an abritrarily large amount of money into political power (it's a lot more complicated than simply buying ads), and to develop a philosophical framework for why this isn't cartoonishly evil.
“Money in politics” is far too broad a term.
Say you’re a Koch brothers libertarian-ish conservative. You want big immigration (including illegal, although you’re not too invested in amnesty), very low taxes particularly on the rich and on corporate earnings, and maybe you’re culturally moderately anti-woke and especially dislike that you got hit with some very expensive civil rights based employment rulings a few years ago but you still have a gay grandson or something.
Which cause are you going to donate a billion dollars to in the next cycle? The party of Stephen Miller, or the party of AOC?
Musk buying Twitter only “worked” (and again, whether it worked has yet to be decided, both on a long term cultural and on an economic basis) because there was already a large constituency of social conservatives who could use the platform to align and organize, especially on topics like immigration. That movement long predated the acquisition, Miller and Bannon had been central to Trump’s initial anti-illegal-immigration messaging in 2016, back when Musk was still a lib centrist and openly criticized Trump as ‘not the right guy’.
Now, back your big corporation. If I want deregulation and tax cuts, I might give a billion dollars to some centrist Dems and some libertarian Republicans. But then it turns out that a future Dem administration has a heavy presence of environmentalist progressives who dislike my polluting factories. And it turns out a future GOP administration contains politicians who owe fealty to and get support from a bunch of farmers or mining interests who don’t like me sourcing cheap inputs for my big business and like protectionist tariffs. So the billion dollars will be worth less than you might imagine.
Have you read the article? The winning tactic is to emulate the AIPAC. You talk to all candidates running for some South Dakota seat and see which one doesn't talk about mining regulations. You tell'em you will support them as long as they don't vote for mining regulations. Then your PAC trashes the reputation of all other candidates and your guy wins. Then you casually, but constantly mention this fact in every hotel lobby in DC: anyone who even thinks about mining regulations is your mortal enemy and you will gladly spend millions of dollars to tank their campaign.
This only works if a lot of people really do oppose mining regulations, so spending millions of dollars is effective.
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