Green Party Presidential Candidate: What Made Citizens United Inevitable

So much talk about the Supreme Court case of Citizens United v. The F. E. C. (2010), with so little understanding. My Philosophy of Science professor, Elinor Ostrom, is the only woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. She intentionally fell outside the microeconomics of what is usually called “The Chicago School.” Her method was holistic. Her purpose was equitable. Her attraction was that she thought in an altogether different way about matters of importance than most political economists.

What Elinor insisted on was that her students become aware of the pyramid of knowledge, as well as the ladder of abstraction. Some concepts are more important than others. Lesser concepts need the ladder in order to find the most powerful explanation for whatever needed exploration. In doing so, she drew on notions like “the forms” at the core of the Platonic writings, referencing those who saw only the reflected shadows on the cave wall.

The notion of “the forms” evolved in intellectual history. It may have reached its zenith when the two greatest philosophers since the Greeks, Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel, wrote of their differentiated perspectives on the equation 5 + 7 = 12. Kant labelled the equation “synthetic”, while Hegel labelled the equation “analytic.” What do those terms mean? What they mean, for our purposes, is nothing more complicated than when we talk about apples and apples and apples and oranges. Analytic is the former; synthetic the latter.

Now we are engaged in a great legal civil war, testing whether our legal system can provide equitable law. The camel of inequity stuck his nose under the tent of outlandish campaign expenditures with Buckley v. Valeo, a 1976 case that distinguished between contributions to political campaigns and expenditures on campaigns. That distinction was made by the justice who wrote the opinion in Buckley, the inestimable Lewis Powell, who had but briefly beforehand written the infamous Powell Memorandum explaining to President Richard Nixon how the rabble had taken over the country—and how to get it back. Even former football standout Byron “Whizzer” White and Associate Justice said the above distinction was nonsense but the other six associate justices and the Chief Justice went along with Powell, and the parade of electoral oligarchy stepped off into history. Contributions could be limited. Blow the door off with expenditures and no court would interfere.