Is there yet a TAC-ian (or Burkean) position on campaign finance? I know that Pat Buchanan had no trouble signing on to the fairly strict campaign finance reform positions popular in the Reform Party in 2000, though as a Republican previously, and after, he hasn’t written much about the issue. My initial reaction to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling was that it might well have a positive impact on foreign-policy-related campaign spending. Because, I reasoned, corporate America has an interest in peace, in trade with the Islamic world, in short with business-like relationships where such relationships are possible. And they would spend to act as brake on the neocon/Israel hawk crazies. Somehow I envisioned more from Exxon and less from Sheldon Adelson than has turned out to be the case.
MJ Rosenberg has a strong column up worrying that the new campaign-spending regime will empower the Right forever, and it’s not a kind of Right which TAC readers will find congenial. Writes MJ:
It appears now that all the legitimate complaints that the pursuit of campaign contributions had utterly distorted U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is becoming a small part of a much larger catastrophe.
That is because as critical as the Middle East is, the whole issue is now being subsumed by a much larger threat: the threat, perhaps likelihood, that thanks to the Citizens United decision, the presidency and Congress will be permanently owned by the Republican right.
As someone who cast his first presidential vote for George McGovern, I am aware that there are left-wing rich people, and without them there would have been no effective political protest against the Vietnam war. Still I wonder if the United States is going to turn into a country in which politicians are simply like race-horses, wholly owned and trained by various competing billionaires, exercising little more autonomy or independent judgment than I’ll Have Another. Since I assume that the Citizens United decision is unlikely to be overturned soon, our solution may simply be a wiser class of rich people, our salvation coming when Bill Gates decides that restoring sanity in his own country a greater priority than ending global poverty, or whatever.
elmysterio 
Scott McConnell wrote:
“Is there yet a TAC-ian (or Burkean) position on campaign finance?”
This is a great issue McConnell has put his finger on. On substantive issue after issue you keep coming back to the present “system” (more like anarchy as the default state) as being the root of lots of the problem.
Reluctantly and slowly I have just come to the conclusion that government funding of campaigns is the way to go. I know it’s no absolute panacea, but otherwise I looked at the instinctive suspicion I had toward government running anything much less election financing and realized that this was totally misplaced with financing.
If government ought to be running *anything,* that is, well should it not be running elections above all, and running them as strictly and cleanly and transparently as possible?
It is after all rather striking that we have this great substantive theory our governmental system is based on that is so great and wise that after 200 years it continues to earn our devotion and indeed the growing devotion of the rest of the world, but that we then allow all that to go for absolute nought because of allowing the mere procedures behind it to corrupt and degrade it so totally.
And what’s more than just suspicious but in fact downright revolting than seeing our politicians running around kissing asses left and right for the stuffed envelopes that are the absolute be-all and end-all of their tenures?
I realize that this may well not be any panacea, and that private individuals and interest may still have the right to run their own ads and etc. But maybe governmental financing of campaigns will create the dynamic whereby the people will better understand and start to denounce the difference between those candidates who are mere creatures of private interests and those who are not. Right now indeed it can seem that there are *no* candidates who aren’t mere creatures of private interests so it would at the very least be very interesting to see us enacting a system where at least some could try it otherwise and see what happens.
Either that, and/or strict term limits, but does anyone really argue that the present system is anything other than ugly, if not perhaps taking us to the point of utter ruin?