Clay Davis Was Right

Recently political scientist Scott Lemiuex had a nice rejoinder to a piece written by Libby Nelson at The Splinter about the fact that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee received political contributions from already former Hollywood kingpin and allegedly monstrously evil person Harvey Weinstein.

I will leave it to others to discuss the life and acts of Harvey Weinstein, but I was struck by Lemiuex's title that "Unilateral Disarmament Is Not A Great Plan" when it comes to how Democrats ought to approach raising money.

Lemiuex quoted the meat of Nelson's argument as follows:

But finding the thousands of dollars Weinstein donated over the many years he has spent as a major Democratic donor, and dutifully Doing Something with it, does not solve The Harvey Problem. The problem does not go away along with his money. Instead, the Weinstein story—and the collateral damage it has caused Democrats—should provoke a moment of reflection: As long as they keep taking money from the super-rich—as long as sustaining the party depends on huge sums of money from people like Harvey Weinstein—things like this will happen. It’s not that every super-rich guy is a predator, though wow, a ton of them are; it’s that when you run your campaigns largely on the donations of rich people, you tie yourselves to them, whether you like it or not, whether you mean to or not.

I'll give credit to Nelson, she points out the ridiculousness nature of some Republicans trying to turn this into some sort of Hillary Clinton "scandal." In addition, she points out some of the very real problems that having a politics dependent on raising large amounts of campaign cash cause in a more sophisticated way than complaining for the umpteenth time we need to "get big money out of politics" because it's "corrupt." And she has the honestly to admit she has no idea (okay she implies she has no idea) about how a "better" way of winning elections could be created. As she puts it at the end of the piece, "If Democrats want to avoid the stink of abusers and untouchable criminals following them to Washington, they’ve got to find a way to get there without their rancid cash."

So there were some fair points, but I have to agree with Lemiuex's response to the implied argument that what the Democratic Party needs to do to win elections is "unilaterally disarm" when it comes to raising money from rich people As he puts it:

I’ve mentioned before how a lot of online lefty discourse — and this tendency, ironically, is particularly strong among people who define themselves as non- or anti- liberal — takes a liberal individualist approach to what are primarily structural problems. The idea that the Democratic Party is just making an unfettered choice to be reliant on rich donors to be competitive is problematic, to say the least. Because of Buckley v. Valeo and its progeny, there will be tons of money in American politics whatever the Democratic Party does. Bernie (and to a lesser extent Obama) may have shown that you can run a presidential campaign relying mostly or exclusively on small donors — but it just doesn’t scale down. There just aren’t enough small donors to competitively fund every marginal congressional and state or local race. And it’s not just venal Democrats who are vulnerable to this money — Russ Feingold can be drowned by PAC money just like Evan Bayh. 

While I think Lemiuex is dead on about this weird tendency in some lefty discourse, if anything I think that he doesn't go far enough. The "collateral damage" Nelson refers to is probably zero when it comes to any upcoming election. And how do I know that? Well because the fact that Donald Trump boasted about doing similar things to what Weinstein is accused of doing on a tape that was then broadcasted on national television over and over again didn't stop him from becoming president!

And Lemiuex is certainly correct that the number of people who can run Bernie style campaigns based on a gazillion small donors is incredibly small, especially considering we live in a polity with literally thousands of elected positions of some importance.

Oh sure there's a moral question about who it's okay to take money from when it comes to legal campaign contributions and who should be refused. A panel of ethicists and philosophers could conduct a very interesting seminar on what constitutes a "deal breaker" when it comes to political donations.

But on a practical level Senator Clay Davis' vulgar maxim about who it's okay to take money from is how campaigns tend to operate.

In a earlier, more simple political time (ie 2012) Lemiuex once wrote a nice post on Garry Wills' review of Robert Caro's classic second book on LBJ Means of Ascent. Lemiuex is a fan of Caro and the book series as a whole, but, well really didn't like that one. There are several reasons for this, but a big one seems to be that Caro spends lots of time talking about Johnson's vulgarity and...uh...questionable campaign tactics, while ignoring what the Good Ol'e Boy LBJ was running against named Coke Stevenson was all about.

In other words LBJ's vulgarity becomes less important when you think of him as a New Dealer who'd be instrumental in helping to bring about the downfall of legal segregation. While Stevenson's "honesty" and anecdotes about his ole timey battered coffee pot and cowboys saluting him as he rode past seem different when one thinks of him as the staunch segregationist and man ideologically opposed to any sort of federal spending on the welfare state that he was as Governor of Texas.

Wills' sums up the problem with this approach to political biography beautifully:

Caro has touched on a serious matter, the problem of maintaining human values in the scramble for power. Seneca faced this challenge in its most acute form, as the court adviser to a corrupt emperor. Addressing it in his dialogue on the tranquil mind, he admitted that honorable men cannot serve in some foul regimes. But even then, he argues, the virtuous man should “disengage with a dragging foot, retiring the standards with a military discipline retained.” It is too easy to conclude, prematurely, that the only “way to save oneself is to bury oneself.” 

In other words while it's true morality has a place in politics, it's not enough for that to be the be all and end all. In fact:

Seneca would judge that a politician who refuses to answer questions has barely been engaged in the first place. Those who decide they are too good for politics may be right, but they are often the least qualified judges, either of their own virtue or the system’s viciousness.

For better or worse money is very important in our political system. You could work to try and change than, but that just means you'll have to find a way to win elections in the "corrupt system" if only to create a new and better system. A system in which say relationships and information would be the driving force, because obviously there's no way for an elite few to monopolize those scarce resources.

Oh wait, that's kind of how Hollywood works?

Nelson may be correct that our current campaign finance system is gross and taints the Democrats in ways that can't be redeemed. But she's probably not that qualified to judge. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made her choice on the compromises associated with choosing to live a political public life long ago.