Hacker News Reader

Comment by bradleyjg | Hacker News Reader

It’s a pretty abrupt turnaround from the same legal movement that brought us Citizens United.

I’d be interested in a fair (i.e. not overly critical or fawning) book length history of the Federalist Society and how it’s evolved.

View on HN

It's a mistake to think of much of the American right as a legal movement or theory vs something more akin to a moral or religious one. Consistency is not the point. The examples of this in the media are the easiest to see: consider the performative outrage and hurt feelings you'll get on a Monday with the grief of how everyone is such a snowflake today on a Tuesday.

(EDIT: this is in all likelihood true for every political party everywhere - that in practice not every decision comes down to strict application of some theory - but the American right often makes fairly strong claims to some inherent pureness of principle that cannot be backed up by the facts of their behavior.)

>this is in all likelihood true for every political party everywhere

Of course it is. And of course consistency is not the point. Hypocrisy is just good politics. "It's bad when you do but good when we do it" is optimal strategy.

Check out Schmitt for the "friend/enemy distinction" in politics [0]. All political factions plays this game, this is fundamental to democracy [1]. Holding your opponents to standards and principles you yourself don't follow is how you win. And of course speech rules within social media platforms is fundamentally a political issue.

[0] https://youtu.be/0d3aRYlSHDU "The friend-enemy distinction"

[1] https://youtu.be/HqgLlYO4JSo "Carl Schmitt On the Contradiction Between Parliamentarism and Democracy"

Sorry, can you explain the turnaround to me? What’s the relationship between Citizens United and this?

Citizens United determined that corporations have some of the same natural rights that people do. In particular, First Amendment right, which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do.

This ruling countermands that: the (implicit) right to not be compelled to speak would seemingly no longer apply to corporations or, more accurately, the people within them.

Edit: It's important to note that corporations' rights to moderate their online holdings does not rely on the CU ruling.

A more charitable way to put this: you don't lose your First Amendment rights just because you joined with other people for commercial or other purposes.

That's not charitable, that's obsequious!

You have never lost your First Amendment rights in the context of a corporate venture. Citizens United goes substantially beyond affirming that fact: it establishes a separate notion of 1A personhood for the corporation itself.

> You have never lost your First Amendment rights in the context of a corporate venture

Hmm. Technically yeah, but corporations tend to gag their own employees more than the government gags corporations. The corporation can say just about anything it wants about politics and faces no repercussions from the government, but if an employee says the wrong thing about politics, they'll be shitcanned very quickly.

> Technically yeah, but corporations tend to gag their own employees more than the government gags corporations.

That's my point! That's the political financing world as established post-CU.

That's because it's an employee employer relationship. If say the wrong shit my gf might break up with me, is that censorship on her part?

But that's the same between government and corporations. It's an entity built of a relationship between people and the government

Not by choice, at least not reasonable choice.

I can find another job corporation must have its relationship with the government. Basically choice

It’s the same old “personhood” fiction for doing things in groups that’s been around since Dartmouth College vs Woodward, which is over 200 years at this point.

Corporations are also entitled to other rights that can be exercised by groups, like not having their property searched without a warrant or seized without just compensation, or their contracts broken. They are presumed innocent in court unless demonstrated guilty.

The actual Citizens in question were getting together (uniting, if you will) to spend money and engage in overtly political speech in a tradition that goes back to Thomas Paine. They used a non-charitable not-for-profit corporation to make and to show a stupid movie about Hillary Clinton. They used a corporation because that’s what you’re supposed to use for things like this and the alternative is sending the money to one private person’s individual bank account and that’s got all sorts of problems. And the court found that was a valid way for the people who contributed to exercise their rights to free speech, because of course it is.

This is the second time in this thread[1] that someone has tried to talk Citizens United down into some sort of scrappy outfit, when it was anything but.

I am also not convinced that use of a personal bank account was a significant problem here, unless you mean in the sense that the FEC (rightfully) prohibits excessive individual contributions.

Assuming it was, however: it stands to reason that everyone (including myself!) would be content with a legal structure where N people can pool their money into a publicly auditable political contributions account. I would happily support a law that makes that easier! But that wasn't the intended goal with CU -- the goal there was to channel extraordinary donations from a very small handful of individuals in a manner not accountable to the public.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32880236

You know what? You want to talk down Citizens United the organization, say I’m playing them as too scrappy and they’re really big money? … be my guest.

But don’t use your personal bank accounts to run businesses or charities, and don’t let anyone at the business or charities you might some day run do that either. That’s a massive red flag, the IRS will come auditing and looking for money laundering, and besides that there’s just an ocean of ways that can go wrong.

And the mechanism for sharing your account like you want already exists. It is called “incorporation”. That is like 85% of the point, easily. (That and doing things with the money, like entering into contracts or owning property.) You’re reinventing the corporation.

Anyway. The goal of CU was to air a movie (a stupid political hit-piece movie, I wouldn’t watch it, but it’s plenty politics).

Personal bank account? You want to get audited, sued and loose everything you own?Because that is how you can achieve that.

Why is a for profit corporation the right instrument here? It seems to me that wanting to join together for political speech doesn't need a profit motive, since there is another motive. Does America not recognize provide any manners for organization that are not for profit without needing to be charitable?

A 'foundation' in the Netherlands (where I am from) would serve perfectly. And it seems to make sense to me to bar for-profit organizations from influencing elections because of the inherent conflict.

Further: Citizens United didn't just pop into our reality, fully formed, from a vacuum. Decades of prior jurisprudence and SCOTUS rulings related to campaign speech led to it.

Too many people think CU was some sort of this-changes-everything moment when it was actually a fairly narrow, technical decision based on prior rulings.

A slow knife is a knife nonetheless!

I agree that CU was a culmination of decades of jurisprudence. But that doesn't meaningfully change the fact that it has had a substantial effect on corporate money in politics.

Right it means that every dollar counts in our political decision making

Right, which is a very bad place to be -- it takes the already-low standard for politicking and campaigning and lowers it further. Why make yourself accountable to your constituents when you can keep your base inflamed with an infinite supply of PAC-funded rage clips?

I don't think that's accurate. I don't think anyone believed that joining a company would -- for example -- mean that they were no longer allowed to make financial contributions, individually, to political campaigns.

Citizens United affirmed that it was ok for corporations to use corporate funds to make political speech via financial contributions. Not allowing that would not imply that people who work for a corporation have lost their individual first amendment rights.

This is correct... but there's also a good reason as to why allowing companies might be a good idea.

Companies allow individuals to limit their liability.

Now I'm sure there are people who abuse this, but it also allows good people to not risk their life getting involved in a political process where they could be sued for their personal assets.

Perhaps it would be better if the government created a separate category though to separate regular businesses from political liability protection "businesses".

I'm still not entirely sure that would be for the best though on a practical level. Businesses do advocate for themselves with lots of money but that money also prefers a stable boring economy... meaning without those actors, we might start seeing laws and lawmakers that are crazy on both sides more than we are now.

> which in turn means that corporations can do the same politicking (and political funding) that natural persons do.

How can a corporation do any of these without natural persons being actually the ones deciding on and performing these actions? Corporation is, after all, just a form of organization of natural persons, and cannot do anything on its own.

In Citizens United, government argued that the government can ban you from publishing a book, unless you’re completely self funding it: if any corporate funds are used in book publishing process (as they typically are with books where authors are paid royalties, it is likely that no books you ever heard about have been completely self-funded). Are you also supporting this position, that government can suppress your speech if any at any point corporate funds are used?

> Corporation is, after all, just a form of organization of natural persons, and cannot do anything on its own.

A corporation is a synthetic legal object: beyond basic restrictions on its form, it's allowed to legislate itself internally according to whatever bylaws and structure it pleases. There is no requirement (and no particular precedent) for them having a democratic structure.

This produces a fundamental tension between the people who comprise the corporation and the decisions that the corporation makes: the corporation can choose to do things that are overwhelmingly unpopular with its employees without significant recourse, since the corporation does not operate according to the will of its members.

In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

> Are you also supporting this position, that government can suppress your speech if any at any point corporate funds are used?

No. I'm not obliged to defend whatever argument the USG's lawyers presented during the particulars of the CU case.

> This produces a fundamental tension between the people who comprise the corporation and the decisions that the corporation makes: the corporation can choose to do things that are overwhelmingly unpopular with its employees without significant recourse, since the corporation does not operate according to the will of its members.

Sure, but it’s still natural persons who are actually making those decisions, no? After all, a “synthetic legal object” cannot actually make any decision. You seem to be conceding that the Citizen United did in fact protect the speech right of natural persons, you just complain about the technical aspects of how this speech act was performed.

> In other words: corporations are naturally susceptible to undemocratic power concentrations, where a small number of executives or board members use the financial heft of the corporate body to achieve their personal goals. Allowing those concentrations to then seep into our democratic system is fundamentally corrosive.

So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

Also, given that you seem to believe that the government should be allowed to block speech by powerful corporations, what about speech by powerful and rich individuals? Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

If it's a natural person, then they can do it with their own time and money. This is not what we've seen in the post-CU political financing world: we've increasingly seen opaque corporate structures where unknown individuals ply unknown amounts of money (collected from the labor of people who almost certainly wouldn't approve it directly) into races.

CU does nothing to protect the free expression of individuals; it has markedly diminished the expressive power of individuals in the political sphere in favor of opaque and legally established (rather than natural) entities.

> So you are only against Citizens United as applied to big and powerful corporations, but are totally fine with it with less powerful corporations? Say, you totally support the actual plaintiff, the Citizens United organization, in its right to publish the movie that was the subject matter in the case?

I don't know if this is intentional on your part, but you're dropping a key piece of context: Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers. It's not some kind of scrappy outfit with a handful of unpaid undergraduate interns, and it would not exist independent of the corporate interests that use it as a more palatable front for political influence ("Koch Interests Action Campaign" just doesn't have quite the same ring to it, I think).

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Frankly, there should be no private financing of elections at all. But that's not realistic.

Realistically: rich and powerful people have the exact same right to engage in electoral politics as everyone else, and there is no immediately feasible way to stop them from dominating those politics via their wealth and power. What we can do is make those attempts at domination as transparent as possible. Rulings like CU directly stand in the way of electoral transparency.

> If it's a natural person, then they can do it with their own time and money.

> (...)

> Citizens United (the organization) is a PAC, with extraordinarily wealthy corporate financiers.

So what is your complaint here, exactly? That wealthy corporate financiers can do everything that Citizens United tried to do, as long as at no point any of the funds pass through any corporation or a non-profit? Seems like you're just trying to make the speech of the wealthy corporate financiers difficult. I don't think people should lose their rights just because they are wealthy.

Nobody is talking about anybody losing any rights. To paraphase Anatole France: the law, in its majestic equality, permits the rich as well as the poor to express and petition as private individuals.

My "complaint" is about civic integrity and transparency: you are (presumably) a member of the same society as me, so you should have an intuitive (and civically gained) understanding that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Our country is better off when those who engage in our political processes, especially disproportionately, cannot hide behind corporate structures.

Agreed. This is why we insist on campaign finance limits and public lists of donors. See new article just today from the UK where someone wanted to donate $300k to a US election, and did so by funneling it through a lobbying group to obfuscate the foreign source.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-chief-of-staff-in-f...

The key point being made is that corporations give both an opaque knowledge of their funding and also a multiplier effect of that funding in a way that a wealthy individual cannot. You saw this immediately with astroturfing on candidates and issues all neatly hidden behind the PAC facade, with no way to discern who funded it.

No, because they can't actually do everything that Citizens United tried to do.

Here's a structure that I think would be fairly unobjectionable: Citizens United works collectively to raise funds for political causes. Once funds are raised, the money -- in its entirety, minus administrative and other overhead costs -- is distributed to all the employees of Citizens United itself. That money is taxed, as it should be. Then the employees are free to voluntarily choose to contribute that money -- up to individual contribution limits -- to whatever candidates they so choose.

The same should be the case if an ordinary corporation (one that doesn't exist for political purposes) wants to donate to political causes: they should be forced to distribute the sum total of that desired contribution as salary to employees, who could then choose to make (or not make) those contributions.

Obviously there are flaws to this plan, and it needs more scrutiny and fleshing out, but I think it is much more democracy-preserving and -- critically -- transparent than just allowing corporations to act as "people" and fund political campaigns directly, or via shadowy means.

Is CU allowed to pay people a nominal fee to be on-paper employees, whose only responsibility is to, a few times a year, sign a release form that allows CU to make a bundle of political donations on their behalf, with the fee paid out to the individual.

Or on the personal level, I can't actually tell if it's illegal for me to pay you $3000 to sign a contract saying you will donate $2600 to a particular candidate. And if it's legal for me and you do to that, why shouldn't it be legal for a corporate entity to do that at scale?

And it's certainly legal for you to hire me to handle the minutia of donating money to a political candidate.

> Sure, but it’s still natural persons who are actually making those decisions, no?

It is a small handful of natural persons (or corporate board or executive team) deciding for the entire corporation full of people who have zero say that the fruits of their economic output (under the auspices of the corporation) are being used to support a particular political party or candidate.

If we look at individual political campaign contributions, then it's one person deciding that some of their hard-earned cash should go to support a particular candidate or cause. But with a corporate structure, it's five people deciding that the collectively-earned cash of thousands of people should go to support a particular candidate or cause.

To put it another way, an individual campaign contribution is "one person, one vote". A corporate contribution is "one person, many votes".

And no, most people do not have the realistic option to quit their job because they don't agree with the political contributions the executives have decided the company will make.

> Should government also have a right to restrict speech of individuals if they are rich and powerful enough?

Governments already do this: individuals are subject to political campaign contribution limits[0]. This unfortunately gets muddied by PACs and the like, which was the issue at hand in Citizens United.

[0] https://www.fec.gov/help-candidates-and-committees/candidate...

How do monetary donations translate into votes? Whether I give a candidate $1 or $1million, I still get only one vote; the only merit of donating money is to help my candidate make their views better known to more people, each of whom can now make a better-informed decision.

There are many cases of well funded candidates (be they self-funded or funded by small donors) failing to win elections; e.g. Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders on the national stage. Despite tremendous advertising, these candidates were deemed inferior by enough voters to lose.

> How do monetary donations translate into votes?

For precisely the same reason that advertising works: people in general are susceptible to psychological manipulation, subtle or otherwise.

Are you suggesting that you cannot actually make any decision, only your decision-making part of your brain can ? ;)

Also, I think that one of our mistakes was to not require limits on the duration of a company (because they used to be shut down once their goal was accomplished?). In comparison, even the richest human has a well-limited lifespan...

> you seem to believe that the government should be allowed to block speech by powerful corporations, what about speech by powerful and rich individuals?

It's like speed-limits. You can only drive so fast. Similarly we should limit how many dollars any single person can spend on manipulating public opinion.

With corporations I guess we should divide the amount they spend on political adds by the number of share-holders, and put a limit on that.

> It's like speed-limits. You can only drive so fast. Similarly we should limit how many dollars any single person can spend on manipulating public opinion.

Does this apply to all advertising, or just "political" advertising? Is "Enjoy Coca Cola" the acceptable kind of "manipulating public opinion", or the bad kind that is limited? Who draws the distinction?

Is Shell or Exxon allowed to advertise their products? Are they allowed to advertise their products in a positive light? Are there spending limits on their just, like, normal product advertising?

Can I air anti-oil and pro-clean-air advertisements? Are these "political" even if Shell's aren't?

Good questions. I think companies should be allowed to advertise their products.

But advertising for who should be elected to run the government is a different ball-game. Why? Because government is not just a product you could refuse to "buy".

Government should represent us. But it should not represent rich people more than anybody else, which is what happens if the rich can choose the government based on political advertising and misinformation.

I think feigned confusion for the purpose of disagreement is rude.

The Federalist Society is very poorly named, with aims nearly diametrically opposed to the Federalists it is named after.

Not too surprised that so many HNers don't know this, so I should have explained better in the previous comment. The Federalist party called for a strong national government to fix all the ills in the previously weak confederation, and they succeeded spectacularly, making the US the most powerful government on Earth instead of a bunch of warring factions making their own treaties, regulations, money, and tariffs. The very first aim of the Federalist Society is "checking federal power."

It's all about the context. Federalists wanted a stronger government compared to Anti-Federalists who wanted something akin to a confederation. Nowadays the debate is not between federalists and confederalists, that ship has sailed, it is between federalists and unitarists.

I think that history is happening as we speak (Yo, media outlets/reporters interested in writing a feature! This would be an amazing topic.). The crux is really 2016/Trump, Adrian Vermeule's "common good constitutionalism", and outlets like Claremont's The American Mind. For lack of a better term, MAGA conservatives are building an intellectual infrastructure for a very aggressive conservative judiciary right now.

Can we stop miscategorizing reactionary regressivism as "conservatism" ? There is nothing conservative about it. They're essentially trying to drag us back at least a few decades and destroy longstanding institutions, including things like separation of church and state and the right to access medical care.

No. Because as much as your absolute moral certitude might feel good to express you aren’t changing anyone’s mind with it. On the contrary.

There’s tens if not hundreds of millions of them and same for you guys. We are all stuck together in one polity.

If we are ever going to achieve a synthesis and get back to a healthier place it’s not going to involve the kind of rhetoric you are indulging in here.

Whoa things escalated quickly, points like these are a complicated of saying no their baddies and here's some fear on top.

Rhetoric? I'm making an objective point about the political spectrum. Moldbug labeled his own philosophy as the Reaction, and condemned conservatism as being doomed to perpetual failure because some progressivism inevitably occurs regardless. And it's just plainly nonsensical to label a movement aimed at undermining longstanding institutions as "conservative".

As far as synthesis and reconciliation, for a long time I viewed the answer as that of respecting individual liberty. Each party seems to get its constituents excited about a desire for individual freedoms on topics that matter to them, and then transmutes that energy into enacting authoritarian regulations that benefit their commercial sponsors. I had hoped that over time the liberty would be an attractor that gained ever more ground. But the flare up of grassroots authoritarianism, specifically in the Republican party where it has gone mainstream, has shown this was too optimistic. So I'm left hoping that there are enough actual conservatives horrified by these developments that will end up voting for the actually conservative options (which now seems to be mostly in the Democratic party) to keep the off the rails reactionary populism from causing too much damage.

Some Republican movements have been authoritarian, but an effort to prevent people from saying that which is undesirable is definition authoritarian just as much if not more so. I don't know what example of authoritarianism you would offer as characteristic of the Republican party, but I'm sure you could offer more than one or two. That's because both political parties must push authoritarianism because both must accumulate authoritarian power to stay in the game, lest they be overpowered by the opposing party.

While constituents, we the people, agree on most points like personal freedom, individuality, respect of human life, and liberty etc., politicians of both parties, out of necessity, must paint their opponents as the authoritarian regime, set on revoking personal freedom and individuality, and devaluing human life.

If you dislike either party, it's not because one is more authoritarian than the other. It's because we lack the mental capacity to retain all the information that makes up the world around us, and must therefore make easier to process, generalizations to survive; Republican, Democrat, grassroots, mainstream, Black, Hispanic, White, etc. And it's obviously no secret that this necessity to generalize is very much exploitable.

What you don't like about the Republican party is all the things that are also the Democratic party, but only in a generalized view that the opposing parties' electorate has succeeded to exploit in your mind.

This is simply not true. You're trying to do a 'both sides are bad it's only your perception coloring your things' deal, but I live in a red state where Republicans encouraged bounty hunters to go after and harass women while also trying to control them if they leave to other states.

The only 'generalized view' is the one being created by Republicans, which I see pushed by Republicans and supported by Republicans. You don't have to look far to see some of the dreadful things they're pushing, and trying to pretend both sides are equally bad is not only intellectually dishonest but it's also argumentally lazy.

You've given me anecdotes and then proceeded to generalize. And called me lazy, which taken together is hilarious. Let's investigate that philosophy, shall we?

Generalizing by nature requires the ignorance of certain truths or anecdotes, in favor of others in order to simplify and conceptualize complex ideas about the world around us.

Read that again. Generalizing requires ignorance.

When you generalize, which you just did, you are, if only by definition, wrong. You must be, logically. If you need help gaining some understanding of logic systems, I'm happy to oblige, because I'm not "argumentally" lazy. (That's not a real word by the way.)

Not all Democrats make up words. Not all Republicans hire bounty hunters.

In summary, when you generalize people as a group to be of a particular belief or characteristic, you must by definition ignore the vast majority of ideas that are intrinsic to the humanity and individuality within the group. That is dehumanizing; it's factually wrong, and it's frankly immoral.

The whole bounty hunter thing is something that was championed by the Republican party. Both locally here in Texas as well as by the party as a whole. I'm not sure how you can call that generalizing when the party directly supports that position. If someone calls themselves a Republican and votes for them knowing that this is their position, then they tacitly support it.

You're effectively taking the stance that you cannot ever criticize a political party for its actions because some small portion of its constituents may disagree which is like I mentioned before, the easy way out. It's avoiding arguing against the actual critique in favor of moving the argument somewhere entirely different.

That's not what I'm saying. But suit yourself. Let's run with your line of thinking and see how that plays out for you. Let's generalize the other way for the sake of debate.

Let's assume you voted Democrat sometime before 2018.

SC Justice Kennedy, a Republican made it illegal to prosecute gays for sodomy.

Kennedy was on the bench so if you voted Democrat, I guess you're anti-gay, you sick bastard! (Me too apparently! Since I did.)

Sure, Democrats are fighting for civil liberties, right? Unless you want to talk about how they are actually anti-gay, and opposed Trump's rules that federally prevent discriminating cross dressers at work. Didn't hear about that one? Well, that might be because you're busy listening to Democrat politicians YELLING SO LOUD about how they are pro gay rights. Pro civil rights. While they go sit in Congress and vote, just like everyone else, for the corporation who gave them the biggest campaign contribution. Check for yourself at Congress.gov what your Democrat politicians are voting for. Should we brand you with all of those horrible things they voted for like Intuit's grip on the complexities of the tax system? It's your fault taxes are hard to file, I guess! Surely that's a Democratic ideal! I blame you! I should, right? Isn't that what you're saying? That we blame you for your politicians?

And if anything I just said about you isn't true, well, it's just a generalization, isn't it? So by your philosophy, I'm right. Whether you're anti gay or not, you aren't an individual so you don't actually have any opinion except what the Democratic party says your opinion is when they vote in Congress. You are anti-gay now and I don't care how much you want to defend yourself you can't because you voted Democrat. You're a gay hater bro. That's that. That's just who you are.

At least by your philosophy.

Which I very clearly disagree with.

> SC Justice Kennedy, a Republican made it illegal to prosecute gays for sodomy ... Kennedy was on the bench so if you voted Democrat, I guess you're anti-gay

Politics is so full of contradictions, that you can't simply take an inversion and use it to argue much of anything. I'm sure you could come up with a good example to illustrate the individual-vs-collective distinction, but this isn't it.

Also at a certain point the policies of the collective do matter, especially when people choose to label themselves as being members of a specific party/movement/etc, rather than merely voting for a politician carrying those labels as a least worst option.

Exactly my point.

I consider myself a libertarian. I might have written your comment several years ago, and I echoed its sentiment above when I described the parties' traditional dynamic. However, the Republican party of ~2020 onwards is a drastic qualitative departure from that symmetric status quo.

You've thrown out "effort to prevent people from saying that which is undesirable" as an example of Democratic authoritarianism. However, this is not a mainstream grassroots view. Rather it's the status quo agglomeration of power by politicians, the government grabbing power while entrenching the big tech oligopoly. Democratic voters in general don't seem to be sitting around going "Biden is going to shut those deplorables up", rather it's more like lament and resignation when the topic of social media censorship does come up.

We can of course point to authoritarian policies enacted by politicians from both parties, because politicians are inherently authoritarian, and enacting authoritarian policies that enrich their sponsors is their bread and butter.

However, the cults of personalities around Republican politicians, the rejection of intellectualism, overtly excepting politicians from the rule of law. These all indicate an authoritarian-flavored organizational structure, supported by the grassroots. If fronting as a strongman and pulling stupid stunts didn't work to get votes and donations, Republican politicians wouldn't do it. And the recent state level pushes to prohibit fundamental medical care (ie straight up individual liberty-destroying dark ages authoritarianism) is policy that doesn't enrich any corporate sponsors (as legislation usually must), but rather seems to be completely at the behest of their perceived constituents.

And so, I no longer consider the two parties symmetric. The Republicans have seemingly made their mainstream platform to dismantle our institutions in favor of regressing to some sort of good-old-days theocracy, while the Democrats still basically represent the corporate/bureaucratic status quo. And while I find that status quo repugnant from a position of wanting to reform it in favor of individual liberty, I'd much rather have the imperfect institutions we've come to take for granted, like the rule of law, than have them destroyed from the top down.

The only difference between us is that I'm aware that we're both victims of marketing. You seem to imagine that it's just me, which suggests to me that it's just you. And that only further makes my point. If you're the egoist, then I'm right. If I'm the egoist, then I'm even more right. At least you acknowledge that you can't sum up someone's opinions based on which party they vote for. The reality is simply that you only get one blanket vote for probably one issue you read about, and thousands you didn't but apparently should be held accountable for.

I dispute that, having myself passed through the perspective you're arguing. It's easy to dismiss things with relativism, and it is in fact necessary for dealing with the media's endless stream of tempests in teapots, but significant differences can still exist and you need to keep your mind open to them.

For me, the off ramp for my benefit of the doubt was the Republican's Covid response, where political nonsense came up against cold hard non-mediated reality. Let's hamstring federal departments precisely when we need them, 2+2=5, don't bother wearing a respirator to protect your family it's all made up anyhow, all merely to feed egos large and small. The fact the party and its constituents continue to double down on an a President that overtly damaged our country are at least two pillars of fascism - party over country, and cult of personality.

And sure, we can apply similar judgements to help us critique the Democratic party. But there is a stark difference in degree and effect, and it's utterly foolish to ignore that.

It sounds to me like you're talking about the Republican party that you saw on Democrat TV. Literally a fabricated cliche marketed to the average viewer that describes exactly zero real human beings but has a nice ring to it and allows you to simplify "them" into a nice box that you can label "not me" and feel good about yourself.

>But the flare up of grassroots authoritarianism, specifically in the Republican party where it has gone mainstream

Wow that took a turn to a hot take really fast. You don't find the rise of the green left, the authoritarian self-described socialists like "The Squad", etc to be the equivalent on the left? Or do you only view things through the lens of the party you like? Yes, the green energy, banning ICE, defunding police, anti-liberty left is just as bad as the deep right wing that wants to ban abortion and all the other things they do. There's no question and there is no ambiguity. Both want control of what you do in nearly every aspect of your life. Waking up involves realizing both of the extremes (left and right) would happily put you against the wall.

Extremism begets extremism. Authoritarianism begets authoritarianism. The horseshoe theory of politics has reached its peak in the last 6 years and opinions like this are part of the reason why. It's always "Them". Never "Us". If only "They" could wake up they'd finally love "Our" version of big brother.

How exhausting it must be to constantly find a way to simplify a vast group of people down into the absolute edge cases and judge them entirely on that edge case.

> self-described socialists like "The Squad" ... banning ICE, defunding police

These are not positions of the mainstream Democratic party. The Democratic party is still basically constrained to its traditional function of channeling constituents frustration into boring status-quo corporate-first policies, much to the chagrin of people who do support the things you've listed.

> green energy

I don't know how you're saying green energy is authoritarian. If it's the economic meddling with subsidies, I'd say it's disingenuous to focus on that when fossil fuels, and overproduction in general, have been so heavily subsidized. I'd much rather the government did not print trillions of dollars and give it away as corporate welfare, but if it's going to, I'd rather it go to forward thinking technologies rather than just lining the pockets of existing industries.

> It's always "Them". Never "Us". If only "They" could wake up they'd finally love "Our" version of big brother.

I'm not an "our". I routinely get into arguments with Democratic friends advocating bureaucracy-centric corporate-first policies that their politicians have convinced them are genuine attempts at reform. I've read plenty of reactionary writing and think it has fantastic critiques about the Cathedral and the deep state. I think those structures are ultimately at odds with personal liberty and enlightenment. However this does not mean that I view every attempt to attack those structures as a good thing.

You're posting in a thread about a topic where they're literally trying to do exactly what the GP is saying. I don't know what you view as a 'middle road' given that their starting negotiating point is 'users cannot be banned for any reason ever'.

>...Can we stop miscategorizing reactionary regressivism as "conservatism"

But that is conservatism though. I can't help but see the whole attempt at renaming it "regressivism" is to avoid "conservatism" from taking the fall when people look at it's outcomes. No one that would be "regressive" today was not a conservative yesterday.

That is not my intent, but I see where you're coming from. Today's reactionaries were conservatives yesterday because that is what the politicians constrained their viewpoint into. To me, the only peacefully-resolving course is to hope there are enough actual conservatives (ie people who respect institutions and want to slow change, and would therefore be against the recent bans on fundamental medical care, the Republican party's disruption of the pandemic response, etc) that will distance themselves from the reactionaries and not continue to blindly vote Republican.

I'm not so sure, since section 230's safe harbor is involved. If section 230's protections were dropped for social media, I am sure that most courts would adopt the Citizens United standard.

However, that would mean a ton of lawsuits for all the defamation and harassment that happens on those platforms.

Section 230 is a federal law, it cannot make a state law that would otherwise violate the First Amendment as incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment somehow okay. That’s not how the relationship between state, federal, and constitutional law works.

If this court case is over a state law, is Citizens United even precedential? That was a ruling about a federal law, and this appears to be a matter of Texas law, adjudicated with Texas court precedent. I assume it's only in federal court due to diversity jurisdiction.

Both state and federal laws have to comport with the constitutional free speech doctrines. Technically they apply to the federal government via the First Amendment and state governments via the Fourteenth Amendment but for a hundred years now the content of the doctrines have been considered identical when applied to either.

Citizens United isn’t directly on point. That was a question of positive corporate speech while this law, if it’s struck down will be struck down under the corporate compelled speech doctrine. But they are both part of the same body of Constitutional law that the federal courts very much have jurisdiction to enforce.

> this law, if it’s struck down will be struck down under the corporate compelled speech doctrine

That's unlikely, as such an argument is a complete non-starter.

If I were arguing against the law, I suspect (shooting from the hip without researching it) that the most fruitful line of reasoning would be that the federal government has preempted the field of interstate communications transmission by a combination of the FCC's organic statute and the CDA. This is a better argument because, despite what some on HN believe, there is a half-century of Supreme Court precedent that compelled hosting is not compelled speech, and because of the doctrine of constitutional avoidance.

As an interesting aside, Justice Kagan had some involvement in one of the issues underlying one of the cornerstone cases in this area. Though she was not a party and does not appear to have been among the amici, when she was Dean of Harvard Law School she opposed military recruiting on campus due to the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. The Solomon Amendment required non-discrimination in hosting speakers for recruiting purposes, under threat of the loss of federal funding. That compelled hosting was challenged and upheld in Rumsfeld v. FAIR, 390 F. 3d 219 (2006).

Even granting, for the sake of argument, that this is compelled speech, would that be sufficient reason to strike down the law?

I ask because there are so many examples of compelled speech that have not been struck down. Witnesses are required to testify. Various companies are required to print warning labels, nutrition facts, country of origin, and such on their products. Politicians are required to say "I approve this message" in advertisements. Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are required to describe side effects of medications. Police are required to give Miranda warnings. Professors at many state universities are required to add a few paragraphs of mandatory text to their syllabi, including a notice that they are mandatory reporters who are compelled to tell the government what they know about certain events.

It's so common that I wonder (despite frequent claims in these discussions) whether a prohibition against compelled speech actually exists at all.

Yeah this is a good point. Compelled speech is a pretty new and undeveloped doctrine with unclear boundaries.

The Court tends to defer to history as a way of understanding how the framers viewed an issue so things like compelled testimony would likely be safe. My pet thought experiment is challenging the requirement to answer the census, particularly with it's much-expanded survey questions. Perhaps I can be compelled to say where I live and who lives with me, but can I be compelled to answer questions like whether any of us are gay?

Rumsfeld vs FAIR was a spending clause case, so there was an additional level of indirection vs the Texas law. In addition it involved Congress’ power to raise and support armies which have always been given a great deal of deference. It’s not really on point.

The Supreme Court's published syllabus explains the holding as follows:

"Because the First Amendment would not prevent Congress from directly imposing the ... access requirement, the statute does not place an unconstitutional condition on the receipt of federal funds." (emphasis added). Rumsfeld v. FAIR, 547 U.S. 47 (2006).*

I'm not sure where you're getting the argument that this is inapplicable, but it sounds like some of the talking points coming from the Internet outrage machine (e.g., the OP). I strongly encourage you to read the primary sources.

* This is the correct citation. The one I entered yesterday is no longer editable but refers to the Third Circuit case preceding the Supreme Court case; switching tabs on my phone is a little harder to keep track of than on my computer, and I apologize.

Shouldn’t you take your own advice and read past the headnote?

Believe it or not you aren’t the first person on the internet that went to law school. Granted most of us have come to regret it …

I've read the decision at length. If you had done so as well, you would see that this line in the syllabus comes verbatim from the majority opinion. 547 U.S. at 60. I cited the syllabus because it occurs first and has less pagination markup, making it more accessible to the average HN reader.

The Supremacy Clause of the Constitution of the United States (Article VI, Clause 2) establishes that the Constitution, federal laws made pursuant to it, and treaties made under its authority, constitute the "supreme Law of the Land", and thus take priority over any conflicting state laws.[1]

Wiki

Can someone explain to me how corporations are protected by the first in America? I’ve never understood this.

Corporations are entities that exist as contracts between people. The theory is that the speech of a corporation is thus the speech of the people involved in the contract.

It is a murky argument in the context of limited financial liability and the de facto absence of criminal liability.

No one is protected by the First Amendment. The government is forbidden to do things. "Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of..." several things, including freedom of speech.

The idea that corporations were given First Amendment rights by a recent Supreme Court decision that made them people is very frustrating to me. Corporations were deemed "people" in 1882, in San Mateo County v. Southern Pacific Rail Road, but it doesn't matter even slightly what they are with regards to the First Amendment, which doesn't specify who is speaking. Whether you're a citizen, noncitizen, undocumented immigrant, visitor, or soulless capitalist entity, if you can speak, Congress shall make no law.

And even more censorship

Reply on news.ycombinator.com