Freedom of specie

Sean Connery and Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger (1964).

A Dissent interview with Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution, run across somewhere on Twitter last night—using "neoliberalism" to mean, or entail, what I might call "economism", the rude reduction of humanity to Homo œconomicus, and of human culture to so many overlapping markets, and human history to a kind of vulgar social-Darwinism of the longue durée, the endlessly repetitive story of how some people have managed to be marginally wealthier than others, and therefore winning, before they died.

So she said something wonderfully insightful about what's really wrong with Citizens United:

a careful reading of the majority decision also reveals precisely the thoroughgoing economization of the terms and practices of democracy we have been talking about. In the majority opinion, electoral campaigns are cast as “political marketplaces,” just as ideas are cast as freely circulating in a market where the only potential interference arises from restrictions on producers and consumers of ideas—who may speak and who may listen or judge. Thus, Justice Kennedy’s insistence on the fundamental neoliberal principle that these marketplaces should be unregulated paves the way for overturning a century of campaign finance law aimed at modestly restricting the power of money in politics. Moreover, in the decision, political speech itself is rendered as a kind of capital right, functioning largely to advance the position of its bearer, whether that bearer is human capital, corporate capital, or finance capital. This understanding of political speech replaces the idea of democratic political speech as a vital (if potentially monopolizable and corruptible) medium for public deliberation and persuasion.

So the reason for freedom of speech from this point of view would be a matter of allowing the Invisible Hand to do its work without obstruction, as competing speeches go into battle with all the resources they can accumulate and one will be crowned. Nothing to do with the agency of speakers in the human need to express themselves, or the collaborative development of ideas in dialectical give and take, everything to do with one idea trouncing another and getting the trophies and more importantly the spoils of war. Speech as the equipment you deploy in the contest, as in a yacht race or better in war itself, the more expensive the better, and who is some Washington bureaucrat to tell you you shouldn't have the best speech money can buy?

It's not that the Court treated money as speech, it's effectively that they treat speech—along with everything else (including Brooks's "spiritual capital")—as a kind of money, that matters only because money matters and nothing else does.