The Claremont Institute posted the original essay at http://www.claremont.org/publications/schaefer000223.cfm

The Totalitarian Temptation of TomPaine.com

By David Lewis Schaefer

Last fall a hitherto unknown, Washington-based organization, the Florence Fund, began running a series of political ads on the New York Times Op-Ed page dealing with such subjects as campaign finance reform, environmentalism, and the media. The ads ran under the heading of the Fund's Website, "TomPaine.com," the ".com" being said to represent "common sense." A new extreme of partisanship was reached on February 2 when the fund's ad featured an unflattering photo of Senator Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.), who has led the fight against legislative limitations on "soft money" contributions to political parties, alongside the phrases "Flat Earth" and "Separate but Equal." As the ad explained, just as the former doctrine had been "disproven" and the latter "repudiated," the U.S. Supreme Court had now moved the debate on campaign reform "forward" beyond "Mitch McConnell's ideas."

The ad went on to applaud the Supreme Court's recent 6-3 decision (Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC) upholding Missouri's law restricting the size of campaign contributions to state candidates to a maximum of $1,075 at the highest level. The Court's decision, boasted TomPaine.com, rejected the arguments of "McConnell, the anti-reform ringleader … parroted by pundits" like George Will "and groups like the National Right to Life Committee," as "all wrong." The ad approvingly cited Justice Breyer's remark that "the Constitution permits restrictions on the speech of some in order to prevent a few from drowning out the many." And the Court, it added, "gutted another misguided idea," advanced by prominent, mainstream political science scholars, of increasing the Federal law's 25-year-old dollar limits and indexing them to inflation, by observing, in the words of the majority opinion, that "The dictates of the First Amendment are not mere functions of the Consumer Price Index." 

One can readily note glaring holes in the Court's reasoning, as was ably done by Justice Clarence Thomas (with the concurrence of Justice Scalia) in his dissent. What is particularly noteworthy about the Tompaine.com ad, however, is its source. TomPaine.com is, as the ad informs readers, a project of the Florence Fund. The Florence Fund, headed by John Moyers, in turn derives its support from the Schumann Foundation, whose president is John's father Bill Moyers - the prominent host of "Frontline" and other PBS shows. 

Last October Frank Greve, a reporter for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, uncovered the ethically dubious role that Bill Moyers plays by simultaneously supplying (through the Schumann Foundation) some one-third of total philanthropic contributions to the campaign for campaign finance limitations, including the support of NPR shows devoted to that cause; broadcasting Frontline shows devoted to exposing alleged Democratic and Republican fund-raising excesses; and featuring on his broadcasts the views of campaign finance "watchdog" groups without disclosing that those groups were funded by his foundation. Now that Moyers has set his son (formerly executive director of the Schumann Foundation) up as president of his own "fund" (while supporting that fund with Schumann donations), the ethical conflict-of-interest tangle grows. 

Both TomPaine.com's tone and its medium exhibit the danger that campaign finance "reform" poses for constitutional democracy. The Moyerses seek to restrict the ability of private individuals and businesses to finance the dissemination of political speech so as to prevent the "few" from "drowning out the many": but just who are the "few" and who the "many" here? Few individuals or even businesses have assets comparable to the $90.2 million that the Schumann Foundation held at the end of 1998 according to Greve (that amount is undoubtedly much greater now), available exclusively to devote to partisan advocacy. (Just how many individuals or organizations regularly sponsor op-ed ads in the Times?) Even fewer have a publicly subsidized pulpit available to them that can rival Bill Moyers's. And those individuals and businesses, unlike the Schumann Foundation and its offspring, pay taxes on their income.

The real goal of Moyers père et fils, it appears, is not to make room for the voice of the "many" as against the "few," but to constrain the capacity of many rival, partisan spokesmen so that "the many" will pay undistracted heed to the enlightened and utterly public-spirited or altruistic voice of … TomPaine.com and its ilk.

Most ominous, in the TomPaine.com ad, is its concluding admonition. The ad advises readers to "forget Mitch" because "He's on the wrong side of history."

That language should sound familiar. Earlier in the century just ended, the two great totalitarian movements that murdered so many tens of millions between them, Nazism and Communism, each claimed to express the verdict of "history." Nazis, expressing the "world-historical mission" of the "Aryan race," and Marxists, acting on the basis of their knowledge of the "laws" of history, felt no compunction at eliminating their rivals, who were on the "wrong side of history." The stridently intolerant tone and holier-than-thou position adopted by TomPaine.com suggest that its spokesmen have indeed learned nothing from history.

David Schaefer, a professor of political science at Holy Cross, is a friend of the Institute and the father of  Naomi Schaefer, a 1997 Publius Fellow.