Citizens United might turn into the most consequential US Supreme Court decision with regards to America's foreign relations.

Allowing unlimited money to be spent on independent political expenditure has created the greatest show on earth, “American Politics: The Show”.

People from around the world are increasingly tune in, and it is very much enhancing the soft power of the US.

However, like other performance enhancing drugs, it's also making the US political system a little deranged.

American Politics: The Show

People around the world tune into the American politics like it’s the NBA. 

First of all, there's the primary underlying contest that produces events to be witness and reported on.

And then there's the ever-growing pool of derivative content, commenting on and building audiences for the underlying content. Note the explosion of American political podcasts, tv shows, opinion columns, movies etc.

People tuning into this spectacle are increasingly identifying with various parties, teams, factions or individual characters - with identification turning into support and then an ongoing "follow".

Citizens united made the secondary economy of political content possible

The richness of the show was made possible by Citizens United.

By allowing unrestricted expenditure by independent actors, Citizens United created the flourishing economy in politics as an industry, and importantly, opened up the possibility of a full career path for political insiders - deepening the level of specialisation and expertise that people bring to producing political content.

The structure of funding is a lot like sports

The core funding for politics is a lot like sports:

• Elite status games: Owning an English Premier League Club and fundraising dinners to meet the candidate
• Direct-to-consumer: Selling merchandise - What is a MAGA hat but a jersey for a start player? Alternatively, you can monetise small money donations reasonably well.
• Advertising: This one is a bit more complicated for sports. The formal political entities spend on advertising, but a lot of the secondary content producers are conversely funded by advertising

Citizens United allowed an unrestricted flow of donor money into independent expenditures, which really increased the level of money flowing through the system, but also importantly opened up the possibility of funding independent entities outside the major parties/candidates.

Global audiences (including Australians) are tuning in more than ever

Australians, like everyone else on the English lanugage internet are getting more and more sucked in:

• In a piece titled I Should Be Able to Mute America, Patrick Marlborough, an Australian lamented that "I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is."
• Australia’s national broadcaster even has a taxpayer funded show on US elections called Planet America
• A colleague casually mentioned to me that his Twitter feed was "NFL and then mostly just US democratic or left-wing content"

As of today (16 Sep 2024), the No 1 Podcast on Apple Podcasts (Australia) is "The Rest is Politics: US". Note that the No 13 is "The Rest is Politics" (UK), and that these are the only 2 political podcasts in the Top 15.

N.B. Also, I'm in no way unaffected by this. I grew up watching The Daily Show and The Colbert report, both of which actually assumed a relatively high level of understanding of US politics to get the jokes (By high level, I mean a reasonable understanding of the formal US political system, the kind you'd learn about in a civics class, not an actual understanding of how politics works.)

International US Cultural Victory

Unless you think it's already happened, this is leading to some kind of massive US cultural victory.

The longer this runs, the more the rest of the Anglosphere and the rest of the world is going to get sucked into the US zeitgeist. Everyone else's memes becomes downstream of American memes.

I'm slowly watching Australian politicians re-imagine the Australian polity as a shadow of the larger American one.

• Senator Ralph Babet already asks if you want to Make Australia Great Again, and is writing gushing letters to Donald Trump.
• Bill Shorten, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016 said, "my party will heed the lessons of Detroit, Michigan, of Ohio and Pennsylvania".

I will aim to add to this list as time goes on.

Making the US political system a bit more deranged

The first interesting dimensions to watch in the coming years will be seeing the curtain being pulled back on the economy of not-for-profits and NGOs that are staffed by a class of permanent political industry veterans and corresponding political insiders.

The second will be to see how the opening up of a lifetime career in the political industry, independent of the formal legal entities that constitute the major political parties will change incentives for political actors in the formal system.

While in the past, there was relatively small amount of ex-party hack/advocacy group types then running for office (and vice versa), there's going to be a much stronger pull for political actors to move away from chasing formal political power, towards chasing the "grift" of the political money machines.

The derivatives are worth more than the underlying

• An example of someone who gave up actual political office to move into the political content industry is Sarah Palin. Incredibly, she was the youngest governor of Alaska and quit office to become a national political celebrity instead. It turns out that being governor of Alaska involved spending a lot on legal fees defending lawsuits, and she swapped over to having a substantially more lucrative career as a political influencer.
• To give you a sense of the volume of money sloshing around, note that Black Lives Matter (the official organisation rather than the social movement) made its initial starters extremely wealthy. 
• There is also the concern about socialisation and staffing. Matt Yglesias is one of the few people who has tried to directly talk about the relationship between formal political campaigns, NGOs and not-for-profit groups and donors. Interestingly, very few people seem to talk about this as explicitly as he does. For example:

Afternote

A collection of statements I couldn't fit elsewhere:

• A more general version of the Matt Ygelsias theory is that the donor class is much more politically extreme than the electorate (on the left and right). A consequence of the oversized representation of big donors on political organisations means that the average party activist/volunteer is socialised into to a more politically extreme peer group than they would be if the organisations were more tied to representing members of the electorate (e.g. in a union).
• This has also been offered as an explanation for why so many significant US politicians are so old (Biden, Trump, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Mitchel McConnell etc.). The theory is that the cohorts below them developed politically in an environment that favoured more extreme political positions focused on insider political institutions, ultimately making them less electable as candidates.