Dartblog

This morning, the student newspaper The Dartmouth runs an exceedingly silly article premised on the assertion that money in politics is inherently corrupting. A few—like Russ Feingold, John McCain, and Denmark—may agree, but the prevailing view in America continues to be that political donations are, like charitable donations, incidents of free expression. I would be the first to confess that, at Dartmouth in particular, money has occasionally caused near-travesties. The recent debate over the constitution is the finest example. A small group of folks, including Dartmouth employees, tried to ram the thing through by hiring, at expenses an order of magnitude greater than those incurred by the anti-constitution folks, professional political black ops companies. I detailed everything in a long post called “How to Disarm the Rich and Powerful.” The answer, as ever, is simply to vote. Dartmouth alumni did vote, and the constitution failed by eighteen points. Turnout was the highest in Dartmouth history.

The moral of that story, in my view, is that money cannot possibly corrupt if the electorate is willing to digest and weigh the arguments on both sides. Which is what makes the paranoid tone of The Dartmouth’s story today ring hollow.

ALSO: The Dartmouth runs a story about a Senior Society with which they associate me. A mite strange, since student press outlets have generally respected the fact that Dartmouth’s dozen or so Societies are secret and prefer to remain so. Sissela Bok seems appropriate here: “While all deception requires secrecy, all secrecy is not meant to deceive.”