MW Stop muzzling the 1%: The wealthy have a right to free speech - and democracy needs billionaires

By John O. McGinnis

Bashing the rich won't fix inequality - it simply gives power to elites who already control the agenda

The wealthy fund candidates and causes across the political spectrum, enabling vastly different messages to reach voters.

When Tesla $(TSLA)$ CEO Elon Musk spent substantial sums in a recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race, opponents of the candidate he supported quickly publicized his involvement. They used it to mobilize voters against him. Voters reacted accordingly.

This is how campaign finance should work in a free society. Citizens speak, even if some speak louder or more effectively than others. Where corruption is suspected, disclosure allows sunlight to do its work.

The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized much of this in its modern campaign-finance jurisprudence, but at times it has allowed the rhetoric of "undue influence" to cloud constitutional analysis. A case now before the court offers an opportunity to clarify that the U.S. Constitution does not authorize the government to equalize political influence, whether by targeting the wealthy or by hobbling political parties. What it does allow is preventing corruption and its appearance, primarily through transparency.

The pending Supreme Court case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, concerns a challenge to restrictions on coordinated spending by political parties with their candidates. It has revived the debate over what justifies government regulation of money in support of political speech. It offers an opportunity to clarify something that the law of campaign finance has often confused. Two concerns motivate regulation of political spending, but only one is consistent with the Constitution's First Amendment.

The first concern is corruption, in which politicians directly trade official action for financial support. That concern is serious and has long been recognized as a legitimate basis for regulation. The second concern focuses on inequality of influence. Here, the worry is that some citizens, particularly the wealthy, wield excessive influence in politics because they can spend more on political speech.

Unequal influence is not a pathology of democracy. It is a natural consequence of a system that protects equal rights to speak. People differ in talent, energy, access to audiences, resources and willingness to collaborate through political parties or other associations. Journalists, academics and entertainers wield enormous political influence through platforms that reach millions. Those platforms, like newspapers and social media, themselves depend on spending money. No one seriously proposes curbing that influence in the name of democratic equality, nor could such an effort be squared with the First Amendment.

The wealthy are simply one group among many whose influence is magnified by their resources. To single them out is not to defend equality, but to enforce a selective egalitarianism that leaves untouched the influence of other elite groups whose views are often far more ideologically uniform. Journalists, academics and entertainers lean to the left, in some cases overwhelmingly so.

By contrast, the wealthy are strikingly politically heterogeneous. They fund candidates and causes across the political spectrum, enabling vastly different messages to reach voters. Given the importance of the decisions governments make and the limited incentives citizens have to pay attention to politics, more widely disseminated political information is a public good. Far from distorting democracy, this diversity of substantial support often enlarges the range of ideas in public debate.

Transparency of donations, rather than the suppression of speech, is the best response to concerns about corruption.

Once this distinction between influence and corruption is kept clearly in view, many existing campaign-finance restrictions begin to look deeply misguided. That is particularly true of limits on political parties, because they are institutions designed to aggregate interests and offer coherent programs to voters.

People who care deeply about politics naturally give more money. If constrained from supporting parties, they will help other organizations, such as super PACs, advocacy groups and loosely affiliated movements. Weaker parties are not a democratic virtue. Stronger parties generally make political competition more about programs than personalities. Providing parties with greater latitude to raise and coordinate spending would improve democratic accountability.

Some of the same logic applies to the wealthy. Efforts to marginalize their participation do not reduce inequality of influence. They shift influence toward other elites who already shape the political agenda. Because the wealthy are ideologically diverse, their participation can counterbalance these different forms of elite power. Politicians seeking office must appeal to voters, not donors alone, but donors can help ensure that a wide range of messages is heard.

Transparency of donations, rather than the suppression of speech, is the best response to concerns about corruption. Immediate disclosure of spending in support of a candidate allows voters to evaluate speech without prohibiting it.

Here again, the wealthy have served a crucial, if underappreciated, part in strengthening democracy. The social-media platforms that enable the quick dissemination of information about political spending have been primarily built by wealthy entrepreneurs and investors. Information about contributions now travels faster and more widely than at any point in American history.

Democracy does not need less participation by those with means. What it requires instead are more explicit rules on corruption, stronger political parties and greater confidence in voters' ability to judge the extent of others' influence when it is brought into the open.

John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University, is the author of "Why Democracy Needs the Rich" (Encounter Books, 2026).

More: Crucial questions about wealth taxes could be answered this year - including whether wealthy people move to avoid them

Also read: Some super wealthy just want to be taxed. Others are pushing back.

-John O. McGinnis

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February 24, 2026 08:05 ET (13:05 GMT)

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