In his dissent, Justice Stevens refers to this development as trammeling the long-held constitutional principle of restricting "the speech of some in order to prevent a few from drowning out the many." He rereads the very cases—Austin, Bellotti, Buckley, and McConnell—on which Kennedy rests his judgment and draws opposite conclusions. "Over the course of the past century Congress has demonstrated a recurrent need to regulate corporate participation in candidate elections," and the Supreme Court has appropriately vindicated this need. Both branches of government limited and regulated "corporate electoral advocacy" to "preserve the integrity of the electoral process, prevent corruption, sustain the active, alert responsibility of the individual citizen, protect the expressive interests of shareholders, and preserve … the individual citizen's confidence in government." Preventing the many from being drowned out by the few is precisely what legislatures and courts have historically understood as their task in preserving democracy. Such prevention, however, is squarely at odds with the economization of politics. It has no place in a market, where the most innovative, ambitious, and aggressive prevail, where this prevalence also equates their "voices" with "valuable expertise" in interpreting and shaping political life, and above all, where competitive positioning and consumer choices rather than equality and deliberation are at stake.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 338