What has happened here? Democratic political speech, far from being a delicate, monopolizable, and corruptible medium for public persuasion becomes, in and as a marketplace, an unhindered capital right. Similarly, the political, far from being a field of highly specific powers through which common existence is negotiated, protected, or transformed, becomes, as a market, a field for advancing every kind of capital—human, corporate, financial, cultural. Both of these moves make perfect sense insofar as neoliberal rationality recognizes market conduct as the sole principle of action and market metrics as the sole measures for every sphere of human action. Importantly, the Kennedy opinion, more than merely drawing on this rationality, articulates it as a set of principles for interpreting the Constitution, construing democracy, and producing political life. Neoliberal rationality constitutes the hermeneutics through which constitutional principles are read and applied in Citizens United and in this way enacts the economization of politics through law.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 328