We Are As We Consume

Those who defend the traditional First Amendment faith in individual autonomy and who therefore oppose the rise of the corporate­self and the consumer­self either do not understand the relationship between commerce and communication or do not understand the futility of attempts to divorce the two in our capitalistic system. The reality of the mass advertising marketplace is simply:

WE ARE AS WE CONSUME.

"[T]he business of America is business," said "Silent Cal" Coolidge. ²²³ This axiom holds as true in our culture generally as it does in our economy. That is, America's highly advanced capitalism thrives on the union of the economic marketplace with the marketplace of ideas. Our identity as Americans is a combination of citizen­self and consumer­self. This identity is molded by a discourse infused with the symbols of commerce. In today's America, it is ever more difficult to detect any form of public expression, including religious speech, ²²⁴ that can remain altogether free of commercial taint. Even "noncommercial" public television and radio are becoming increasingly sponsor­dependent. ²²⁵ Ultimately, it is impossible to disentangle commerce from communication and preserve America as we know it.

Underlying the progressives' critique of commercial speech is the charge that there can be no individual liberty where the values of the self are manipulated or dictated by the profit system. ²²⁶ But a harder look at the mass advertising process reveals that any corruption of the old self is not a one­ way phenomenon. It is not simply "them against us," but also "us against us." The commercial system as constituted feeds the massive appetites of a people charmed by consumption. Advertising spokesman Burt Neuborne puts it squarely: "[N]o evidence at all exists to support the paternalistic notion that commercial speech manipulates hearers into involuntary choices. Quite the contrary, no form of communication is more sensitive to the wishes and whims of hearers." ²²⁷

Ironically, in our consumer culture, it is the progressive view that is likely to be seen as manipulative, elitist, and undemocratic. ²²⁸ For most Americans, individual autonomy is synonymous with consumer autonomy. Our most cherished freedom is the freedom of choice, the liberty to choose our lifestyle. It is an arresting fact that the modern preoccupation with freedom of choice was popularized in a wartime advertisement for vacuum cleaners. Tracking FDR's "Four Freedoms," a 1944 Saturday Evening Post advertisement proposed another: "the Fifth Freedom is Freedom of Choice." ²²⁹ Predictably, the defenders of commercial speech have seized on the notion of freedom of choice to buttress their constitutional case. "In short ...," Judge Jacob Fuchsberg instructs us, "political freedom may be so dependent on economic freedom that the pursuit of one cannot be readily divorced from the other, certainly not without drastically circumscribing the freedom of people to exercise a choice among basic competing values." ²³⁰