What’s your issue? Climate change? Gun control? Listen to Lawrence Lessig first
Yesterday, my mother sent an email to a giant group of relatives and ambiguous friends letting them know that there’s a man running for PRESIDENT that lives in our town (my hometown) of Brookline, Massachusetts. “Have you heard of him?” she asked me last week. “His name is…let me think…he’s a Harvard guy. Anyway, he’s our neighbor! He’s running for actual president!”
“Lawrence Lessig?”
“Yes!”
“He’s our NEIGHBOR?”
I love Lawrence Lessig.
In the email, my mother linked us all to his website and this sexy little 60 second clip, meant to sell us on why his single-issue platform for campaign finance reform matters. All it taught me is that 60 seconds does his issue no justice at all. It also gave me that inner rumble that preempts my more frenzied writing stints, the urge to clarify WHY THIS THING FUCKING MATTERS, immediately, to this random group of people including (but not limited to) a handful of republican cousins, neighbors I haven’t seen in ten years, and all of my mother’s therapist friends. Now I’m going to impose it on you.
So his point is simple: it’s that the corruption baked into political campaign fundraising is shamelessly blocking meaningful reform on every single other issue we care about. What’s your issue? Climate change, women’s rights, inequality, gun control? Whatever it is, it won’t get much better until we address this bottleneck.
This is how Lessig puts it, in his best Ted Talk:
It’s not that mine is the most important issue. It’s not. Yours is the most important issue. But mine is the first issue, the issue we have to solve before we get to fix the issues you care about.
The why is what stuns me most, endlessly. In the 2012 election, 132 people — as in the number of guests at a small wedding — were responsible for 60% of all Super PAC donations. That makes half of one tenth of one percent of Americans are our “relevant funders”. On top of this is the gross reality that our congressmen spend 30–70% of their time fundraising and campaigning. Half of their working hours are lost on the phone or at some hidden steakhouse (or wherever, I don’t know what these people do) with multi millionaires and billionaires, many of whom own or invest heavily in companies or industries they want to see succeed. Now watch our politicians bend like pretzels for the money they need to maintain their spots in Congress.
Those funders want what’s best for themselves, not what’s best for all of us. DUH. Hello school shootings, hello tax loopholes, hello pizza with tomato sauce considered a vegetable in school cafeterias. It’s so CORRUPT.
You may have known that part — but it’s important we remember what it means. It means that through this entire election process, the conversations aren’t about or dictated by us. This is an economy of lobbyists, politicians and funders that thrive on dysfunction and infighting — the more there is tension on abortion, the more jobs there are for lobbyists, and the more donations politicians can get from pro- or anti- organizations on that “fight”, because it has more urgency. Suddenly, we average citizens are all whipped up into a frenzy without realizing that we’re all just playing into their game. And of course it makes us passionate; the stakes are high. This system plays air-hockey with people’s rights, health, safety, and livelihoods.
If there’s less power in this twisted economy of campaign finance, it’s better for 99.95% of Americans, both left AND right — it means representatives are more likely to vote with their conscience on issues, make more reasonable decisions…you know, represent. Why can’t today’s Republican party be conservative, want less federal influence, and also not want guns in the hands of the mentally ill? The NRA guys help bankroll their politicians’ campaigns. That’s it. What bothers me most is that these issues are packaged and polarized as Democrat and Republican so much more cleanly than our beliefs are as thoughtful humans, as a result of this corrupt economy. It strips issues of their nuance and pits us against each other.
So Lessig probably doesn’t expect to win. He definitely wants people to have to face the reality that once this power is displaced (all it takes is one law), EVERYTHING will work better. Politicians should be taking less money from more people. That’s what gives us more of a say.
I recently moved to London from New York, and the political difference between the left and the right here in England is just so goddamn reasonable. I’m asked about US politics regularly: “Do you actually think Donald Trump could win? You do know trump means fart here.” “Did you lot really just get universal healthcare? Oh, it’s not universal?” “Is this real? Was that real? Why are they talking about this?”
(That last one was from my profoundly English boyfriend, while watching the GOP debate segment on abortion).
Anyway, these conversations invariably turn to America’s lax gun laws. And when people ask, this is the explanation I have to give them. It won’t change until we change how campaigns are funded. It’s a long, weird answer, but it’s the real one, stripped of distractions. It’s also, thankfully, got a clear solution.
I’m all in for a Listen to Lessig 2016 campaign. Vote, I don’t know. But give that man a soapbox!
