The Vox Kludge

Wow. Vox has published a bizarrely confused bit of click-bait. In a piece titled “The Great Money-in-Politics Myth,” by Dylan Matthews, Bernie Sanders is said to believe that we don’t have universal healthcare because of “money.” Very quickly, Dylan links this view to the “progressive movement” generally. And then even more quickly, he ties that view to other less “plausible” versions of it, mine being the only one named. By the end of his essay, the argument is referred to as the “Sanders/Lessig” argument.

The claim of Dylan’s essay, in a tweet, is just this: clean elections don’t make people liberal. And like all bad writing (though maybe all great click-bait), it is an argument against an argument that no one has actually ever made.

Bernie Sanders certainly attacks big money. But his theory of change is not money alone. His “revolution” rhetoric is more than rhetoric. It is his plan. If you actually listen to him explain how we get what he promises, he points not just to the end of big money, but to the rise of “millions” demanding change. That rise may well be helped by the decline of big money. That decline might well be necessary to it. But Bernie is doing more than arguing for that decline. He is rallying millions, because he knows that regardless of the money, real change takes real people.

Likewise, I certainly attack the role of money in politics. But I have never argued that the consequence of that reform would be to tilt America in one direction or the other. To the contrary: my work works hard to show how fixing our corrupted democracy helps both the left and the right. See, for example Chapter 9 of Republic, Lost v2.0 (2015), “How So Damn Much Money Defeats the Left.” Then see Chapter 10: “How So Damn Much Money Defeats the Right.”

How could it do both? To remove the “corruption” within a system of representation is to allow that system to represent its people better. But that change doesn’t change the people being represented, any more than honest voting machines are certain to shift votes to the left or to the right. My argument has always and only been that the corruption that is our system blocks the ability of our system to represent us. The system instead, as I’ve argued, represents the money, whether that money is from the left (as conservative Richard Painter has argued in his great new book, Taxation Only With Representation (2015)) or the right (see again, chapter 9 of Republic, Lost v2.0 (2015)).

Dylan is not actually interested, however, in what I’ve actually written. If he were, the bulk of his essay wouldn’t have made the confused and mistaken leaps the essay tries to make. Nor would he continue to lecture about how there are other problems, like gerrymandering, that are actually more significant to the liberal cause than money. Because the thrust of my campaign (for anyone who actually looked at the platform) was not about money, it was about representation. The aim of the Citizen Equality Act is not just to end the corrupting influence of money. It is also to enable equal representation — through gerrymandering reform (see section 2) and reforms of voting (see section 1), as well as changes to way campaigns are funded (see section 3). My aim there, and throughout Republic, Lost v2, is to press for a republic, which is, as the framers understood it, a representative democracy, by fixing the corruptions that destroy equal representation.

Bernie Sanders wants to do that, too, but more than that. He wants not just a system that better represents America. He wants to convince America of the truth in his progressive beliefs. As a liberal myself, I have enormous respect and deep admiration for him in his project. He is an authentic politician, and that creature is incredibly rare. To watch his rise has been among the most moving political experiences I have known.

But the whole reason I ran was my fear that Sanders was not making fundamental the kind of changes that I believed were necessary to make that revolution, as I said, “credible.” Those changes, I still believe, would be supported both by those who #feelthebern and by others too. You don’t have to believe in single-payer health care to want a democracy that represents its people equally.

Ending corruption is thus a necessary condition of getting the kind of reforms that Bernie Sanders wants. It is not sufficient — and obviously so, given how conservatives are increasingly making the same corruption point.

So yes:

Merely taking the money out of politics, in other words, is nowhere near enough if liberals want to create a comprehensive welfare state.

But, of course, no one ever said it was.

UPDATE2:

After this was posted, Dylan Matthews took to twitter:

But again, of course I said it would “help.” It obviously would. What I never said — and what Bernie Sanders has never said —was that it was “enough.”