• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

To the million Arnold Hiatts that this revolution will need

Preface

“There is only one issue in this country,” former MSNBC commentator Cenk Uygur told Netroots Nation, in June 2011. “Campaign finance reform.”

For the vast majority of America, Uygur’s comment is obscure. For a small minority, it is obvious. This book was written for that vast majority, drawn from the insights of that small minority.

As I have struggled to craft it, I have become driven by the view that practically every important issue in American politics today is tied to this “one issue in this country,” and that we must find a way to show the connections. For both the Left and the Right, until this “one issue” gets fixed, there won’t be progress on a wide range of critically important public policy issues. Until it gets fixed, governance will remain stalled.

The challenge is to get America to see and then act. Again and again I have been told by friends, “If you’re going to do this, the story needs drama. There has to be good versus evil. You must tell story after story about venal corruption. Rod Blagojevich, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, Jack Abramoff—these are the figures who will rally America to respond.”

Maybe. But what if the problem is not Blagojevich? What if Washington is not filled with evil souls trying to steal from the republic? What if the absolutely debilitating corruption that we face is a corruption caused by decent souls, not crooks? Could America rally to respond then? Can we get angry enough about small but systemic distortions that block the ability of democracy to work, if those distortions are the product of good people working in a corrupted system?

I am unsure. As I have worked over the past four years to understand this problem, I have become convinced that while a corruption of Congress is destroying the republic, that corruption is not the product of evil. There is great harm here, but no bin Laden. There are Jack Abramoffs and Duke Cunninghams, to be sure, but they are the exception, not the rule. And without great evil, I am not yet sure that we can muster the will to fight. We will, I fear, simply tolerate the corruption, as a host tolerates a parasite that is not life threatening. Until it is.

Yet I write with hope. If we understand the nature of this corruption, its solution will be obvious. The challenge, then, will be to build a movement to bring about that solution. Such a movement is possible. It has been built before.

But to build it will require a different kind of learning. This is not an academic book. I do not mean to enter an academic debate. It instead builds upon the insights of academics to address a different debate entirely: a political debate, within the domain of activists, that has been raging in parallel for almost a half century.

Each side in this debate talks past the other. The academic seeks a truth, but that truth is too often too obscure for citizens to grok. The activist seeks to motivate, but with stories that are too often too crude, or extreme. The activist is right that the problem is bad—indeed, worse than his focus on individual corruption suggests. But the academic is right that if the problem is bad, it is not bad because our government has returned to the Gilded Age. We are better than they were, even if the consequences of our corruption are much worse. For this is the paradox at the core of my argument: that even without sinning, we can do much more harm than the sinner.

This work takes me far from my earlier writing, though the hint of this book was clear in Remix (2008). I was driven to this shift when I became convinced that the questions I was addressing in the fields of copyright and Internet policy depended upon resolving the policy questions—the corruption—that I address here. I thus left copyright and Internet policy, and began a process to learn as much as I could about a vast and largely undefined field. That work has brought me back to Harvard, where I am now the director of the Edmond