Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [115]
As I write these words, Gallup’s latest “confidence in Congress” poll finds only 11 percent who have confidence in this Congress.54 Eleven percent. At what point do we declare an institution politically bankrupt, especially an institution that depends fundamentally upon public trust and confidence to do its work? When the czar of Russia was ousted by the Bolsheviks, he had the confidence of more than 11 percent of the Russian people. When Louis XVI was deposed by the French Revolution, he had the confidence of more than 11 percent of the French. And when we waged a Revolutionary War against the British Crown, more than 11 percent of the American people had confidence in King George III.
We all must confront this disease if we’re to overcome it. Our Congress is politically bankrupt. It struts around as if all were fine, as if it deserved the honor that its auspicious Capitol building inspires. It acts as if nothing were wrong. As if the people didn’t notice.
We have lost something profoundly important to the future of this republic. We must find a way to get it back.
PART IV
SOLUTIONS
Our Congress has been corrupted; its independence, weakened. This corruption can be seen from two sides: from the side of Congress and from the side of the people.
From the side of Congress, the corruption weakens the focus on the people, as it strengthens the focus on the funders. As Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.; 1953–1965, 1969–1987) put it:
Senators and representatives, faced incessantly with the need to raise ever more funds… can scarcely avoid weighing every decision against the question, “How will this affect my fund-raising?” rather than “How will this affect the national interest?”1
From the side of the people, the corruption confirms the irrelevancy of democracy. We are taught our place. We find other things to do. We focus on strategies to make us less dependent upon an entity that is distracted from us. We learn not to waste our time, because the message these distracted souls send is, You are not my real concern.
Both sides are bad, but in different ways. Yet we can respond to both in a similar way: by removing the distraction that thwarts their independence.
The changes that would accomplish this are not hard to describe. How we effect them, however, is. The gap in the Framers’ original design is obvious enough. The types of reform that would fill that gap are obvious as well. But how one motivates a political response sufficient to fill it is incredibly difficult to imagine. I am not convinced it is possible, even though the next chapters map four different strategies we could try. I have my favorite among these four, but none are probable.
If this change is possible, it will take a series of unprecedented events. We’ve only ever seen major reform as the reaction to major quid pro quo corruption. But as the corruption I’ve described here doesn’t manifest itself in drama, I am not even sure we could imagine the event that would inspire the change we need.
Instead, this reform will depend upon equally extraordinary, but much less dramatic, events, moments that defy belief as a way to focus attention in a way that might affect beliefs.
The first time I recognized such a moment, I was watching TV. Bill O’Reilly was Jon Stewart’s guest on The Daily Show. As a liberal, my job is to despise O’Reilly. As a former conservative, I find that job harder than it should be. I get that there’s a Star Wars metaphor in this somewhere, but the ambiguity made me particularly eager to watch a clear hero, Stewart, tangle with the denouncer of “pinheads,” O’Reilly.
Stewart was interviewing O’Reilly about his new book, Pinheads and Patriots (2011).2 Midway through the interview, Stewart asked O’Reilly this:
When are we