Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [124]
Second, $3 billion a year isn’t a lot if it gives us even just a 20 percent chance of fixing our democracy.
For just think about how much we spend every year to “support democracy” around the world. Some of that spending (a small part) is direct. Much more of that spending (a huge part) is indirect. We’ve waged the longest war in American history to “make democracy possible in Iraq.” The total cost of that war? More than $750 billion. And that’s just the money. Put aside the 4,500 patriots who have given their lives to that theory of democracy building.
If we’re willing to spend $750 billion (so far) to make democracy in Iraq possible, we should be willing to spend one-twenty-fifth of that to make democracy in America work.
Will it work? We don’t see lots of evidence that trust in government increases when politicians adopt campaign finance reform. Why would this be any different?
It is fair to be skeptical about any reform working here. As Nate Persily and Kelli Lammie have demonstrated,11 we have little actual evidence to support the idea that cleaning up elections increases the public’s trust.
It is also fair to be skeptical about whether Persily and Lammie’s results generalize to every type of campaign finance reform. After all, none of the changes in the system for financing federal elections have changed the underlying (and corrupting) economy of influence. Indeed, the most prominent (transparency) has just made it more prominent. It is therefore not surprising that trust doesn’t rise when these changes are made. These changes are different, however, from the changes of the Grant and Franklin Project. It alone would change the economy of influence of elections and give the people a reason to think differently.
But what’s to stop the bundling of the democracy vouchers just as contributions are bundled today? And if they were bundled, wouldn’t we still have the same problem we have today?
In a word, no. The problem with American democracy is not that people try to aggregate their influence. It is that the influence they aggregate is so wildly disproportionate to the influence the system intended—votes. If a bundler succeeded in pulling together one hundred thousand souls to contribute their vouchers to a particular candidate, no doubt that bundler would have some important influence. But her influence is a better proxy for “the People” she has inspired than is the proxy of the bundler who today collects $5 million from a handful of wealthy, connected souls. Better, not perfect. But my bet is that it would be better enough.
Which leads to the final important qualification, or what I called before the “one critical assumption”:
The history of campaign finance reform is water running down a hill. No matter how you reform, the water seems to find its way around the obstacle. Block large contributions from individuals, and they become soft contributions to parties. Block soft contributions to parties, they become bundled contributions coordinated through lobbyists. And on it goes. In each case, a brilliant reform has been defeated by some new clever technique to ensure that money continues to have more salience in our political system than votes.12 As Robert Brooks wrote a century ago, “it must be admitted that the ablest corruptionists sometimes show skill little short of genius in devising new schemes to avoid the pitfalls of existing law.”13
It would be hubris to pretend that there is any single and final solution to this problem. I don’t make that assumption here. I do believe, however, that the architecture of this solution is better than the architecture of most of the solutions offered during the past forty years, all of which depended upon either silencing, limiting, or dampening someone’s desire to speak.
This one doesn’t. The Grant and Franklin Project doesn’t forbid anyone from running their own ads. It doesn’t force any candidate into the system. It doesn’t stop the likes of