Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [142]
Why not the same for country?
I wouldn’t compare my love for my family and my love for my nation, except to say that the irrational parts in each feel very much the same. Or at least one irrational part that I would hope you saw as the same: we should be willing to do whatever we can, the odds be damned, to save both when we see, when we finally see, the threat that stands above both.
The poor do this all the time for us—not just the poor, but many, many who are poor. We call them soldiers. They volunteer to fight wars for democracy. They put their lives on the line, literally, for an argument that is, in my humble opinion, vastly more attenuated to the end of saving democracy than anything I’ve described here.
The war I’ve endorsed won’t kill anyone. And it is a war we can’t rely on poor people to fight alone.
So you pick your poison. You tell me which hopeless strategy is best. Or you come up with a better one. But don’t tell me this is hopeless. Hopelessness is precisely the reason that citizens must fight.
Conclusion
Rich People
Arnold Hiatt was the chairman of Stride Rite Shoes, a company that has spread many beautiful designs, none as important as Keds. He is also one of the Democratic Party’s largest contributors. In 1996 he was its second-largest contributor, maxing out to support close to forty congressional candidates who had each promised they would support campaign finance reform. Many of those candidates won. Their cause, however, has not been won. Yet.
In the spring of 1997, President Bill Clinton wanted to thank the largest contributors to the Democratic Party. He also wanted to hear their ideas for what he should do with the last four years of his presidency. Thirty of the top contributors were invited to the Mayflower Hotel. None of them knew of course that Clinton would be frittering away almost two-thirds of that four-year term because of a fling with an intern. That was all to come. Instead, he was then still riding high as the Comeback Kid who had beaten back the Republican Revolution to become the first Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be reelected after a full first term.
At the end of the dinner, Clinton gave some remarks. He then asked the guests to give him their remarks about what he should be doing, and how he should be governing. One by one, the guests stood and offered their ideas. The president listened and took notes. The evening appeared to be having its intended effect: the fat cats were being attended to; their purr was warming up nicely.
Hiatt was the last to speak. Sitting two seats from the president, he stood, looked the president straight in the eyes, and said (as it was told to me and as best as I can reconstruct, with just a little poetic license taken with the words that Hiatt has kept in the form of notes only):
Mr. President, I know you’re an admirer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So I want you to put yourself in FDR’s shoes in 1940—the year when Roosevelt realized that he was going to have to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy.
Because that, Mr. President, is precisely what you need to do now—to convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy.
The war that Hiatt pushed, however, was not a war against Fascists. It was a war against fat cats, against people like the people in that room. People who believed that they were entitled to direct public policy merely because they were rich. People who had convinced the American people that democracy did not work, because the politicians listened to them, the fat cats, and not to the people. Hiatt challenged the president to recognize that “current campaign finance practices are threatening