Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [143]
There was silence when Hiatt finished. No doubt, some were uncomfortable. Hiatt remembers the president being “gracious.” The only published account reports him as being less than charitable: “Clinton’s response effectively slashed Hiatt to pieces,” according to Peter Buttenwieser, “humiliating him in front of the group.”1
When I first heard this story, this simple act of courage moved me beyond words. I didn’t know Hiatt. I hadn’t heard of this effort to get Clinton to persuade a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy. But I could feel how impossibly difficult it must have been to utter those words, then and there. It was an act of courage, impossible for most of us if only because it was certain to alienate Hiatt from his friends.
For Hiatt’s challenge effectively divided those Democrats into two very different camps: one supporting fundamental reform and the other preferring the status quo. Whether or not Hiatt was the only member of the reform camp, there was a certain majority that liked the status quo.
Over the past four years, as I’ve worked to recruit supporters to this campaign, I’ve come to recognize these two camps. What unites them is a basic commitment to liberal politics. Not radical, leftist policies, but Democratic policies far from the extremes of the GOP.
But what divides them, these fat cats of the Democratic Party, is the question of whether they should continue to have the power over the Democratic Party that they have, and hence, for those brief moments when the party controls our government, power over the government as well.
Some among these fat cats love the life they now have—a life in which they can get any senator on the phone, or even the president, in a pinch. They love the world in which the most powerful person in the world, the president, invites them to dinner.
I don’t mean that they love this world of power merely because they like power. Maybe that’s why they like it, but that’s not how they understand it. Instead, these insanely rich people actually believe that their views about patent policy are better than those of people who have studied the question for thirty years. Or that their insights about health care are worth more than the views of doctors or nurses. They are convinced they are wise because the market made them rich. And they believe that a president should consider himself privileged to listen to their very comfortably funded wisdom.
As I’ve tried to convince these people to fight for a world where they don’t have this power, I have grown accustomed to a certain deflated recognition. You can walk them through the thousand reasons why this system of government is corrupt; you can get them to acknowledge the million times when bad influences have produced insanely bad policies; you can bring them to acknowledge the poison that this economy of influence is for democracy, and the rule of law. Yet, in the end, they resist. They just can’t imagine giving up their own power.
Sometimes they’re quite honest about it. I remember one soul, the certain inheritor of billions, telling me flat out, “I like my influence. I like being able to get senators on the phone.” (He has subsequently flipped, and is now a strong supporter of small-dollar-funded elections.)
But sometimes they’re just oblivious, and their obliviousness brings out the worst in me. I remember once talking to one about the principle of “one person, one vote”—the Supreme Court’s doctrine that forces states to ensure that the weight of one person’s vote is equal to the weight of everyone else’s. He had done work early in his career to push that principle along, and considered it, as he told me, “among the most important values now written into our Constitution.” “Isn’t it weird, then,” I asked him, “that the law would obsess about making sure that on Election Day, my vote is just as powerful as yours, but stand blind to the fact that in the days before Election Day, because of