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We all understand this pull. We all know addiction. There isn’t a person among us who hasn’t suffered, or caused, Yeltsin’s harm, if only at the level of a family or among friends.

So think about that harm. Recognize its nature. Think about the alcoholic and his plight. He might be losing his family, his job, and his liver. Each of these is a critically important problem, indeed, among the most important problems a person could face. But we all recognize that to solve any of these “most important” problems, he must solve his alcoholism first. It’s not that alcoholism is the most important problem. It’s not. It is just the first problem.

So, too, with us. There is no end to the list of problems we as a nation face. Whether big government or bad health care; complicated taxes or global warming; a ballooning deficit or decaying schools. But we won’t solve these problems until we solve our first problem first: a dependency that has corrupted the core of our democracy. We can love the agents of that corruption. We can even reelect them. But we must get them to change.

The only souls that can do this are citizens. Not politicians. Not former politicians. Not wannabe politicians. But citizens. Indeed, citizens who swear off elected politics.

For we need a politics that is not about politicians. We need a people who devote themselves to saving this republic without others wondering whether they are simply trying to secure a job for themselves. We need a way to engage that is not about just listening. We need to take responsibility for the government we ask the politicians to run. We need to fix it, and then give it back to them to run.

We citizens. You. Me. Us.

We need to launch a generation that stops simply hacking at the branches of evil, to steal from Thoreau one last time, and learns again to strike at the root. We need a generation of rootstrikers.

When Ben Franklin walked out of Independence Hall, the work of the Constitutional Convention completed, he was stopped by a woman and asked, “Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?”

“A Republic, madam,” Franklin replied, “if you can keep it.”

A republic.

Meaning: “A representative democracy.”

Meaning: A government “dependent upon the People alone.”

We have lost that republic.

We must act to get it back.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to many for their generous help.

I was aided in the research by an army of scholars and some soon-to-be lawyers, including Jennifer Campbell, Alissa Del Riego, Dominic DeNunzio, Ronak Desai, Ryan Doerfler, Ann Donaldson, Paul Dumaine, Jacob Eisler, Rachel Goldstein, Jeremy Haber, Lauren Henry, Jason Iuliano, Rohit Malik, Randy Maas, Bryson Morgan, Benjamin Sadun, Shaina Lee Trotta, and Chinh Vo. Matthew Wansley helped organize that army and did exceptional work on his own for an extended period.

My understanding of these issues was also affected substantially by students in four corruption seminars that I taught, two at Stanford, one at Harvard, and one at the University of Cincinnati. Paul Gowder helped me pull together the first of these seminars. Joel Hyatt co-taught the second at Stanford and has guided my thinking and work here substantially.

Michael Nelson, Michael Powell, Larry Pressler, and Ken Silverstein offered insights in a series of interviews. Mark McKinnon, Trevor Potter, and Nick Allard helped introduce the world of lobbying, as well as others less eager to be named. David Post showed me Jefferson on corruption. Zephyr Teachout’s work about the Framers generally has been essential to my own. I am grateful to her, and eager to read her forthcoming book, Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box (to be published in 2012).

Help with ideas and references was also provided by a wide range of Tweeps, including @JMHeggen, @EDUCAUSEeq, @gfish, @mrtnzlngr, @bobblakley, @bobblakley, @heydan, @dlnorman, @xt1, and @dclauzel.

Without the program Freedom (macfreedom.com), this book would not have been completed.

Early drafts of the manuscript