Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [2]
Ben Franklin would weep. The republic that he helped birth is lost. The 89 percent of Americans who have no confidence in Congress (as reported by the latest Gallup poll)1 are not idiots. They are not even wrong. Yet they fail to recognize just why this government doesn’t deserve our confidence. Most of us get distracted. Most of us ignore the root.
We were here at least once before.
One hundred years ago America had an extraordinary political choice. The election of 1912 gave voters an unprecedented range of candidates for president of the United States.
On the far Right was the “stand pat,” first-term Republican William Howard Taft, who had served as Teddy Roosevelt’s secretary of war, but who had not carried forward the revolution on the Right that Roosevelt thought he had started.
On the far Left was the most successful socialist candidate for president in American history, Eugene Debs, who had run for president twice before, and who would run again, from prison, in 1920 and win the largest popular vote that any socialist has ever received in a national American election.
In the middle were two “Progressives”: the immensely popular former president Teddy Roosevelt, who had imposed upon himself a two-term limit, but then found the ideals of reform that he had launched languishing within the Republican Party; and New Jersey’s governor and former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson, who promised the political machine–bound Democratic Party the kind of reform that Roosevelt had begun within the Republican Party.
These two self-described Progressives were very different. Roosevelt was a big-government reformer. Wilson, at least before the First World War, was a small-government, pro-federalist reformer. Each saw the same overwhelming threat to America’s democracy—the capture of government by powerful special interests—even if each envisioned a very different remedy for that capture. Roosevelt wanted a government large enough to match the concentrated economic power that was then growing in America; Wilson, following Louis Brandeis, wanted stronger laws limiting the size of the concentrated economic power then growing in America.
Presidential reelection campaigns are not supposed to be bloody political battles. But Taft had proven himself to be a particularly inept politician (he was later a much better chief justice of the Supreme Court), and after Roosevelt’s term ended, business interests had reasserted their dominant control of the Republican Party. Yet even though dissent was growing across the political spectrum, few seemed to doubt that the president would be reelected. Certainly Roosevelt felt certain enough of that to delay any suggestion that he would enter the race to challenge his own hand-picked successor.
A Wisconsin Republican changed all that. In January 1911, Senator Robert La Follette and his followers launched the National Progressive Republican League. Soon after, La Follette announced his own campaign for the presidency. Declaring that “popular government in America has been thwarted… by the special interests,” the League advocated five core reforms, all of which attacked problems of process, not substance. The first four demanded changes to strengthen popular control of government (the election of senators, direct primaries, direct election of delegates to presidential conventions, and the spread of the state initiative process). The last reform demanded “a thoroughgoing corrupt practices act.”
La Follette’s campaign initially drew excitement and important support. It faltered, however, when he seemed to suffer a mental breakdown during a speech at a