Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [3]
The Republican party is now facing a great crisis. It is to decide whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln’s most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and without Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the public to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.2
The term progressive is a confused and much misunderstood moniker for perhaps the most important political movement at the turn of the last century. We confuse it today with liberals, but back then there were progressives of every political stripe in America—on the Left and on the Right, and with dimensional spins in the middle (the Prohibitionists, for example). Yet one common thread that united these different strands of reform was the recognition that democratic government in America had been captured. Journalists and writers at the turn of the twentieth century taught America “that business corrupts politics,”3 as Richard McCormick put it. Corruption of the grossest forms—the sort that would make convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff wince—was increasingly seen to be the norm throughout too much of American government. Democracy, as in rule of the people, was a joke. As historian George Thayer wrote, describing the “golden age of boodle” (1876–1926): “Never has the American political process been so corrupt. No office was too high to purchase, no man too pure to bribe, no principle too sacred to destroy, no law too fundamental to break.”4
Or again, Teddy Roosevelt (1910): “Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit.”5
To respond to this “corruption,” Progressives launched a series of reforms to reclaim government. Many of these reforms were hopeless disasters (the ballot initiative and elected judges), and some were both disasters and evil (Prohibition and eugenics, to name just two). But mistakes notwithstanding, the Progressive Era represents an unprecedented moment of experimentation and engagement, all motivated by a common recognition that the idea of popular sovereignty in America had been sold. The problem was not, as McCormick describes, a “product of misbehavior by ‘bad’ men,” but was instead now seen as the predictable “outcome of identifiable economic and political forces.”6
That recognition manifested itself powerfully on November 5, 1912: The incumbent Republican placed third (23.2 percent) in the four-man race; the socialist, a distant fourth (6 percent); and Teddy Roosevelt (27.4 percent) got bested by the “new” Democrat, Woodrow Wilson (41.8 percent).
Yet only when you add together these two self-identified Progressives do you get a clear sense of the significance of 1912: almost 70 percent of America had voted for a “progressive.” Seventy percent of America had said, “This democracy is corrupted; we demand it be fixed.” Seventy percent refused to “stand pat.”
A century later we suffer the same struggle, but without anything like the same clarity. A “fierce discontent,” as Roosevelt described America in 1906, is once again raging throughout the republic. Now, as then, it gets expressed as “agitation” against “evil,” and a “firm determination to punish the authors of evil, whether in industry or politics.”7 We look to a collapsed economy, to raging deficits, to a Wall Street not yet held to account, and we feel entitled to our anger. And so extreme is that entitlement that it makes even violence seem sensible, if only to the predictably insane extremes in any