Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [4]
Roosevelt was encouraged by this agitation against evil. It was, he said, a “feeling that is to be heartily welcomed.” It was “a sign,” he promised, “of healthy life.”
Yet today such agitation is not a sign of healthy life. It is a symptom of ignorance. For though the challenge we face is again the battle against a democracy deflected by special interests, our struggle is not against “evil,” or even the “authors of evil.” Our struggle is against something much more banal. Not the banal in the now-overused sense of Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil— of ordinary people enabling unmatched evil (Hitler’s Germany). Our banality is one step more, well, banal.
For the enemy we face is not Hitler. Neither is it the good Germans who would enable a Hitler. Our enemy is the good Germans (us) who would enable a harm infinitely less profound, yet economically and politically catastrophic nonetheless. A harm caused by a kind of corruption. But not the corruption engendered by evil souls. Indeed, strange as this might sound, a corruption crafted by good souls. By decent men. And women. And if we’re to do anything about this corruption, we must learn to agitate against more than evil. We must remember that harm sometimes comes from timid, even pathetic souls. That the enemy doesn’t always march. Sometimes it simply shuffles.
The great threat to our republic today comes not from the hidden bribery of the Gilded Age, when cash was secreted among members of Congress to buy privilege and secure wealth. The great threat today is instead in plain sight. It is the economy of influence now transparent to all, which has normalized a process that draws our democracy away from the will of the people. A process that distorts our democracy from ends sought by both the Left and the Right: For the single most salient feature of the government that we have evolved is not that it discriminates in favor of one side and against the other. The single most salient feature is that it discriminates against all sides to favor itself. We have created an engine of influence that seeks not some particular strand of political or economic ideology, whether Marx or Hayek. We have created instead an engine of influence that seeks simply to make those most connected rich.
As a former young Republican—indeed, Pennsylvania’s state chairman of the Teen Age Republicans—I don’t mean to rally anyone against the rich. But I do mean to rally Republicans and Democrats alike against a certain kind of rich that no theorist on the Right or the Left has ever sought seriously to defend: The rich whose power comes not from hard work, creativity, innovation, or the creation of wealth. The rich who instead secure their wealth through the manipulation of government and politicians. The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed.
Theorists of corruption don’t typically talk much about decent souls. Their focus is upon criminals—the venally corrupt, who bribe to buy privilege, or the systematically corrupt, who make the people (or, better, the rich) dependent upon the government to ensure that the people (or, better, the rich) protect the government.8
So, too, when we speak of politicians and our current system of governance, many of us think of our government as little more than criminal, or as crime barely hidden—from Jack Abramoff (“I was participating in a system of legalized bribery. All of it is bribery, every bit of it”) to Judge Richard Posner (“the legislative system [is] one of quasi-bribery”) to Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein (“legalized bribery”) to former congressman and CIA director Leon Panetta (“legalized bribery has become part of the culture of how this place operates”) to one of the Senate’s most important figures, Russell B. Long (D-La.; 1949–1987) (“Almost a hairline’s difference separates bribes