Name: Republic, lost
ISBN: 9780446576437

Republic, lost

In an era when special interests funnel huge amounts of money into our government—driven by shifts in campaign-finance rules and brought to new levels by the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission—trust in our government has reached an all-time low. More than ever before, Americans believe that money buys results in Congress, and that business interests wield control over our legislature. With heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig takes a clear-eyed look at how we arrived at this crisis: how fundamentally good people, with good intentions, have allowed our democracy to be co-opted by outside interests, and how this exploitation has become entrenched in the system. Rejecting simple labels and reductive logic—and instead using examples that resonate as powerfully on the Right as on the Left—Lessig seeks out the root causes of our situation. He plumbs the issues of campaign financing and corporate lobbying, revealing the human faces and follies that have allowed corruption to take such a foothold in our system. He puts the issues in terms that nonwonks can understand, using real-world analogies and real human stories. And ultimately he calls for widespread mobilization and a new Constitutional Convention, presenting achievable solutions for regaining control of our corrupted—but redeemable—representational system.

What Hacker News says

mandmandamJul 2023

I think the reference to Jefferson, as if modern lobbying is a foundation of US Democracy, is extraordinarily distasteful.

Here are some entire books written by people who studied this issue in great depth:

    "The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate" by Lee Drutman: In this book, Drutman explains how and why corporations became so invested in influencing politics, and what that means for the future of American democracy.

    "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It" by Lawrence Lessig: This book by a prominent legal scholar and activist provides a comprehensive analysis of the influence of money on politics and proposes innovative solutions for reform.

    "So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government" by Robert G. Kaiser: A detailed look at the rise of the lobbying industry in Washington and its impact on American democracy.

This shit is killing people, no exaggeration. The rise in inequality over the last 50 years is rotting America's heart and soul out. US style lobbying is right at the center of it.

thread

pksebbenFeb 2023

the three steps you mention do not operate like that, in reality.

1 - most news is published by one of a few conglomerates. It is impossible to be competitive in this space without a staggeringly large bankroll, and most 'competition' is just the illusion of, not the genuine article. An example of this is the chairman of the Associated Press (nominally a non profit news organization) also being the CEO of Hearst Communications (named for William Randolph Hearst - one of those conglomerates I'm referring to)

2 - Things getting in between your opinion (that is, anyone's opinion) and enacted policy: first-past-the-post elections, the two party system, gerrymandering, the Senate (unless you live in Vermont, Wyoming, or one of the Dakotas), the DNC, the RNC, primaries, voting happening on a single day, voting not being a national holiday, the supreme court, relying on representatives rather than voting directly, corporations are people, and money buys elections.This list is incomplete but touches on most of the key players. You get the picture.

3 - Not quite sure where to start with this. see (1) and (2) above.

The thing is, it's a really complicated mess and like any sufficiently complex system, it's nearly impossible to reason about without making some deep assumptions. For a light introduction to the scope of the situation, I recommend reading Republic Lost, by Lawrence Lessig. He's a constitutional scholar who started talking about all this before the system started to show late-stage symptoms of what's probably terminal cancer, from a societal perspective.

thread

pksebbenSep 2022

this view of an average Americans level of agency in our political process could most politely be described as 'simplified'.

Before you even get in the weeds as to how voting actually works, that two party thing you mentioned provides, at the ideal best, two people with two sets of ideas about how to get things done. IF they don't agree on how to manage something (say we get the rare politician who's not in favor of further deregulating banks), there's no guarantee that one of those two ideas will be any good, or aligned with the political zeitgeist they're supposed to represent. Much more often, the wedge issues they differ on are a fraction of the things they'll be making decisions about, and stuff like military spending, bank deregulation, and general market deregulation are bipartisan supported. So if you don't like either of those, you're effectively excluded from the political process.

Then, you have all the ways in which the voting process is gamed by those in charge of it. Gerimandering is an obvious and easy one to spot, but there are other, more pernicious methods employed - like restricting voting to a single day, not making voting a holiday, purging voter rolls prior to the primaries (we'll deal with the primaries in a second), restricting felons from voting (whilst making things like marijuana possession a felony, an easy way to shunt out the underprivileged). There's more, for good reading on this topic check out Republic Lost by Lawrence Lessig.

We are married to first-past-the-post voting, which is demonstrably the worst system but the easiest to game.

The supreme court, which makes many of the most impactful political decisions, isn't voted in. And they have life terms. So even if you manage to make progress elsewhere, they can just decide that things should be different and change the way the law works.

The Senate arbitrarily distributes the power to block legislation among the least populous states, making it easier to manipulate the population into voting for people who will do this.

K Street (the lobbyists) literally get paid to 'help' draft legislation that favors only those who can afford it. Some of our laws are actually for sale.

Then you have the primaries, which are effectively controlled by two fairly small cabals of (who exactly? I dare you to enumerate the people involved). Each of which has it's own set of obtuse rules that's not subject to an iota of the scrutiny that actual elections are subject to, even though you could make the argument that the primaries are the more important election, because they decide what the two options will be.

Then there's the news. Rather, there's the institutions that claim to be news, but all of which behave more like winged propaganda machines, pumping their color and fueling anger at (whatever the wedge issues are for the other team today). These outlets all have things they will not talk about, like the issues with our elections or growing income inequality, because these things are precisely the things that the power structure, which all major news networks benefit from, is founded upon.

One thing both parties agree on completely; there should only be two parties. This would strike one as odd if they weren't so deeply acclimated to the situation.

thread

pksebbenJul 2021

I love the work that represent.us does. This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

I remember reading Republic, Lost years ago. it's good to see action plans around that material.

thread

prepperpottsMay 2020

one interesting, counterintuitive argument i've seen on how to prevent this is in lawrence lessig's book, "republic, lost" about the us congress.

his take is that public servants actually don't make enough money, when compared to their peers in the public sector, and that an important step to preventing regulatory capture is to pay them better. that way, people don't spend their careers in public service trying to avoid pissing off lobbyists they're hoping to work for later.

not sure if it'd work or not, or if making moves like this illegal is better, but it's definitely an interesting idea.

thread

bprovenFeb 2019

Better yet - campaign finance reform: https://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Version-Lawrence-Lessig...

I think there are good people that want to serve, but they have to play the money game to survive (costs millions/billions to get elected?? What?!). Which eventually corrupts them ...

Term limits might be nice too.

thread