Lester Land and the Most Important Political Issue (Maybe)

Lawrence Lessig is an activist and unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. But don’t let his failures distract you from what he has to say—in fact, his lack of political success may be supportive of his message: the United States’ political structure is corrupt and we must fix it.

In this post, I’ll mostly outline Lessig’s TED Talk from 2013, but it is by no means exhaustive of the issues he’s trying to address. (Feel free to check out his interview on the Joe Rogan podcast for just a couple more.) Across all of his work, he is pointing to the broken thing that was supposed to help fix everything else.

To understand the problem, we begin by looking at the fictional country of Lester Land. Lester Land looks an awful lot like the United States, with 320 million population and similar demographics. And much like the United States, it chooses its leaders through an election. But Lester Land is interesting because before someone can run in the general election, they must first go through the “Lester election,” in which only those with the name Lester (0.05% of the population) are allowed to vote. It is well-documented that to be competitive in the general election, one must first do exceptionally well in the Lester election. Lester Land’s system rightfully sounds silly, but of course, you probably already know that the United States also has an election that determines who will be successful in the general election: the “money election.” And the number of Lesters in Lester Land is proportionate to the number of funders in the U.S.’s money election.

Now Lester Land would maintain that this is fair, that the people (not just the Lesters) ultimately get to decide who wins. The United States said the same thing in the Citizens United Supreme Court case. And that’s true, I guess. But the obvious problem for most is that the people only have the ultimate say on those already filtered by the Lesters or the funders. And in the case of the United States, the power of the funders concentrates more narrowly around a decreasing number of funders relative to an increasing amount of donations. At its most extreme, in 2012, 0.000042% of the United States (132 individuals) gave 60% of SuperPAC money in that election cycle.

This is, simply stated, corruption in our elections. Now this form of corruption is perfectly legal. Yet it is corruption nonetheless—“corruption relative to the framers’ baseline,” as Lessig puts it. It is a proven dependence on funders rather than people.

And you may be tempted to assume this is an issue solely for the political left. Liberalism has a certain affinity for the power of the people and wanting the government to be pure enough to solve the nation’s problems—yes—but this corruption is detrimental to the right as well. Consider a project under Al Gore’s vice presidency in the 90s that aimed to deregulate a significant portion of the telecommunications industry. This would be a major win for small-government Republicans, but the project was rejected by Capitol Hill for the singular reason that deregulating the industry would hinder politicians from raising money from that industry. Money in politics hurts both sides.

Lessig does not claim, however, that money in politics is the most important issue. For him, the environment is the most important issue. For you, it may be the economy—he’s fine with that. But we must realize that money in politics, that corruption in government, is the first issue. Our efforts toward everything else—whether it be the environment or the economy, or fighting for civil rights or reducing the government altogether—they are all affected by political corruption.

Now the solution to this particular issue is simple: we need to limit funding per individual so that funding is from a wider base (or something like that). But the practicality is hard, seemingly impossible. How do you change a broken system through that same broken system? Politicians have an interest in maintaining the status quo, in their potential to become a lobbyist or the like.

Lessig believes in competition and in our society’s ability to develop incentives for change. He believes that we can develop rules to help change the system and get the money out of politics, and I’m inclined to agree. It’s surely hard to do, and the cynicism is understandable. It’s hard to stop a machine of this size. But even if political corruption is not the most important issue, it is the first issue, and so we must aim to do the impossible, to create change and fix the system.

2 thoughts on “Lester Land and the Most Important Political Issue (Maybe)

  1. I agree that this issue is first in how any political system is run, but you make a leap in your argument that I can’t get past. In your 5th paragraph, you call the current system corrupt – how is it corrupt? Why is this system necessarily bad? If rich people want to give money to SuperPACs, a case needs to be made that it is not only bad, but passes the higher bar of corrupt.

    1. I think both of these questions are addressed above, but you’re right, it’s mostly assumed.
      How are big donors bad? Politicians bend more to the will of the wealthy few who donate than to the majority.
      How are big donors corrupt? Lessig’s answer is that it is “corruption relative to the framers’ baseline.” He goes into more detail on this in his talk. The situation described here is admittedly legal, but it has corrupted the original intention for the government, a government “dependent upon the people alone.” The government is now dependent on funders in addition to the people and these funders are not equal to the people in an ontological sense.

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