Glenn Reynolds: Larry Lessig, trying to be heard
The electoral system that Lessig hopes to reform is keeping him out of October's DNC debate.
Larry Lessig is a law professor, and he’s running for president of the United States. But it’s not his job, but his message, that makes him stand out.
A law-professor president wouldn’t be so unusual. Bill Clinton is a former law professor (Hillary too). Barack Obama was, technically, a "senior lecturer" at the University of Chicago Law School, which for the University of Chicago is close enough to being an actual professor.
But although law professors are, as I can attest, the salt of the earth — nature’s noblemen, really — voters could be forgiven for looking at the last 20 years or so and concluding that “law professor” isn’t the strongest of selling points for a presidential candidate.
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And Lessig, a Harvard law professor who is running for the Democratic nomination, isn’t stressing his employment history. Instead, he’s running as an insurgent against the powers that be. According to Lessig, whom I interviewed by phone last week, “I’ve come to the view that we’re at a crisis of governance, and a Democratic candidate who promises the moon can’t focus on this.”
What’s the crisis? “Democrats say it’s that we have Republicans in the world," Lessig said. "But the real source is the deep inequality — political, not economic — that we have in our democracy. Four hundred families produce half the political funding. That inequality is the mechanism that stops change.”
Lessig’s solution is the “Citizen Equality Act,” a statute designed to reduce the influence of money in politics. Once it’s passed, he promises to resign, which makes his choice of running mate pretty important, I guess.
Lessig has raised a million dollars, which is nothing to sneeze at, but he’s being given the cold shoulder by the Democrats when it comes to participating in the debates. I think he’s got a good argument for being included — he’s certainly as serious a candidate as those sad sacks Martin O’Malley and Lincoln Chafee, and I’m hearing a lot more about his campaign than about the curiously somnolent campaign of Jim Webb.
Why are they keeping Lessig out? According to Lessig, it’s for the same reason he wants in: “My view is that if we can get this message [of reform] into the debate it would change the dynamics of this Democratic primary entirely. This issue framed in this way totally blows up the Democratic primary.”
Hillary and Bernie, he says, are promising the moon to voters, but can’t deliver. Lessig told me, “If I can get on that stage and say the rocket can’t get off the ground, and we have to change this dynamic first,” the narrative shifts in a way that the leading candidates can’t address.
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I’m not sure I agree with Lessig’s solution — and, in fact, I’m pretty sure that I don’t. We’ve had layer on top of layer of campaign finance “reforms” that seem to have made things worse, not better. But he’s still on to something.
Most people today, I think, share a feeling that the system is rigged, for the benefit of insiders and at the expense of ordinary Americans. I spoke at a conference on constitutional change that Lessig organized with Mark Meckler at Harvard Law School back in 2011, and it was interesting to see Tea Party people talking earnestly with MoveOn types. The solutions they favored were often (but by no means always) different, but the dissatisfaction with the current situation was deeply shared.
“Most Americans,” says Lessig, “are members of the None Of The Above Party.” If allowed to do so, they would probably throw out most of America’s political class bodily. It’s easy to see why the big shots of the Democratic Party — and, for that matter, the Republican Party — prefer business as usual, even if it’s bad for the country.
The real question is, how long will Americans put up with that? As voters’ patience wears thin, the chances for insurgent candidates like Lessig look better.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, and a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
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