Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it | Larry Lessig | TEDxMidAtlantic

Translator: Milenka Okuka Reviewer: Mile Živković So, it turns out that exactly one year ago, right now, at this very moment, one year ago in Hong Kong, an extraordinary protest began. The protest started by students, literally, high school students and college students, elementary school students, then their parents were a little embarrassed that they let their kids work so hard and then they showed up too. And the protest was about a law. And the law was proposed by China. The law was to determine how the governor of Hong Kong would be elected. The law stated: "The ultimate objective is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage following the nomination of him by a broadly representative nomination committee in accordance with democratic procedures." Okay, so the idea was that t

here

's a two-step process.

The first step was the nomination and then the second step was the election. The nomination committee would be made up of about 1,200

people

, which means that out of seven million

people

, 0.02 percent of Hong Kong. Alright, 0.02% as you can see is a really small number. (Laughs) Really, very small. If you thought about it, relative to all the people in Hong Kong, it would look like this: This little corner is 0.02 percent. So 0.02% can choose the candidates, from which the rest of Hong Kong can vote. And the outcry was because it was feared that this filter was a biased filter.

The claim was that the 0.02% would be dominated by a pro-Beijing political and business elite. T

here

fore, the 99.98% would be excluded from this first critical step with the consequence, obviously, of producing a

democracy

that answers only to China. Well, now it turns out that the Chinese stole this idea from an American. Don't worry, there were no patents, no copyrights, no intellectual property violations here. But they stole the idea from an American. Perhaps America's greatest political philosopher: a man named Boss Tweed. (Laughter) Boss Tweed had a political party in Tammany Hall. He used to say, "I don't care who you choose, as long as I'm the one who nominates." (Laughter) So, this conception, this type of... (Laughter) (Applause) the conception of politics has an obvious logic, because, if you control the nomination, each candidate would worry about what you, the nominator, think. . .

So, you pretty much control the candidate, whether or not you control the final choice. We can call that brilliant theory, that brilliant theory to destroy

democracy

, tweedism. Any two-stage process where the Tweeds nominate and then the rest select is Tweedism. And the consequence of Tweedism, obviously, is to produce a system that responds only to Tweeds. Now, Tweedism was practiced not only in the North, not only in New York, but it was also practiced in the South. Texas in 1923 practiced tweedism by law. In 1923, Texas passed a statute that said: "In the Democratic primaries only whites could vote." Only whites could vote.

Black people can vote in general elections, if of course they could register, given all the barriers to registration. But only whites could vote in democratic primaries. And of course, back then, it was hard to imagine, but back then the only party that mattered was the Democratic Party in Texas. So in this two-stage process, blacks were excluded from the first stage. 16% of Texas was excluded from this first critical stage, with the obvious consequence of producing a democracy that responds only to whites. Now, those cases are obvious to us. Everyone looks at that and says: there's obviously something wrong with so-called democracies setting up their structure that way.

So why don't we see it here? In the United States we take it for granted that campaigns will be privately financed. But we must recognize that financing is its own competence, financing is its own Primary. We have the voting system, where people vote, but in the first stage there is a Money Primary that determines which candidates can run in those voting elections. Now, that Money Primary takes time. Members of Congress and congressional candidates spend 30 to 70 percent of their time dialing (this is an old phone, you might not recognize it) but dialing dollars. Calling people across the country to get the money they need to run their campaigns or to get their party back into power.

B. F. Skinner gave us this wonderful image of the Skinner box where any stupid animal could learn what buttons it needed to press for its sustenance. This is the picture of the life of the modern American congressman. As the modern American congressman... (Applause) he comes to learn what buttons he needs to push to get the sustenance he needs for his campaign to be successful. This is his life and it has an effect. Each of them, by doing this, develops a "sixth sense," a constant awareness of how what they do might affect their ability to raise money.

They become, in the words of "The X-Files," "shape shifters" as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them raise money. Not in the numbers 1 to 10, but in the numbers 11 to 1000. Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, describes how when she went to Congress a colleague told her: "Always lean green." And to set her straight, she continued: "You know, he wasn't an environmentalist." (Laughter) Obviously this is also a Primary. It is the Primary of Money. It's not the White Primary, it's the Green Primary. It is the first stage of a multi-stage process to select the candidates who will represent us.

So if this is the structure, we should ask who the funders are. Or we can think about who the biggest funders are. In 2014, the top 100 gave as much as the bottom 4.75 million funders to congressional campaigns. So far this election cycle, 400 families have donated half the money in election contributions and Super PAC contributions so far. Four hundred families! That's not American democracy. That is the democracy of the Banana Republic. (Laughter) And then we can think not only of the main funders, but also of the relevant funders. Of course, people who give millions of dollars have the attention of members of Congress.

But how much do you need to give to be relevant? How much do you need to donate to be big enough for people in Congress to care as they ask for dollars to raise money from you? Take the people who maxed out in 2014. And in 2014, that means they gave $5,200 to at least one candidate in the General Primary and General Election. It turns out that in 2014, 57,874 Americans maxed out that way. So we could say, 57,874 gave enough material to control, to be the dominant force in this first stage of the electoral process. And some of you math geniuses could do the numbers. 54,874, hey, wait a minute, that's 0.02% (Laughter) of the United States. 0.02% of the United States dominates this first stage in the process of choosing the candidates who will represent us.

They choose the candidates because you can't be credible unless you get their money. And we can vote for those candidates. This small fraction of 1%, this Chinese fraction of 1% dominates the first stage with the consequence, obviously, of producing a democracy that responds only to these financiers. It's the Princeton study, which, as a Harvard professor, I'm not allowed to talk much about, let's get it off the stage quickly. By Martin Gilens and Ben Page, the largest empirical study of real decisions of our government in the history of political science, related the real decisions of our government over the past 40 years to the opinions of the economic elite, the opinions of social groups of organized interest. and the opinions of the average voter.

And what they found was that there was a good correlation between the opinions of the economic elite and what our government actually did. So, as you go from 0% of the elite supporting something to 100%, the probability that that proposal will be approved increases. The same goes for organized special interest groups. As the number of them supporting something increases, the probability of that proposal being approved increases. Here is the graph of the average voter. It is a flat line. Flat line, literally and figuratively. What this means is that, when the percentage of average voters who support a proposal goes from 0 to 100%, it does not change the probability that that proposal will be enacted.

As they put it in English: "When controlling for the preferences of economic elites and the positions of organized interest groups, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, close to zero, and statistically non-significant impact on public policy." "In a democracy, this is true. Very good, here is the image we had, they told us about our democracy. There we were, the citizens, driving the bus. But here is the reality, the reality is... (Laughter) (Applause) the reality is that the steering wheel has come off this bus, we no

longer

drive the bus. We have, anecdotally, in the most aggressive empirical analysis, no relationship with what our government does.

This is a product of tweedism. And what tweedism is is, above all, corruption. It is a corruption of the design of our representative democracy. When Madison gave us our representative democracy, he described it, in "Federals" 52, as a system that would have one branch, Congress, that would be "dependent solely on the people." An exclusive dependency. But that is not our Congress. They depend on the town and the Tweeds. And then, to continue, to clarify, Madison in "Federals" 57 said, by people he means: "Not the rich, rather than the poor." Not the rich, more than the poor. But that is not our reality.

People today do not refer to the rich, but rather to the poor, except for the Tweeds. The Tweeds have more power than the middle class and the poor. This is corruption. They're not criminals, it's a system in which decent people who come to this town to do the right thing are inclined to do what the Tweed demand, because it's the only way to survive. It is corruption. But it is caused by a basic inequality that we have allowed to evolve within our representative system. An inequality. Remember Orwell's quote: "All animals are created equal." And what we have here is that all animals are created equal but the Tweeds are more equal than others.

It is inequality. But the fundamental thing about recognizing that it is about inequality is that, if we could eliminate inequality; if we could address that fundamental inequality in this representative democracy; If we could neutralize this tweedism, then we could end the corruption that makes it impossible for our government to do any of the things we want it to do. We could achieve a system that depends solely on the people because only the people would have influence within our government. It would be a system in which not the rich, but rather the poor, were the people because each one, due to this equality, would have the ability to pressure the government in the direction in which he wants it to be pressured.

Equality. I'm not talking about wealth equality, it's important to care about that too. That's not what I'm talking about. I am referring to the inequality that we have as citizens. And to achieve that, what I've been arguing is that we need to talk about a statute that Congress should pass tomorrow. Statute, let's call it the Citizen Equality Law. What the Citizen Equality Law does first is change the way campaigns are financed. So that instead of this Green Primary we have a Money Primary, but citizens are financing these campaigns, as much as anyone else. The money comes from all of us through proposals like the American Anti-Corruption Act or John Sarbanes' Government by the People Act, which would provide small-dollar public funds to finance congressional campaigns.

So that they would not depend on a few to finance their campaigns. That is the first fundamental dimension of equality that we should reinsert in this representative democracy. And there are other inequalities within our system. We need equal representation within our system. This article, this fantastic article written by Christopher Ingraham for the Washington Post, shows a graph of these gerrymandered districts in the United States. These are electoral districts of the United States. Here's my favorite example of this. You can see the natural community that unites these people here. (Laughs) This is a system. They said they are crimes against geography, that's a good way to put it.

This is the system by which politicians choose voters. Voters do not elect politicians. And they elect voters to create safe seats. Both Democrats and Republicans play this game. So in our Congress today, 90 seats are competitive. Which means 345 seats are these safe seats. Which means that if you are a minority party in each of these 345 seats, the representative doesn't care about you because he knows he doesn't need you. Which means 89 million Americans are notrepresented in this system, because we structure it in a way that ensures that these people do not count. That is inequality. And Fair Vote has a proposal built into the Equal Citizenship Act to radically change the way we make these districts work so that we have fair proportional representation across the country.

And finally, equal freedom to vote. The absurd ways we make it difficult for people to vote. And it's no accident how we make it harder for people to vote. In the last election, 10 million people had to wait more than 30 minutes to vote. Which for people with babysitters and iPhones may not seem like a bad thing, but if you're a working family who can't afford that kind of support, that's too high a poll tax for many. And of course, as... (Applause) as the Brennan Center found in a study they did on this, this poll tax is strongly correlated with race.

It is racially correlated in the sense that where there are black or brown districts they are less likely to have the resources necessary to make it possible to vote easily. That, of course, I think is more directly correlated with the party, leading to many proposals incorporated in the Citizens' Equality Act, including the Voting Rights Promotion Act, which would attack some of these provisions that make it difficult for people vote. And Bernie Sanders' suggestion of Democracy Day, where we move voting to a holiday so that workers can vote as easily as those who are not required to do so. (Applause) So these three ideas are grouped together in a statute, the statute that Congress could approve tomorrow to achieve this equality and make this representative democracy possible.

Well, now I raise this as the central fight we should have and people say, well, why? There are so many problems out there, why would you choose this one to push through? And there is a practical reason. The practical reason is that we will get nothing from this government until we get this. If you want this government to address climate change, we won't get climate change legislation until we address this fundamental inequality in this broken democracy. He wants Congress to address the social security issue to ensure there is social security; We won't get a government to address that problem until we fix this democracy.

He wants Congress to address the student debt problem. We're not going to address the problem of student debt until we address this problem of democracy. So it's not that this is the most important issue. It's not that those questions are the most important, this is just the first. This is the question we have to solve, if we are to have any chance of solving the long list of critical problems that we as a nation must address. That's pretty much why we should put this first. But it's not just practical, it's moral. 400 years after slavery arrived on these shores, I believe it is time we peacefully fight for equality.

May we have a campaign, a national campaign, everyone rallying around the idea that it's finally time for us to stand up for this idea of ​​equality. It is a shame to our traditions that in 2015 we have movements that need to affirm that black lives matter. How can that be possible? (Applause) Well, I can tell you that it is because we have a political system that does not count us equally. We have a political system that counts some more than others. We have a political system that betrays the fundamental idea of ​​a representative democracy. 54 years ago, Martin Luther King went to Lincoln University and gave a speech in which he said: "America is essentially a dream, the substance of the dream is expressed in these sublime words, words raised to cosmic proportions: that we are all created equal." We have heard it said that the Pope should not talk about climate science, so he should not talk about what the Creator meant, but let me tell you the reality, whatever the Creator meant, the reality is that we are not equal in America today.

The reality is that we have second class citizens in the United States today. And the reality is that until we face the fact that this ideal is a fantasy in America today, we will not begin to have a democracy that

represents

us. We need to learn from our brothers and sisters who fifty years ago risked their lives to fight for equality. And we need to learn from our brothers and sisters around the world who are now risking their lives to fight for equality. Fight for equality, love for equality. Sacrifice that sense of love, sacrifice for equality.

Because if we don't, how will we look at our children, who will look at us and say, "Look at what you inherited and then wasted. Look at what you had and then left us." Because we were given the nation with the potential to be the greatest democracy in the world and we have allowed that potential to die. Thank you so much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)