Introducing Another Way

This is Larry Lessig, and this is the third season of the podcast, Another Way. In the first season, we discussed another way to elect a president. In the second season, we discussed another way to amend the Constitution. In this third season, we're going to talk about another way to elect a president committed to fundamental reform. Now, another way relative to what? Well, relative to the obvious way to get a candidate committed to fundamental reform. That is, of course, to run as that candidate committed to fundamental reform. I've tried that before. It's not easy. And given the tens of tens of emails that I've gotten from people begging me to try it again, I thought hard about doing it again. There is a real shot this time to get into the debates, a real and tangible shot, because there's an objective measure based on the number of contributions that a candidate would get. And so there would be a real opportunity to make fundamental reform a fundamental part of a debate. But I've obviously decided not to run those tens of tens of emails notwithstanding. Otherwise this would be an earnest video begging you for your support. That decision was as much personal as political, I'll confess. My kids are just not at the age when I can afford to run away for two or three years in pursuit of this campaign. So this is another way to get us a candidate committed to fundamental reform. And I will commit that. If we can't get a candidate to win this time, committed to fundamental reform. If we can't get a candidate who, when he or she wins, does actually deliver on fundamental reform, there will be a reform candidate in 2024, I promise you that. But 2024 is way too long to wait to fix this democracy. We need that fixed now, which means we need that candidate now, now. And therefore, this podcast is about helping that process along. That's the purpose of this season, to get us a candidate committed to fundamental reform. Because that's what unites us here at equal citizens, regardless of our politics. What we believe is we need reform first. For the last dozen or so years of my life, this has been my focus as well. I've written five books. There's another coming out this fall. You can pre order order it on Amazon right now. They don't represent us. That was a slight commercial plug. I apologize for that. I've given hundreds of talks around the country, and as I've given these talks, I've become absolutely convinced that this is a nation that is committed to the idea of reform. Polls bear this out. More than 90% of Americans look at this corrupted government and believe it is a corrupted government. More than 90 of us are committed to the idea of reforming this government. And so that's the aim of this season, to develop the conversation that would get us a candidate that would be committed to reform. So here's how we're going to do it. We've got a measure of what reform would be or what a commitment to reform would be, and we're going to help you see how close each of the leading candidates come to meeting that measure. Now, to do that, we're going to try to include the candidates themselves, either in an interview for this podcast, or, even better, a podcast drawn from a democracy forum, where we invite the candidates to speak to an audience about these issues of fundamental reform. But whether it's in their words or not, at least for those candidates who will be on the debate stage in the presidential debates, we will present to you what they think about the questions of fundamental reform. And based on what they think, we hope you will make a decision about who you will support. Now, by we, I don't mean the royal we. There will be others who are part of this podcast as well, others with varying perspectives on the question of reform, others with cooler voices. But we hope regularly, maybe every week, we will be able to present another episode in this season, not always directly related to the President's, but always related to the question of reform, to the question of what are the changes that this republic needs to get it to be a representative democracy. Maybe again, but if not again, then let's say, at least finally, This is season three of the podcast Another Way. I'm Larry Lessig. These podcasts are sponsored by equalcitizens.us. you can find us on the web. You can give us feedback, ideas, and other people we should be talking to. This season, we'll cover the full range of reform that's at the center of this presidential campaign. So next week, our first interviewee will be Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Senator from New York, who's running for president and has, as we will see, the most aggressive, most ambitious program for changing the way campaigns are funded of anybody in this field right now. So stay tuned to episode two of the podcast, Another Way. Please follow and share this with as many people as you can. Okay, so what is the measure of this reform? Earlier this year, Congress did an extraordinary thing that practically no one outside of the Beltway even noticed. Congress passed in the House of Representatives, HR1. HR1 was the most ambitious reform proposal that the House of Representatives has passed since the Voting Rights act of 1960. 5. It had an extraordinary range of reforms built into that single bill. Reforms including changing the way campaigns are funded, reforms ending partisan gerrymandering in the states, reforms enabling people to have a free opportunity to vote, or at least an equal opportunity to vote by creating automatic voting registration, and a commitment to restoring the Voting Rights act that the Supreme Court had struck down. And it included ethics reforms that basically slowed the revolving door so that representatives were more focused on their constituents than on their next job as lobbyists. This was an extraordinary statement by the House of Representatives about the fundamental reform that this democracy needs. And the key to this is that this fundamental reform was made first. Now, we want the same idea for the president, not HR1, but let's call it POTUS1. We want the next president to tell us what his or her POTUS one would be, both in the substance of what the changes would be that this POTUS I would bring about, and the priority, the commitment to making this POTUS one change the first thing that the next president would do. So what should the substance in this POTUS 1 proposal be? Well, to see the substance of what's needed, we have to see a little bit more about the nature of the problem. So let me spend a couple minutes describing that nature. For many years, I would quote Henry David Thoreau, where Thoreau wrote, quote, for every thousand hacking at the branches of evil, there is one striking at the root. Now, when I quoted Thoreau, for the many years that I did quote Thoreau, what I intended the root to be was money, the corrupting influence of money in our political system. But the reality is, over the last couple years, I've come to see that there is in fact, something deeper than just money, something that is more fundamental, more clearly the root that is corrupting our political system. The framers of our republic gave us what they referred to as a republic. But by a republic, they meant a representative democracy. And by a representative democracy, what they meant was a democracy that would be, quote, representative. It's kind of in the title itself. And by representative, what they meant was equally representative for those that were being represented, that our democracy plainly is not. We are unequal in any number of ways. Let me just identify four here. We are unequal in how we get the right to vote. It's astonishing that America assigns to essentially partisan administrators the obligation to run elections in America. Most democracies assign that role to a nonpartisan institution. And of course, many, many states function in a nonpartisan way in enabling their citizens the right to vote. But in many states in our country, partisan election officials make elections more difficult for the people they are trying to defeat. It is built into the DNA of that system because there are any number of details where the devil can hide, any number of places where the election officials can make it slightly more difficult for some to vote than for others. So the election official might close down the number of voting booths in certain districts that he or she knows will vote against the party that he or she represents. Or they will make the times that the voting booths are open shorter or the access to voting technologies more difficult, as the technologies are slow or clumsy or cumbersome to use. Or they will have ID requirements that are implemented in a way that makes it easier for some to comply than for others. Any number of these decisions election officials can make to make it harder for their opponents to participate. It is outrageous that we have a democracy that allows the government to pick which among us have the power to vote more easily than others. Yet that's what our democracy does. Or think about how our vote is weighed. You've all heard of this system called gerrymandering, where the politicians get to draw the districts so that they pick their voters rather than the voters picking their representatives. Now, gerrymandering, of course, has existed for hundreds of years, but it's increasingly sophisticated in its ability to map districts to make it almost impossible for the other party to win in those districts. So the Congress is filled with safe seats, meaning seats where the party in control knows that that party will control that seat regardless of who they nominate to be the candidate to win. But what a safe seat system does is that it makes the representatives extremely sens to the only people who could actually beat them, which is not a representative or a candidate from the other party, but instead a candidate from their own party who would challenge them in a primary. Now, what that means is that they are terrified about a primary challenge, which would always be a challenge from an even more extreme person in their party. So if you are a safe seat Republican congressperson, what you are worried about is not a Democrat challenging you. You'll always beat the Democrat. What you're worried about is an even more extreme Republican challenging you in the primary. And so you are constantly focused on how you can make sure that the extremes in your party are happy. And it's the same the other way around. If you are a Democrat in a safe seat Democratic district, you're not worried a Republican is going to beat you, but you are worried that an even more extreme Democrat might challenge you in the primary and beat you in the primary, which means you are constantly focused on how you can make sure the extreme of your party has no reason to take you on. Which means that these safe seats generate a dynamic that focuses our representatives not on the average citizen in their district, but on the extremists in their district, driving our Congress to be even more polarized or extreme than it already naturally would be. Or think about how we elect our president. Of course, everyone knows we have an Electoral College in America. Everyone knows the Electoral College actually is the institution that selects our President. But we select the electors to that Electoral College through our popular elections for president in each of the states and in all but two states. The way those elections work is that the winner of the popular vote, regardless of how much he or she wins by, gets all of the electors in that state. So if you win by 50% plus one vote, you get every elector from a state, regardless of the fact that your opponent basically got the same number of votes that you did. Okay? Now, what the winner take all system means is that the only states that it could possibly make sense to campaign in are those states that could go one way or the other. These are the so called swing states. What the Electoral College system means, given winner take all, is that presidential candidates are focused on just these swing states. In 2016, 95% of campaign appearances happened in just 14 states. 99% of campaign spending happened in those same 14 states. But those 14 states do not represent America. They are older, they are whiter, their industry is kind of mid 20th century industry. There are seven and a half times the number of people in America working in solar energy as mined coal. But you never hear about solar energy in a presidential election because those people work in Texas and in California. It's the coal miners who live in the swing states, which means that candidates are obsessively focused on coal miners on their way to the presidency. But that means we've built a system for electing our president that systematically leads the President not to care about all of us, or even a representative sample of us, but instead to care about the slice of America who happens to live within these swing states. Okay? And then finally, and most grotesquely and so blatantly that it misled Lee for so many years, we can think about whether our voice matters equally in an election. And because of the way we fund campaigns, the answer to that question is obviously no. Members of Congress and candidates for Congress spend anywhere between 30 and 30, 70% of their time, 7 0% of their time raising money, calling dialing for dollars, calling people to raise the money they need to get elected or to get their party back into power. Now, they are not just calling random numbers. They're not calling the average American. The people these candidates are calling are a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%, the people who give money in substantial amounts to campaigns. The hundred or one hundred fifty thousand American Republicans who give a substantial enough amount to a campaign to make it worth the Congressperson's time to call. Now, those people do not represent America either, whether on the Republican side or the Democratic side. What we know about those people is that they are more conservative than the average voter, whether a Republican voter or a Democratic voter. And yet candidates have to please them first to even have the chance to compete to be a representative in Congress. And what we know about the dynamics of that system is if you must please these funders first, you are always at the back of your mind going to be wondering whether your vote will continue to keep them pleased with you. Which means this is a system that gives them enormous power relative to the power of the average voter. Fundamental reform is about fixing each of these dimensions of the failings of our democracy. Fundamental reform is about making each of these dimensions more representative. Now we're going to ask the candidates how they're going to do that, what's the techniques they would use. This is for them to say. If it were up to me, I think the answers are pretty clear. With respect to the equal freedom to vote, we create an obligation in the states to make sure that people have an equal freedom to vote. Vote. We empower organizations to hold those states accountable, and we tax the states by reducing the amount of money we give them if they fail to assure that people have an equal freedom to vote. With gerrymandering, Congress could exercise its constitutional power tomorrow to end the practice of partisan gerrymandering in drawing congressional districts. My own favorite version is proposed by the Fair Vote Organization. It's now in Congress as the Fair Representation Act. That would create multi member districts with rank choice voting so that we could assure that the Congress that was selected by America represented a broader diversity than the Congress that is worried about the extremists on the right or the extremists on the left. With respect to the Electoral College, I deeply favor the system that would allow every vote to count equally in America through the National Popular Vote Compact, which would get states to pledge their electors to the winner of the national popular vote. But if that can't be enacted either because the Supreme Court says it's inconsistent with the Constitution or because we can't get enough red states to adopt it, then I believe that at least the law should require that electors be allocated proportionally in a state so that if you get 40% of the vote in a state, you get 40% of the electors. And indeed, if we could allow the electors to cast their vote in a fractional way, we could assure that the representation in that state would be perfectly equal to the representation that would exist in the vote for that state. But most important and most obvious, we should change the way we are funding elections. I support the idea of vouchers that would give every citizen the opportunity to help fund campaigns. And if every citizen had vouchers that could be used to fund campaigns, then candidates would be obsessively focused on reaching out to citizens to get the money that they need to fund their campaigns. They wouldn't spend their time raising money from the tiny fraction of the 1%. They would spend their time being responsive to all voters so that they could get the money from all voters that they would need to run successful campaigns. Those are the changes I would make. But in this series, we are going to ask the candidates what is the substance of, of what they would change to make these failings of our democracy fixed. But more important than the substance is the priority. This was a genius in what Nancy Pelosi did with HR1. By making it the first move in this new Congress. She signaled that this first change was needed if any other change were to make sense. That fixing democracy first was the way to make it so that democracy could represent us all equally again. And so that's what we need to be demanding from the presidential candidates, too. Let's call it POTUS I. The POTUS I commitment is the commitment to not only the substance of fundamental reform, but the priority of fundamental reform reform that if he or she is elected, he or she will make fundamental reform the first thing that that administration takes up. Now, this is important for two very different reasons. First, we know that if a candidate gets elected making fundamental reform his or her priority, there is a real chance we would get it. Now, of course, that requires imagining that Mitch McConnell, aka the Dark Lord, is no longer controlling the Senate. McConnell has made it his career to protect the corrupt political system that now governs the United States Congress. And so the only way we can imagine getting reform through is making sure that McConnell goes home to Kentucky. He is a representative, we can say, who is both shameful and shameless. Shameful for what he is doing, but shameless in what he is doing because he feels no compunction at all in the games that he plays to make sure that the power that exists in Washington stays as it is. If we can have A Senate without McConnell at its lead, and if we can elect some Republicans committed to reform as well, then a president who made fundamental reform his or her priority would be a president who could get it passed. That's the first and critically important reason why we need POTUS run right now. Here's the second reason. It shows the seriousness of the candidate for the issues that candidate is pressing. You can't be serious if you're pressing single payer health care without addressing the problem of the corruption of this political system first, because you're not going to get single payer health care in a system where doctors and insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies are funding campaigns. You can't be serious in a commitment to the Green New Deal until you're also serious about ending the power of the carbon monopoly over our elections. You can't be serious about building a financial system that is not a financial Chernobyl wannabe unless you address the power of Wall street funders in our political campaigns first. You can't be serious about getting us a fair tax system unless you are also serious about changing the opportunity of the rich to fund campaigns more powerfully than the rest of us can. By showing us this priority, a candidate shows us that he or she is serious about the reforms that are being pressed by his or her campaign. This is because, as I've said a million times before, it's not that reform is the most important issue. It's not these issues like climate change or health care or infrastructure, those are the most important issues. It's just that this is the first issue. This is the issue we have to address first if we're going to make sensible reform in these other contexts even possible. And so that's what we want to do here. We want to start a conversation, maybe deepen a conversation about what these changes need to be and which candidates are lined up to make these changes possible. We want to practice a kind of slow democracy. You know, the slow food movement that says that if we just change the way we prepare and eat food, if we prepared food by cooking it at home, and if we ate food by sitting around a table with our friends and spending hours eating, then those two together would create healthy food, healthy food environments that would give us a chance to have the nutrition we need without the poison in our food supply. And that's the same with democracy. If we could slow the conversation down. If we could give people a chance to think and reflect, if we could give both sides a chance to speak, if we would give them the chance to be understood without the frame of hate that so much of media brings to political discourse, then we could develop a democracy that would be healthy, too. And that's what we want to do in this season of the podcast. Another way we're gonna give you a chance to think and reflect about the candidates and where they stand on the issues of reform, and then hopefully to act. Because at the end of each episode, we're gonna give you a list of three things that you can do right now to address the question we have spoken about and to suggest solutions that could be enacted. We are never gonna ask you for money. This is not about raising money, either for equal citizens or any of the candidates we are talking about. It is always and only about giving credibility to the idea that reform is possible and that reform is something we could achieve in this election of 2020, because credibility is what this democracy needs. We need to give credibility to the movement that could make democracy in America credible again. Now, why should we care about that? There are idealists out there who care about democracy as an ideal. They think of it as a perfect system that we should enact just for the idea of having a perfect system governing us. These are the sort of people that worry about whether their books on their shelves are in alphabetical order or the sort of people who fold their underwear in their underwear drawer. That is not why I care about this issue at all. That is not my concern. I care about getting a democracy because I care about reestablishing the capacity of our government to govern. I assume that if we could unrig this rigged system, we could actually get a government that could govern. Again, obviously about the issues that all of us are talking about. Issues like climate change or healthcare or infrastructure or economic growth or Social Security that actually gives Americans security again, but not just those issues that we are already talking about, but the issues that we should be talking about, but that never seem to be on the political stage. Issues like the perpetual war that America seems to be caught within, where we spent billions of dollars every year to fund an infrastructure of war making, not just in America, but around the world. For what purpose? Beyond making the defense contractors rich or artificial intelligence which will increasingly dominate the future of competition and work across the world, and which countries like China are deploying in a strategic way to give them an advantage in the world economy, but which we can't think about sensibly at all because so much of our government policymaking is captured by people who would benefit from the policies that it enacts or the future of work itself. In a world where robots become more and more dominant over so many functions that are now performing formed by humans. How do we build a world where that does not produce radical inequality, but instead new opportunity for people to have different types of jobs and futures? Or privacy in a world of perpetual surveillance which dominates every single aspect of our life? Where now we can't begin to address this question sensibly given the interests that dominate so much of our politics, These issues and people million other issues too, need sensible government. That is my assumption. That's why I'm in this fight. We need a government that we can trust to make decisions that are actually in the interest of America as a whole. If I could give you one image which I can't given this is a podcast and not a video but one image, it would be this. Imagine a battleship that it loses its capacity both to steer or to stop and it barrels ahead if that's what battleships do, knowing that there's nothing that can be done to steer it or stop it before it runs against a wall or runs into a port. That is our democracy today. We have lost the capacity to steer and we have no choice to stop. And that that means that the catastrophes that could be avoided can't be avoided until we fix this democracy first. That is our objective at EqualCitizens US. And you could go to our website and help spread the word of this podcast so that we can share this message with many and build the movement for reform that the refor reform movement will need. On our website you can give us ideas and also feedback for the podcasts that we have produced and for the podcasts that we could produce. And you could help us build the movement that would make this democracy possible. This is Larry Lessig. I'm grateful for your support. I'm eager that you help us make this campaign for POTUS I a success. If the next president is elected with a potus I pledge there is a real shot that we could solve these problems of our democracy and get on to solving the problems that this democracy faces. Thanks very much. Sa.