Lessig’s Republic, Lost

The Montana decision today has provoked me to write up the review of Larry Lessig’s _Republic Lost_ (Powells, Amazon)that I’ve been planning for the last few months. Short version: there is a lot to like about the book. If you are looking for a good account of the systematic corruption of American politics, this is that account. If you are looking for the account that might convince your centrist/moderately conservative aunt or uncle that there is something wrong, even better – Lessig writes far better than I can for that audience, although he makes it reasonably clear that his allegiances are left-of-center. This said, there’s a lot to disagree with too. Most broadly, I don’t think that his updated version of early twentieth century progressivism will do what he wants it to do, although it could surely help. The fundamental problem that Lessig sees is one of money in politics – if one can cleanse out the Augean stables by attacking dubious relationships between politicians and lobbyists and fundraisers, one could win back the Republic. The fundamental problem that I see is one of economic inequality – even if there are no obvious quid-pro-quos between legislators and those wanting to sway them, the system will remain corrupt. In short – if there is a friendly argument between Lessig and Chris Hayes (and I suspect there is), I think that Chris has the better of it.

First – the stuff that I like. Lessig does a great job in analyzing and laying out the extent of corruption in US politics. He writes the book in a way that may well be semi-deliberately naive, so as to suggest that the problem lies less in individuals (he suggests that most members of Congress are likely decent human beings) than in their incentives. I mostly don’t buy this, to the extent that I am _expected_ to buy it – but I think that it serves a very valuable analytic purpose. It separates out, and puts to one side, questions of individual blame (it’s easy, but not always useful, to single out corrupt scumbags) and forces readers to look at the corruption of the _system._ To put it another way, I don’t think I am the imagined audience of the book, since I am already largely convinced. It talks more directly to people who think that the problem is one of a few (or more than a few) bad apples, and shows patiently that they are wrong – that even if there were a Congress composed entirely of Mr. (and Ms.) Smiths, it would likely fall victim to the same kinds of problems.

Lessig also argues against the political science literature which suggests that there is no very obvious relationship between political donations and legislative outcomes – he suggests in effect that this literature is subject to wide-scale selection bias, because the observed legislative outcomes tell us little about the proposals that never even made it onto the agenda. This fits well, in broad terms with e.g. the “arguments of Hacker and Pierson”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/15/review-jacob-hacker-and-paul-pierson-winner-take-all-politics/ on policy processes and the importance of drift. Money may not do much to explain why legislators choose _a_ when they are confronted with the choice between _a_ and _b_, because at that point, money and ideological predilections are already more or less lined up with each other. But it _may_ potentially play an important role in explaining why the choices are between _a_ and _b_, rather than, say, _c_, _d_ and _e_, which may be more appropriate ways of dealing with the problem, but which have died in committee or sub-committee, or never even been put forward, because it was clear that they had no prospect of success.

Lessig points to the ubiquity not of direct corruption but of gift exchange – the sociological patterning of mutual obligations over a long period of time. It isn’t so much that members of Congress take donations as a direct quid pro quo for voting for specific items of legislation. It is that they are involved, over the longer term, with quasi-personalized relations of diffuse reciprocity, in which no specific donation or legislative favor is earmarked as a direct exchange, but where there is an overall pattern of informal expectations, which are extremely difficult to wriggle out of. There is an analogy here, which Lessig doesn’t make, to the mafia. The opening scene of the _Godfather_ (perhaps the most over-used piece of movie footage in undergraduate classes in the social sciences) is quite accurate in its portrayal of how many people come under the sway of the mafia through the exchange of favors in what game theorists call an indefinitely iterated relationship.

Here, Lessig quite self-consciously builds on the legacy of the Progressives, who sought to replace what they saw as a politics dominated by various forms of partisanship, corruption and cronyism with clean administrations, bureaucratic norms and the like. Of course, it is more difficult to eliminate nepotism from politics than it is from bureaucracy – politics often runs more or less directly on the promise of particularist exchange (witness Orrin Hatch’s recent promises that if he is re-elected, he will move up the ranks of seniority and be able to bring all sorts of goodies back to the voters of Utah). It is _particularly_ difficult given the US Constitution, and the way that it has been interpreted (e.g. _Buckley v. Valeo_ ) in ways that see financial donations as a legitimate form of expressive activity. Lessig has clearly more or less given up on achieving change in constitutional interpretation through the court system (and given the current climate, who could blame him). Instead, he is pushing for a grassroots politics of reform. In particular, he argues for a movement at the state level that would push for a new constitutional convention, that might revisit the relationship between money and power, making it easier to regulate this relationship. He believes that there is common ground between the left and the Tea Party right that could improve the chances of reform – both see the relationship between money and power as corrupt. Again, I’m more skeptical (teh Twitter tells me that Tea Partiers were there today cheering wildly at the Montana decision), but this still doesn’t mean that there isn’t some grounds for possible movement. I _particularly_ like his suggestion that any convention be composed of randomly selected citizens accompanied by shadow conventions at the state level, using deliberative polling to produce proposals. This obviously fits with the kinds of arguments that Cosma and I have been making about “cognitive democracy”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/23/cognitive-democracy/.

This all is very good – but it is, pretty self-consciously, a Progressive agenda in both the good and bad (for my idiosyncratic understanding of good and bad) senses of that term. It is an agenda based around _reform_ (albeit root-and-branch reform) of the _political process_ rather than consideration of the economic process too. At multiple points in the narrative, Lessig says that he has no problem with people being rich as such – instead, he’s interested in opposing those whose riches come from manipulation of politics and government. He closes the book by talking about the few, public-spirited rich people who have done a lot to try and underpin the process of reform. Lessig surely recognizes the corruption of the present system, but he also yearns for more public spirited _noblesse oblige_ and a better, more intelligent and more decent centrism.

This leads him into some direct errors. As “Ezra Klein argues”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/our-corrupt-politics-its-not-all-money/?pagination=false he greatly overstates the consequences of his particular concern – corrupted relationships between funders and politicians – for American political life in general. To take one specific example (not from Klein), Lessig argues that money helps drive polarization –

Extremism, in other words, pays – literally. As one study summarized the research, “An incumbent’s ideological extremism improves his or her chances of raising a greater proportion of funds from individual donors in general and small individuals contributors in particular. Extremism is not the only way to raise money […but] to some legislators, extremism is an advantage.”

But as Nolan McCarty (who has done research on this topic) “points out”:http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/03/13/lessig-klein-and-the-economist-on-polarization-spending-and-gerrymandering/, this is a misinterpretation. Overall, extremism doesn’t pay out in financial terms.

bq. The data clearly show that members with extreme DW-NOMINATE scores suffer a slight penalty in fundraising. Even if there is now a stronger correlation between fundraising and extremism, I note simply that Congress was plenty polarized by 2002 without fundraising being an important source of it. Moreover, in a recent paper, Bertram Johnson (cited by Lessig in Republic, Lost) does find that extreme candidates receive a greater proportion of their funds from individuals and from small donors. But this paper reconfirms our finding that extremism does not raise the _absolute level_ of contributions from individuals over all.

It also leads him to adopt an agenda which is less focused on changing the _structural influence_ of different groups in society (e.g. through addressing economic inequality) than in seeking to moderate that influence through limiting the importance of fundraising. Here, the evidence is murkier. But there is good reason to think that the structural influence of economically powerful actors is _not_ simply mediated through donations, but can happen in a variety of different ways. For example, Charles Lindblom’s excellent book, _Politics and Markets_ talks about how the ability of a business to decide to locate a new office in district _x_ rather than district _y_ provides the owners of that business with very substantial influence over politics, of a sort that would not be alleviated even in a system of fully publicly funded elections. More generally, much of the ‘donations have no direct influence on legislation’ literature tends to support this argument – it explains the apparent mismatch between a legislative system in which there is little evidence that donations change legislation, and a political system in which the rich do remarkably well, by reference to structural power and the dominance of the _status quo._ As described in Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David Kimball and Beth Leech’s excellent overview book, _Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses and Why,_ (p.23)

bq. Readers may be surprised by [our expectations that material resources do not explain actors’ success in achieving policy goals], as they go against decades of study of policy change and lobbying and seem to fly in the face of the obvious assumption: of course the wealthy win in Washington. We would simply say: If the wealthy are so certain to win, they should already have won in a previous iteration of the process. Since the distribution of power should already be reflected in the status quo, there is no reason that _changes_ to the status quo, which is what lobbying is about, would necessarily move in the direction of even further gains for the wealthy (nor systematically against them). After all, if the status quo reflects a rough equilibrium of power, and we believe it does (and a quite unfair equilibrium in many cases, with much greater benefits going to the privileged and the wealthy than to the needy and the poor), then changes to the equilibrium should reflect only changes to the mobilization of these interests. In the short term, such changes are likely to be random.

This also fits with recent work on policy drift, albeit in a somewhat different way. It returns us to the Chris Hayes and Aaron Swartz analysis – if they are right, economic riches are fungible into political power without political donations (although donations surely help facilitate this). This further implies that the ‘striking at the root’ that Lessig would like to see should involve striking at economic equality, which is the root of the problem, rather than sleazy relationships between politicians and funders, which are merely a symptom. One can’t change the equilibrium without changing the equilibrium.

This said though, there remain enormous practical difficulties for leftwingers too. If Lessig’s reformist politics are hard to achieve, the kinds of redistributive politics that Chris, and Aaron (and I) would like to see are harder still. I saw Chris talk last week in Washington and he was genuinely worried by a question, which pushed on more or less this problem. He expressed the hope that the increasing frustrations of the upper middle class, who are coming up against the problems of meritocracy, might spur reform. Lessig, for his part, looks to reformist millionaires. Neither of these seem to me to be especially hopeful prospects. The problem that both Lessig’s politics, and its more left-wing sparring partner faces is a straightforward one – how do you push for serious change in an unequal system, whose inequalities mean that the people who are getting most badly screwed (the unemployed, workers, the lower middle and actual middle class) are just those people who are most powerless to achieve change? I don’t see any very straightforward answers to this question myself.