Lawrence Lessig believes that the left and right need to unite to fix the core problems plaguing America. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
“The most important division in politics today is between the inside and the outside,” United Republic ally and Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig told The Atlantic magazine in a discussion about the corrosive influence of moneyed interest in American politics, including the 2012 election.
Lessig first bemoaned the fact that candidates who care about the issue of money in politics, like Buddy Roemer, were silenced during the Republican primary:
[The issue of money in politics] couldn’t surface through any of the other candidates because it would be deep hypocrisy for anyone on the Republican or Democratic side to say money is the problem. On the inside of American politics this issue is invisible. For Americans it isn’t invisible. It’s essential. But there’s no way for it to be channeled through the process.
Lessig argues that if “insider politics” ignores the problem, ordinary Americans of all political views need to take up the charge
…the most important division in politics today is between the inside and the outside. This election is the quintessential insider politics drama, and when it’s over it’s going to leave the outside even more disgusted than they were before. The challenge is to figure out how the outside can come to recognize, as a sleeping giant when it wakes up, that it’s big, that it’s got different limbs, and that they can actually act together. The giant here is slowly waking up in American politics. It has a left version and a right version. And there’s a need for a cross-partisan alliance to fix the things that are wrong at the core of this government.
Read more:
The Atlantic: Politics Q&A: Lawrence Lessig on the 2012 Primaries
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