One Way Forward

US politics are typically described as Right vs. Left / conservative vs. liberal. However, the "Inside" thwarts reforms for all "Outsiders".

MoveOn began in 1998 as "a cross-partisan player and the only adult in the field" during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The movement grew from one or two people to thousands in a few days, surprising everyone, especially the Insiders. Hundreds of volunteers attended over 300 meetings with members of congress. In so doing, they challenged the conventional Insider wisdom that volunteers cannot be effective in political lobbying.

Insiders were also surprised by Obama's performance in 2008 and more recently by the Tea Party, the international Occupy movement, and the SOPA / PROTECT IP Act protests.

The Tea Party, Occupy, Move to Amend and similar groups have attracted many people who are very passionate in their concerns and willing to devote substantial amounts of time and money to try to fix what they see wrong.

Lessig spoke with activists with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street and others. He believes that together they have the energy and commitment needed create much needed change. However, their progress is currently prevented by a tendency to claim that talking with the "other" is treason.

People right, left, and center are concerned about crony capitalism. Before we can solve problems of concern to all, we must do the following:

1. Identify effective reform(s) we can agree upon
2. Leverage our common passion to support this
3. Without denying our differences.

Lessig described a teach-in he gave at Occupy K Street, where he implored the Occupiers to invite Tea Partiers to collaborate against crony capitalism. A man in the audience said he ran a site "AgainstCronyCapitalsim.org". Retrieved October 28, 2012.. He assured the audience that thousands of Tea Partiers would join them in a fight against crony capitalism. Then Dave Zirin, a sportswriter for The Nation, started tweeting and blogging that, "We should not be collaborating with the racists from the Tea Party."

Lessig insists that we can either (a) remain separate and ineffective or (b) squelch the inflammatory condemnations of the "others" and build a coalition to reduce crony capitalism and make the government "dependent on the people alone", as James Madison wrote in Federalist paper No. 52.

The difference today between Left and Right today is nowhere nearly as profound as slavery was.. If our forebears could fix that, we should be able to fix our current problems with crony capitalism.

In Republic, Lost, Lessig documented why he thinks that crony capitalism is the gateway problem in the sense that we must fix that problem before we can fix any of the other major problems facing the nation today. The analysis in this book is summarized in the accompanying diagram: Current law in the US include many provisions that expire after a few years. This provides an essentially infinite supply of opportunities for calling lobbyists and major corporate contributors to "extort" (Lessig's term) money from them to extend their special provisions. Most incumbent politicians (at least at the federal level in the US) know that they need huge amounts of money primarily to buy television advertising and research on how to sell their candidacy to the public – and virtually the only way for most of them to get that money is to spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time on the phone asking for it.

Diagram of the corrupt system described in Republic, Lost

This diagram suggests a candidate for the gateway problem not discussed by Lessig: The reliance of the public on the major media conglomerates. This aspect of the problem has been discussed by media scholar Robert W. McChesney in his books on The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics in the 21st Century, and Tragedy and Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy. His proposed solution includes public funding of substantive investigative journalism, which could be implemented in a way consistent with Lessig's proposed "Grant and Franklin" project for public funding of political campaigns controlled by individual taxpayers; see The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again.

McChesney noted that the media consolidation in the US during the 1990s was accompanied by the near elimination of investigative journalism, especially from mainstream commercial broadcasting.[2] A number of investigative journalism organizations have arisen to try to fill this gap, some of which are part of the Investigative News Network.

OpenSecrets has a database that can be mined for information tying money to specific actions (or inactions) by the US congress. More research in this area could potentially increase public awareness of the problem. Research on this problem has been done by liberals like Ralph Nader, Public Citizen, and Common Cause and conservatives like the Cato Institute.

Lessig asks citizens to engage congress, the president and the constitution. He suggests that citizens ask legislators to support publicly funded elections, to limit and make transparent independent political expenditures, and to reaffirm that "unalienable rights" belong to natural persons only. He suggests that citizens further attempt to elect a presidential candidate that will lead the charge for change. To this end, he supports "AmericansElect.org". Retrieved October 28, 2012.. He also suggests calling a constitutional convention for the limited purpose of drafting an amendment to dramatically reduce the corrupting influence of money in politics (see "CallAConvention.org". Retrieved October 28, 2012.).

He further suggests we need to engage people who are different. If you support the Occupy movement, try listening to some Tea Party Patriots, and vice versa. If you're a Republican, how well do you understand the Democrats, and vice versa? The goal is NOT to convert the other but rather to find common ground by first listening respectfully.