“Mr. Lessig goes to Washington” in The Nation

Christopher Hayes wrote an interesting article on cult hero and reformer Lawrence Lessig in the Nation:

Political reporter Thomas Edsall, in his 1984 book The New Politics of Inequality, draws a distinction between two types of reformers in the center-left coalition. The vast majority of interest groups in Washington, from the Sierra Club to the AFL-CIO to Planned Parenthood, are pursuing what Edsall calls “substantive reform”–attempting to push legislation and enact policies that will provide public goods, protect citizens from harm and redistribute benefits, rights and privileges away from the powerful and toward middle-class citizens and disenfranchised minorities. Then there’s a small cluster of about a dozen groups–Public Campaign, the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation--that focus on procedural reform. Rather than trying to win the game, they’re trying to change the rules: pushing for broader enfranchisement, more transparency and, crucially, reforms that will reduce the influence of big money on politics.

Lessig worries about corporate socialism which he argues corrupts democracy:

In the past eight years the collusion between government and business has gotten worse, creating what economist Dean Baker terms the “conservative nanny state.” Lessig sees unmaking this state of affairs as the challenge of the era. “There’s a speech that Reagan gives in 1965,” Lessig says, “where he talks about how democracy always fails because once the people recognize they can vote themselves largess, they just vote themselves largess and the fiscal policy is destroyed. Well, Reagan had it half-right. It’s not as if it’s the poor out there who have figured out how to suck the money out of the rich. It’s exactly the other way around.”

An interesting read for anyone interesting in politics be they Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, Green, or Mike Gravel.

(h/t boing boing)