Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and 2016 candidate for the Democratic nomination. In this interview filmed at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he explains how money’s influence in politics threatens American democracy. Congress has become deeply unrepresentative, he says, because politicians are focused on answering to their biggest campaign donors rather than the general population. This is why people are drawn to anti-establishment candidates like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. “We could fix these problems if we had a Congress with the will to address the corruption that has broken the representative system,” Lessig says. “Unfortunately we don’t have that will right now, we have to find a way to create it.”
Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump?
American intellectuals haven’t felt the allure of authoritarian, illiberal politics this strongly in a long time.
.. In 1953, Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind, which described how a series of Polish intellectuals came to embrace Stalinism. Miłosz detailed the role that “coercion” and “personal ambition” played in their ideological transformation.
.. “To belong to the masses is the great longing of the ‘alienated’ intellectual,”
.. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that “against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society,” totalitarianism “promises the security and comradeship of a crusading unity.”
.. First, they admire his campaign’s raw, unbridled energy. The Trump movement, according to the Wall Street Journalcolumnist Peggy Noonan, radiates “dynamism.”
.. The “Journal of American Greatness” makes explicit what Noonan, Hanson, and Gingrich imply: that America’s current system of government is illegitimate.
.. A second asserts that the United States is “post-Constitutional.”
.. A tyrant, Strauss argues, takes absolute power by overthrowing a constitutional republic. A Caesar also takes absolute power, but only when a constitutional republic has already collapsed on its own.
.. “Caesarism is not tyranny. It is rather a sub-species of absolute monarchy, in which the monarch is not an unjust usurper but the savior of a country with a decayed republican order that can no longer function.” By overthrowing a depraved and unaccountable elite, Trump would reassert “the people’s sovereignty” and “their natural right to rule themselves.”
.. In May, she wrote that Trump’s fans want him to be “a human bomb that will explode by timer under a bench in Lafayette Park and take out all the people but leave the monuments standing.” These are ghastly metaphors. Obviously, Noonan is not endorsing revolutionary violence. But she’s writing sympathetically about the people’s supposed desire for it. And she’s doing so on behalf of a candidate who incites actual violence.
.. Because Trump represents the people and the people distrust the media, which are part of the corrupt ruling class, Trump has the right to slander and impede the media’s work. In Hannity’s words, “They deserve what they get.”
.. For Trump, popularity equals truth.
That’s why, when he’s ahead, he spends so much time citing polls. He understands that in American public discourse, it’s hard to say the people are wrong.
.. America is a democracy because the people’s voices count. But it is a liberal democracy because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law are not subject to popular vote.
Weimar Germany and Donald Trump
How traditional and radical conservatives come to speak a common political language—that ultimately benefits the extremists
She waxed melodic about Hitler’s cabinet, in which there were just three Nazis. All the others were upstanding conservatives, men like Franz von Papen, the aristocratic former chancellor and leader of the Catholic Center Party, and the career bureaucrat Constantin von Neurath, who was named to head up the foreign ministry. These were experienced men, reasonable men. They would contain Hitler’s excesses.
.. Americans often say that the German people elected Hitler to power, but that is not accurate. The highest vote the Nazis received in a free election came six months before the seizure of power. In July 1932, the Nazis won 37 percent of the electorate. That represented a significant proportion of German voters, to be sure, but it was far from a majority. In a parliamentary system, as Germany was, 37 percent doesn’t get you to power. In the next election in November 1932, their tally declined to 33 percent. In autumn 1932, it would have been reasonable to think that the Nazi wave had crested and that Hitler and the Nazi Party were on the decline. In fact, Hitler and his supporters feared as much. In the end, the conservative elite saved the Nazis from the political wilderness.
.. Yet the traditionalists struck a deal with the Nazis on Jan. 30, 1933, one they reconfirmed many times during the 12 years of the Third Reich. The accommodation between traditional and radical conservatives began to take shape even before the end of World War I, before the Nazi party even existed.
.. Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, the two officers who led the Supreme Military Command and effectively ruled Germany dictatorially in the last two years of the war, shifted the blame for Germany’s defeat away from the military (and themselves, of course). The army had remained upright and upstanding, the army had never been defeated in the field, so they claimed. Germany had been betrayed at home by socialists and the Jews; that was the only reason Germany had to sue for peace.
.. Those who had initiated and led Germany into the disastrous war remained nicely shielded from any responsibility.
.. The Dolchstoßlegende marked the first moment of the political alliance between the traditionalists and the myriad radical conservative groups, including the Nazis, who quickly emerged after WWI.
.. Weimar, in short, represented a great moment of democratic reform, cultural efflorescence, and sexual experimentation. It was everything that conservatives, traditional and radical, hated
.. profiteers’ republic, abusers’ republic, robbers’ republic, Jew republic, the system—all served to delegitimize Germany’s democratic system and all those associated with it, including liberals, socialists, and Jews.
.. The ultimate sin, which the Nazis propagated so effectively, was to associate Jews and communism, the rootless, cosmopolitan Jew with the place of the Soviet Union.
.. It is directed against those identified as foreigners, even when they are third-generation Germans, French, or Britons, whose families may have hailed from Turkey, Morocco, or Jamaica.
.. “Security, the first liberty,”
.. They can’t control him. And they shouldn’t expect power to moderate him.
.. He can do a whole lot in regard to foreign and immigration policy and the naming of people to the federal judiciary. Ours is a presidential system, and despite the difficulties Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had with Congress and the Supreme Court, presidents wield enormous power. In possession of that power, Trump will be fully capable of shredding the constitution from within, as the Nazis did.
.. The political language of fear and hostility directed at “foreign” elements (never mind the fact that many and even most of those so-called foreigners had been residents and citizens for generations) enables moderate and radical conservatives to come together. The moderates make the radicals salonfähig, acceptable in polite society. That is the real and pressing danger of the current moment.
‘Make America Great Again’ is not a policy. It’s an exercise in mass psychology.
The pledge to “make America great again” is not an economic project. It’s an exercise in mass psychology. The idea is to get people to displace their anger and frustration onto groups that (in Trump’s view) have eroded America’s “greatness” — Mexicans, Muslims, the Chinese, political and financial elites, and “the media.” The Trump treatment is to peddle hatred and resentment for his political gain.
.. The role of campaigns and elections in democracies is to let the people speak. Ideally, it is to shape public opinion by informing it and allowing it to coalesce around widely shared beliefs. But when the information being served up is false, incomplete or deceptive, the process is perverse. It sows disillusion, not progress.