“They Don’t Represent Us”

Lawrence Lessig

It makes sense as a structure for the book, but golly, opening with over a hundred pages of detailed explanation of everything wrong with the political system in the US at the moment sure was depressing. Took some work to make it through that.

The second half, though, which does a little bit of “in an ideal world, we could do X and Y…” and then immediately discards that as “but we live in the real world, so here’s A and B that we could actually achieve, and how” was a lot easier. Which isn’t to say easy, but campaign finance reform, for example, sure would be worth the effort.

This is an impressively non-partisan book, with a thoroughly non-partisan call to action. Because it isn’t about “these structural inequalities are benefiting one party to the detriment of the other,” it’s about “these structural inequalities are detrimenting the concept of democracy.” To echo my own personal bugbear, it’s not calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean My Team would win; it’s calling for ranked-choice voting because RCV would mean politics would suck less. If the Other Team wins more, it’s still a net benefit, because it won’t be the primaried-in extremists of the Other Team, it’ll be the moderates that My Team can at least tolerate. And My Team’s primaried-in extremists would be having the same issue. We, the voters? We’d be getting representatives that actually represent our values — or, at least, the values of a majority, rather than the values of the primary voters of whichever team won that time around.

Well worth the read, even with that opening slog; check it out.1