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America’s democracy is in crisis. Along many dimensions, a single flaw—unrepresentativeness—has detached our government from the people. And as a people, our fractured partisanship and ignorance on critical issues drive our leaders to stake out ever more extreme positions.
In They Don’t Represent Us, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry.
But the blame does not only lie with “them”—Washington’s politicians and power brokers, Lessig argues. The problem is also “us.” “We the people” are increasingly uninformed about the issues, while ubiquitous political polling exacerbates the problem, reflecting and normalizing our ignorance and feeding it back into the system as representative of our will.
Jeff Clements examines how Citizens United v. FEC and related cases have fabricated unprecedented rights and power for corporations and money, at the expense of human beings and democracy itself.
Democracy is all about equality in political power. But this doesn’t work for everybody.
The primary source of big money in First World countries is the control of consolidated and potentially immortal artificial entities -- corporations.
