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Y'all read Chris Hayes's article tracking Lawrence Lessig's evolution from a tech policy guy to an all-purpose political reformer? If not, why not?
Lessig's years rolling the copyright boulder up the hill served as the narrative inspiration for his talk at the Press Club. For Lessig, copyright is just one example of the ways money corrupts the Congressional process by preventing Congress from getting what he calls the "easy cases" right. Nearly every expert who's studied copyright term has concluded that it shouldn't be extended retroactively: Milton Friedman once referred to this position as a "no-brainer." But that hasn't stopped big corporations like Disney, which stands to lose a considerable amount of money when Mickey Mouse becomes public property, from pushing through legislation that extends copyright protections for old works.It's the same dynamic with a host of issues, from the farm bill to the role of contractors in Iraq to an issue Lessig calls "the most profound" we face: global warming. There, the scientific consensus is absolute, the stakes dire and yet action has been routinely thwarted by a coterie of corporations that have a monumental monetary interest in the status quo. "Really, who cares about Mickey Mouse," Lessig told me over dinner the night before his talk. "But if we can't get global warming right? An easy question as fundamental as global warming? Then we're really fucked."In comparison to saving the planet from immolation, ending donations from lobbyists might seem insignificant, Lessig told the audience at the Press Club. But the problem Congress faces is akin to that faced by an alcoholic. "An alcoholic could be losing his family, his job, his liver," said Lessig. "These are extraordinarily important problems in any scheme of reckoning; these are the most important problems he could be facing. But he will never face and solve those problems until he solves this alcoholism first. This problem that I've described is not the most important problem, it's just the first problem.... We need to solve this problem now."This is much the point I try to make in my health care writing. Before the policy problems, before the issues of implementation and spending and benefit levels and public opinion, before all of that is the simple problem of politics. We don't have good models right now for legislative change. We don't know how to get to 60. We don't know how to activate tha alchemical process that turns a politician, if only for a little while, into a legislator. We don't know how to convince the other side that leaving the problems unsolved is worse than having to explain away an opponent's political accomplishment. The central problem of our times, as Lessig says, is a political one. And until we solve that, or at least figure out a way to navigate through it, all the smart policy thinking in the world won't be able to solve our problems.
