“Has Lessig Lost It? The Marriage of Larry and the Donald”

Steven Rosenfeld at Alternet:

Given the arc of Lessig’s activism, it’s not surprising that an individual who is driven to address one of the fundamental flaws in American politics is willing to embrace one of America’s most divisive politicans because he’s saying the right things about his issue. While that may be predictable or inevitable, it also a bit desperate and naïve—which has always been the danger of single-issue politics.

Let’s imagine that Lessig somehow links up with Trump. Are people who want to see a fundamental restructuring of interplay between private money and political candidates suppose to ignore Trump’s racism, sexism, elitism, and war-mongering, just because Trump has been bombastically telling Americans that he’s invested and gotten results from politicians, and “that’s a broken system”?

This is the danger of single-issue politics: seeing the light and being blinded by it. The problem is not that Lessig’s analysis of the problem is wrong. His remedies, including a national system of publically financed elections, are also correct—that, too, has been proven over the years in states and cities to be a generally better approach than the endless dialing-for-campaign-dollars status quo.

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