Professors Archon Fung of HKS and Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School say Trump’s brazen embrace of billionaire ruling partners could be an inflection point in America’s long slide toward rule by the wealthiest.
It’s one of the most important studies you’ve probably never heard of. Ten years ago, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took an extraordinary data set and a small army of researchers and set out to determine whether America could still credibly call itself a democracy. As case studies, they used 1,800 policy proposals over 30 years, tracking how they made their way through the political system and whose interests were served by the outcomes. For small-d democrats, the results were devastating. Political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. The influence of ordinary citizens, meanwhile, was at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” America, they concluded, was not a democracy at all, but a functional oligarchy.
Fast forward to 2024 and a presidential campaign that saw record support by billionaires for both candidates, but most conspicuously for Republican candidate Donald Trump from Tesla and Starlink owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. That prompted outgoing President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, to warn Americans about impending oligarchy—something Gilens and Page said was already a fait accompli 10 years before. And as if on cue, the new president put tech billionaire supporters including Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg front and center at his inauguration and has given Musk previously unimaginable power to dismantle and reshape the federal government through the Department of Government Efficiency. So what does it mean that American oligarchy is now so brazenly out in the open?
Joining host Ralph Ranalli are Harvard Kennedy School Professor Archon Fung and Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig, who say it could an inflection point that will force Americans to finally confront the country’s trend toward rule by the wealthy, but that it’s by no means certain that that direction can be changed anytime soon. The Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Democracy and Self-Government, Archon Fung is a democratic theorist and faculty director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS. Larry Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and a 2016 presidential candidate whose central campaign theme was ridding politics of the corrupting influence of money.
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Episode Notes
Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores policies, practices, and institutional designs that deepen the quality of democratic governance. He focuses upon public participation, deliberation, and transparency. His books include “Full Disclosure: The Perils and Promise of Transparency” (Cambridge University Press, with Mary Graham and David Weil) and “Empowered Participation: Reinventing Urban Democracy” (Princeton University Press). He has authored five books, four edited collections, and over 50 articles appearing in professional journals. He holds two SBs—in philosophy and physics—and a PhD in political science from MIT.
Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School. Prior to returning to Harvard, he taught at Stanford Law School, where he founded the Center for Internet and Society, and at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig is the founder of Equal Citizens and a founding board member of Creative Commons, and serves on the Scientific Board of AXA Research Fund. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he was once cited by The New Yorker as “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.” Lessig has turned his focus from law and technology to institutional corruption and the corrupting influence of money on democracy, which led to his entering the 2016 Democratic primary for president. He has written 11 books, including “They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy” in 2019. He holds a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge University, and a JD from Yale.
Ralph Ranalli of the HKS Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the host, producer, and editor of HKS PolicyCast. A former journalist, public television producer, and entrepreneur, he holds an BA in political science from UCLA and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.
Scheduling and logistical support for PolicyCast is provided by Lillian Wainaina. Design and graphics support is provided by Laura King and the OCPA Design Team. Web design and social media promotion support is provided by Catherine Santrock and Natalie Montaner of the OCPA Digital Team. Editorial support is provided by Nora Delaney and Robert O’Neill of the OCPA Editorial Team.
Preroll: PolicyCast explores research-based policy solutions to the tough problems we’re facing in our society and our world. This podcast is a production of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Actuality (Joe Biden): Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all over America. And we’ve seen it before. More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts.
Intro (Archon Fung): But I think what we might be looking at, which makes plutocracy different, is very concentrated wealthy people with an idea about how all of society should look and are able to affect that vision, whatever it is. A vision about manliness, a vision about race relations, a vision about deregulation, a vision about technological accelerationism, and they’re able to reshape all of society. That’s different even from the third category. And I think for sure, if that’s what we’re seeing, that would be very toxic for democracy.
Intro (Lawrence Lessig): I think if there’s a silver lining to this election, I think it’s a large chunk of the people who supported Donald Trump supported him because they believe this is a corrupt and broken government. But this guy is not going to help it. Help them. I mean, this is going to be the most kleptocratic, to use another word you would never utter outside of the Republic of Cambridge, the most kleptocratic administration we’ve had since the last Trump administration. And so I feel like we have an opportunity to focus people’s attention in a way that helps them see what actually could help. And, if that’s addressing this corrupting influence of money, finally, that would be progress.
Intro (Ralph Ranalli): Hi. It’s Ralph Ranalli. Welcome back to PolicyCast. It’s one of the most important studies you’ve probably never heard of. Or if you did, you’ve probably forgotten about it. More than a decade ago, political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took an extraordinary data set compiled by Gilens and a small army of researchers and set out to determine whether America could still credibly call itself a democracy. They used case studies of how nearly 1,800 policy issues made their way through the political system and whose interests were served by outcomes. For small D democrats, the results were devastating. Political outcomes overwhelmingly favored very wealthy people, corporations, and business groups. Meanwhile, they found that the influence of ordinary citizens was at a quote “non-significant, near-zero level” unquote. America, they concluded, was not a democracy at all, but a functional oligarchy. Fast forward to 2024 and a presidential campaign that saw record support by billionaires for both candidates, but most conspicuously for Republican candidate Donald Trump from Tesla and Starlink owner Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. That prompted outgoing President Joe Biden, in his farewell address, to warn Americans about impending oligarchy—something Gilens and Page said was already a fait accompli ten years before. And as if on que, from his first days in office Trump has put billionaire tech bro supporters like Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg front and center at his inauguration and given Musk previously unimaginable power to dismantle and reshape the federal government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. So what does it mean that American oligarchy is now so brazenly out in the open? My guests today—Harvard Kennedy School Professor Archon Fung and Harvard Law School Professor Larry Lessig—say it’s an inflection point that will force Americans to finally confront the country’s trend toward rule by the wealthy, but where it’s by no means certain that that direction can be changed anytime soon. Archon Fung is a democratic theorist and faculty director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS. Larry Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School and a presidential candidate who ran in 2016 with a central campaign theme was ridding politics of the corrupting influence of money. They’re here today to talk about American oligarchy, out in the open.
One quick note: During this conversation, my guests and I will use both the terms “oligarchy” and “plutocracy.” Oligarchy is defined as a government where authority is concentrated in the hands of a small group of powerful, usually wealthy, individuals. Plutocracy is a form of government where power is held by the wealthy. We will use these terms more or less interchangeably.
Ralph Ranalli: Archon, Larry, welcome to PolicyCast. So President Biden gave his farewell speech, and I thought it was a fairly extraordinary moment where he actually said the O word, oligarch, out loud and said: “Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He also talked about the rise of a tech industrial complex and said Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. I’m interested in your thoughts and reactions on what he said. Larry, do you mind going first?
Lawrence Lessig: Well, I felt it was a little too little too late. You know, there’s been a big fight. I feel like I’ve been in it now for 18 years, to try to address the corrupting influence of money inside of our political system. And there have been leaders in that fight in Washington, people like John Sarbanes. And Biden was never a leader in that fight. Even Nancy Pelosi, in the end, became a leader in that fight.
And the thing I feel like I was fearing is exactly what we saw manifest itself. You know, Steve Ansolabehere many years ago wrote a paper about how there’s too little money in politics. Like, it didn’t make sense. It would seem like you would be putting more money in politics because the return would be so high. Well, look at Elon Musk in this last election. Even if he spent—the estimates are a little unclear—but let’s say he spent $300 million. The return on that investment was huge, maybe a factor of 10 within the first month after that election. And I feel like he’s now set—much like Donald Trump has created the model for how politicians will behave, which is, I think, terrible—I think Elon Musk has set the model for how super wealthy people will behave. And so the acceleration of this anxiety around the corrupting influence of money is really astonishing.
Archon Fung: I agree with Larry in that it’s a little too late. I’m not sure whether Biden’s complaint is that your billionaires won rather than my billionaires. Because I believe that the Harris campaign—and it’s obviously very difficult to tell because of the dark money—probably outspent the Trump campaign by quite a bit. And so I’m a little unclear on what the complaint is exactly. I think, one thing he’s worried about is the further concentration of both wealth and power. And it’s interesting because I think what we’re seeing in the rise of MAGA and Trump is a response and a reaction to the kinds of problems that Larry has been working on for a long time of money in politics and institutional corruption.
And one of my bibles on this topic is this book by Marty Gilens—Larry knows it very well—Affluence and Influence, that shows for decades, federal lawmaking has been completely unresponsive to the bottom 80 or 90 percent of public opinion when the opinions of the wealthy are different from the opinions of the non-wealthy. And so wealth has infused the policymaking process to great effect for a long, long time. And part of the right populist appeal is that that part of the income distribution, whether it’s 10%, 5 % or 20% has been running the show forever and they’ve got to go and I’m your man for making them go. And so the moment that we’re in is a response to a longstanding problem of money and politics. Now, the irony is that it may make the problem worse, not better.
Ralph Ranalli: Right. And Biden has taken some probably well-deserved heat for being a little bit disingenuous, you know in, in saying that, given that the people he gave the presidential medal of freedom to were essentially billionaires. But is it important that we’re saying the O word now? We’re saying the word oligarch. Maybe it’s unfortunate that things have gotten this crazy. That things have gotten to the point where you, it can’t be avoided. But, is there a silver lining ...
Archon Fung: In raising attention to the issue.
Ralph Ranalli: ...in raising attention to this issue, because this has been a hard issue to talk about.
Archon Fung: Yeah, and I think the issue is different now. In thinking about this conversation that we’re having, I was thinking about, well, I do feel like the current problem of money in politics is different from the last 20 years and how is it different? Let me try this on for you. It might be one stage too complicated. Plutocracy is about the problem of too much money and inequality. And the least noxious form of that is that you have a bunch of rich people who are driving around in yachts or flying their jets. And it’s conspicuous consumption. They just get to consume a lot more than everybody else because of the inequality. And that’s distasteful to me, but not particularly political, right?
And then a more noxious form is wealthy people being able to infuse their money into politics to defend their interests, whether they’re a car company or a fossil company or they’re big food or they’re pharma or whatever. And Larry’s forgotten more about this topic than I’ll ever know, but that, that is politically noxious, because they exercise more political voice than everyone, and democracy is about political equality. And then I think on a par, but in my view slightly worse than that, is when people with a lot of money have bright ideas about how the world should look. And so this is either the Gates Foundation has big ideas about health in Africa on one hand or the Koch brothers have big ideas for reshaping the American economy and regulation on the other hand.
Chrystia Freeland, in one of her older books, says that’s the problem is when very wealthy people get some social idea. That’s what I don’t like, right? But I think what we might be looking at, which makes plutocracy different, is very concentrated wealthy people with an idea about how all of society should look and are able to affect that vision, whatever it is. A vision about manliness, a vision about race relations, a vision about deregulation, a vision about technological accelerationism, and they’re able to reshape all of society. That’s different even from the third category. And I think for sure, if that’s what we’re seeing, that would be very toxic for democracy.
Ralph Ranalli: Larry, what do you think about the notion that we can actually talk about oligarchy and the influence of billionaires? Because it has been hard to talk about, right? If you’re a reporter at, say, the Washington Post or an editor at the Washington Post, and your boss is now Jeff Bezos, are you able to say, well, actually, concentrated wealth is the number one problem in American politics and the American democracy. Even if there is a credible, fact-based argument for that? Is there utility in now being able to more easily name this problem?
Lawrence Lessig: Well, the question is in what context. I like being able to name that problem here at Harvard, because it’s really striking how here at Harvard, people in the government department don’t want to talk about money as a problem, right? Steve’s greatest, latest book was The Tyranny of the Minority, right? It goes through all of the ways in which our political representative system is minoritarian, all the structures that create, minority influence over democracy. Money is not on the list. It’s not even a section, let alone a chapter, right? So, I like the fact that now, here, it’s almost undeniable.
But I actually think it’s a useless conversation when you’re talking to ordinary people about what the problem of government is. Words like oligarchy, plutocracy, you know. I think that the last campaign, demonstrated this. People are talking about saving democracy. People don’t care about democracy in the abstract. They don’t care about ideas like oligarchy. They care about the fact that their government doesn’t work. They think it’s corrupt. They think it doesn’t do anything for them. They think that you’re either an idiot or you’re on the inside. You’re on the take if you’re trying to get the government to help. And I think our challenge is to first connect with people’s deep cynicism and skepticism about government and then to begin to show them how we can actually do something about it. Because I think if there’s a silver lining to this election, I think it’s a large chunk of the people who supported Donald Trump supported him because they believe this is a corrupt and broken government. But this guy is not going to help it. Help them. I mean, this is going to be the most kleptocratic, to use another word you would never utter outside of the Republic of Cambridge, the most kleptocratic administration we’ve had since the last Trump administration. And so I feel like we have an opportunity to focus people’s attention in a way that helps them see what actually could help. And, if that’s addressing this corrupting influence of money, finally, that would be progress.
Ralph Ranalli: I think a lot of the Trump voters were faced with thinking the Democrats are just going to do the status quo. Republicans are going to do this money and politics status quo. But this guy is going to probably take a chainsaw to the status quo, to the federal government. And, over the last couple of weeks, that’s proven itself in ways that, a lot of us who have been around politics a very long time have would find almost unimaginable. What, Elon Musk’s Doge team did at the Treasury Department, taking over their computers. And at USAID, with Musk tweeting out that USAID is corrupt and needs to die. It’s a criminal organization and needs to die.
Archon Fung: He put on X, I killed it, I put it through the woodchipper. Yeah, yeah.
Lawrence Lessig: To be very specific about, just how extraordinary it is, it’s not just that he, in some organizational sense, took over the payments infrastructure at the Treasury. According to Wired, he actually has a coder who went in and has modified the software that is providing the payment services for the Treasury Department. And it’s not like in some sandbox he was modifying the software. He was like modifying the software. The running software. The running software. Yeah. Nobody would do that, even in a small Accounts payable department for some third-rate company, but the idea that for the United States government, you’re having some tech guy sit there and start manipulating the code so that he has a capacity to control whether payments are made?
And again, I feel like it would be one thing If you thought this was a deeply intelligent, informed, reflective set of judgments that was being brought forward to figure out how to do something with the government, but literally everything he says is just total bullshit. They make up facts. They just frame the story as if it’s good versus evil. As if it’s a bunch of criminals inside of our government who are just stealing money, as if they discovered, it goes to the Lutheran Services, and so therefore it’s criminal because it’s going to religious organizations. It’s all ignorance, and yet it has the complete confidence of the wealthiest man in the world, supposedly, behind it, which makes it the worst possible mix in government.
Archon Fung: The plutocratic part, or element, is that he can do it unchecked, at least so far, right? I’m sure lots of people have crazy ideas about how to run the U. S. Treasury and parts of the U. S. government. The difference is he gets to do it, and so far—perhaps checks will be coming—but not.
Lawrence Lessig: Yeah. I don’t see where they come, because, theoretically, he’s violating all sorts of rules and laws. But it requires a prosecutor. And the prosecutor works for the President according to the President, even though I don’t think that technically is how we should think about prosecutors.
Archon Fung: Yeah.
Lawrence Lessig: But, if the prosecutor came forward, the President would say, go home, and if he didn’t, he would say, fine, you’re immune. I feel like we’ve just created this unchecked force inside of our government who believes that he’s gonna do for it what he did for Twitter. And for anybody who’s a long-time user of Twitter, that’s not an exciting prospect.
Archon Fung: So Larry, let me ask you about that question. It gets into legal issues, which I have not the slightest clue about. So somebody like Musk, or in Trump one other people who wanted to fundamentally change the way that the administrative state operated, whether it’s Treasury or some other organization, the first ring of checks were very oftentimes conservatives with a set of norms who paid attention to the processes according to which the federal government had run for a long, long time. And you can have debates and steer within those sets of processes. And we’ll bend the rules and push them out, but we’re gonna do these processes in that discussion.
And so that’s it a check, a normative check not quite a deliberative check, but there’s discussions going on. So that’s gone. That first ring, there’s nothing like that. And then one would think that... At least some of them at Harvard Law School have said, you know, it’s OK, the Constitution will kick in once it gets to the courts. There will be lawsuits, and so on. And so, the judiciary ought to be a wider ring check, but it sounds like you have some skepticism that that will kick in anytime soon.
Lawrence Lessig: Yeah, the critical check that existed inside of the federal executive was a process inside of the Department of Justice, which would review executive action and constrain it according to the judgment of the head of OLC, Office of Legal Counsel. And the head of OLC is not the President’s lawyer. In some sense, he’s the Constitution’s lawyer. The head of OLC will review material that comes to them about a proposed regulation or a proposed action, and they will study it and decide whether it’s legal. And legal according to the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence. So it’s not legal according to some crazy theory of the President or the President’s Attorney General. It’s legal, according to existing jurisprudence. And if it is legal, it’ll approve it. If it’s not, it’s supposed to be rejected.
The courts take that for granted. And so the courts have relatively little oversight beyond that because they think that system is working. So, 80% of the necessary legal check is already being done. And if there’s some exception, then they can step in and do something about it. The challenge we’ve got here is it’s absolutely clear that internal process is not happening. They’re just doing things like stopping payments. There’s no way that went to OLC. There’s no way. There’s not even a head of OLC yet, but there was an acting head of OLC, but the acting head of OLC just could not have approved that under existing law. That just would not have been approvable.
So it’s clear none of that is happening. They’re just basically shooting from the hip. And then the question is, will the courts step up? Will they exercise more aggressive review now that they realize that the internal reviews are no longer in place? Or will they continue to do what they’ve done before, which basically means they get away with whatever they’re doing.
Archon Fung: At some point, and this will probably be too late by then, I’m an elderly person on Social Security, I don’t get my check, maybe because Elon Musk didn’t like me, more likely because that 24-year-old left out a semicolon in the code where there should have been a semicolon. And then I sue the government for not having my check, and maybe I sue DOGE, or I don’t know who I sue, but that certainly is a route of redress. It will take a very long time.
Lawrence Lessig: It will take a long time. It will cost more than you’d ever get. The point is the legal system is not built to deal with the kind of autocratic behavior like this. We’re just not built for it. Many people inside of the law school are terrified that if a court gives an order—“You must do this”—that the president will just say: “No, I’m not going to do it.” Or his people will say, “No, I’m not going to do it.” And then what do you do?
Archon Fung: Then you’re in a constitutional crisis.
Lawrence Lessig: There’s a great interview of Chief Justice Berger, who was the Chief Justice when the court decided United States versus Nixon. That’s the case where the court ordered the President to turn over the tapes, and because he was ordered to turn over the tapes, he knew he would have to resign because the tapes revealed he had engaged in criminal behavior, at least criminal behavior before United States versus Trump. Maybe it’s not criminal behavior after the immunity. So Berger is asked by the interviewer like so what would you have done if Nixon had said no? And without missing a beat, Berger said, “I would have gathered up the Supreme Court Police and we would have walked down North Pasadena Avenue and gone into the White House and told them to obey the law.” And of course, his point was, there’s nothing they can do. There’s no opportunity to deal with this if he does not live up to the law.
Now Nixon was a lawyer and, for all his flaws, he had a deep respect for the integrity of the American legal constitutional order. I don’t think Donald Trump has a clue about what the constitutional order is. And so this is a real question. What happens if they just disobey the law? And the courts are stuck, stymied and I don’t know where we go.
Ralph Ranalli: So I guess the ultimate question on that is, have we reached a point of no return? I hate to keep returning to Musk and I’ll try not to do that much more.
Archon Fung: Well, the topic is autocracy.
Ralph Ranalli: True, true. Yeah. But he’s saying things like: “We’re going to get rid of all government regulations.” And he’s, I guess what you’d call showboating. He is signaling that he’s operating with this complete immunity. He named his so-called department after his own Bitcoin. And he’s teasing what could be construed as neo-Nazi salutes, presumably because he can and show that he can get away with it. There’s a lot of nonsensical debate about “Oh, was it a Roman salute or a Nazi salute,” but the political reality is that you don’t make a gesture that could conceivably be misconstrued as a Nazi salute unless you’re 100% sure you can get away with it. So, what, if anything, is there out there that, that could be counterweight to what’s happening now?
Lawrence Lessig: I think there’s no effective counterweight until the next election.
Archon Fung: So I don’t know about that. I like the idea of concentric circles, and the first one is gone, the second, the court system, I have less confidence now than I did five minutes ago. Thanks a lot, Larry. I think a third ring is probably civil society in some way. You may, in the next—I don’t know what the time frame is, weeks, months—see a fair amount of protests where you’re already seeing at the local level in the immigration orders. You see small, very small kind of protests around USAID and these buildings around orders that people regard as not lawful, at least they don’t like them. I don’t know if they have a particular legal view.
And one odd feature of the first 15 days so far is that many of these policies seem to alienate a very broad constituency, everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to a whole set of professional organizations in public health, in medicine, in law, in higher education. And then, certainly, the traditional left progressive groups, right? And it’s a broad, broad swath that a small group seems to have alienated very, very quickly. And so there’s an informal ring there. And then, I have thoughts about the midterms that we can get to.
Ralph Ranalli: Martin Gilens, who you mentioned before, came out with a very important study about a decade ago.
Archon Fung: Yeah.
Ralph Ranalli: Where he and Benjamin Page of Northwestern did this major study, which essentially concluded that the United States was a functional oligarchy. They said economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U. S. government policy while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. And they said, average citizen’s influence was at a non-significant, near zero level. Ouch.
Archon Fung: Yeah, it’s a devastating study. That was a devastating study.
Ralph Ranalli: And it was a huge study. It was based on almost 1,800 case studies. Why in this intervening decade have we not been talking about this? That was such a seminal moment for me. Why haven’t we been talking about this?
Archon Fung: I think we have different... we may have some different diagnoses. My diagnosis is actually a little bit in line with some of the MAGA and Donald Trump thinking, which is that most of the people in a position to say something about it are beneficiaries of the system. So a book that I found enlightening on this is Patrick Deneen’s book, Regime Change. Recent book, evidently J. D. Vance is a big fan, and Patrick Deneen was actually Pete Hegseth’s advisor at Princeton. So, Deneen, has three pieces in his argument. The first is that there is a ruling class of this 20 percent, everybody who lives in the super zips or wants to get their kids into Ivy League colleges and the Republicans and Democrats alike, and they’ve been making policy for a long time, mostly to benefit themselves. And so it’s true that most of those people aren’t in the 0.01%, arithmetically, but they’re still benefiting from this policy structure.
The second piece of the argument, so I’m on board actually with the first piece of the argument. Largely. The second piece of the argument, which was a little bit new to me, is that diversity, equity, and inclusion is actually instrumental to the ideology of this 20 percent in that they get to feel that they are on the side of justice and inclusion at the same moment that they are disparaging the deplorables, and everybody down below that, let’s say 50 percent on down, the white working class, if you like, because the white working class doesn’t understand structural racism. And so it does this work of making the ruling class, us basically, further out of touch. And then the recommendation is it’s a funny term, he calls it “aristo-populism.” Is you’ve got to have a populist hammer that breaks up everybody in the federal government and everybody in these universities and then a set of aristocrats that is common good oriented who’s connected to the bottom 80% who will do right by them. And maybe that’s Elon Musk, I’m not sure in this story. But that’s the kind of story and so that’s a long answer to why we haven’t been talking about it is: Why would we? We’re benefiting from it. Not as much as the top 1%, but a lot.
Ralph Ranalli: Larry, you were passionate about this issue of the corrupting influence of money in politics...
Lawrence Lessig: Don’t say past tense.
Ralph Ranalli: You are, but you were so passionate back in 2016 that you ran a presidential campaign. Can you talk about some of your experiences and maybe your frustrations in trying to get people to focus on this issue?
Lawrence Lessig: Well, way back at the beginning of my work on this we, we were commissioning a poll that found 96% of Americans thought it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. But 91% didn’t think it was possible.
Ralph Ranalli: Wow.
Lawrence Lessig: So this is the politics of resignation, right? We all wish we could fly like Superman, but we don’t leap off of tall buildings—well, hopefully—because we know we can’t. But if, all of a sudden, we discover you just take a pill and you can fly like Superman, many of us would just take the pill and fly like Superman. But the point is, if you could make people think there was something to do, you would unleash, I think, an enormous amount of energy that wants to address this problem, but which right now doesn’t because they don’t think there’s anything to do about it. So I think that’s number one.
And then number two is sort of related to what Archon was just saying. This is just such ignorance, I just don’t know how to pronounce Anand’s last name.
Archon Fung: Jahiradas, I think.
Lawrence Lessig: Jahiradas. Yeah. Winners Take All.
Archon Fung: Yeah, yeah.
Lawrence Lessig: Winners Take All. In this book, it’s a brilliant book, and it explains a lot in many aspects of society, but the basic thrust of the book is the most powerful, the wealthiest in society, will support those, quote, reforms that don’t hurt them. Right, so they’ll, they’ll push reforms that either benefit them or don’t hurt them, but they’ll block reforms that actually would hurt them. Right, so like real redistribution? No, no, that’s not gonna happen. But, better education? Well, better education means spending more money on education, means maybe more money for their universities, whatever.
So, I think that in the democracy reform space, you see a little bit of this dynamic. Maybe a lot of this dynamic. We’ve just had an election, and there was a big movement in a lot of states to try to get changes to the primary process and ranked choice voting. They had a hundred and sixty million dollars they spent to promote those ideas. Almost everywhere they lost. They either lost big or they barely won, but the point is, it was a total bust. And when you talk to the super wealthy people who were pushing those ideas, and ask them, you know, what about supporting reform for money and politics? They’re like, no. They’re happy to change the way primaries work. They’re happy to push for ranked choice voting, all these kinds of geeky democracy nerd ideas. But anything that would actually affect them directly, they’re against it.
Archon Fung: It reduces their voice, obviously.
Lawrence Lessig: It reduces their voice, right. So, you know, I, as you know, was part of a campaign in Maine to get an initiative passed that would take on Super PACs, because we think this issue has never been decided by the Supreme Court and we think the Supreme Court actually will get the right answer in this. And as we teed up that question and tried to raise money for that question, there were very few, but some important, super wealthy billionaire types who basically said, “I’m spending my money. to reduce my own political impact,” right? So, one out of a thousand. Right. But the point is...
Archon Fung: Literally a black swan...
Lawrence Lessig: But the point is that I think explains a lot about why you look at a problem like what Marty and Ben were talking about. And most people say, we’re not going to do anything about that. How are you going to do anything about that? So we’re going to go and try to do things we can do something about.
Ralph Ranalli: Yeah. Well here in Massachusetts we an initiative which I think showed you could get people to care about the tax code. It was called the Fair Share Amendment but its often referred to as the Millionaire’s Tax. And it levied a surcharge on any income over basically a million dollars. It was publicly popular and it’s been successful, at least in terms of raising revenue for things like roads and schools. Can you fix what I see as essentially a tax code problem, which is this non virtuous cycle that goes back to Ronald Reagan, when he dropped the highest marginal tax rates from 73% to 28%, which is basically where they were in the Roaring Twenties. And since those days, you’ve had a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. And, that cycle is still churning, money is still being siphoned up, and the wealthy are accumulating even more money, which means in a political system where money carries the day, they’re accumulating more power. Can you approach this and fix this as a campaign finance problem, if it’s really a we-are-making-too-many-billionaires problem?
Archon Fung: I think, well, this is a perennial question in money and politics. A democratic theorist thinks, okay, well, there’s a society with, we call it background inequalities, like poor people and wealthy people. Can you create a firewall between those inequalities and create political equality on the other side? And that turns out to be very hard to do. And campaign finance people sometimes call it the hydraulic problem, where that wall is a little bit like a dam. And any hole, the money pours through and it will find the holes and you keep plugging your fingers into it. So, I’m a little bit skeptical about the firewall prospect.
Lawrence Lessig: But I think it’s a sequencing issue. You can’t address the tax problem until you address the money problem.
Archon Fung: Right, that’s true.
Lawrence Lessig: You can’t address the climate change problem until you address the money problem. You can’t address any of these issues until you address the money problem first. And I found in this fight, this 18-year-long fight, at the beginning of this fight, People denied that. People would say like, “No, let’s, let’s deal with climate change. Let’s deal with healthcare. Let’s deal with the tax rates.” And you would say there’s no way to do that. As long as this blocks it. So I think the thing is to understand the money is not the most important issue. The money is just the first issue.
If you address the money, it’s a gateway solution. You can go through that gate, and then you can begin to pick all the other issues you could address. Or recognize you can address those issues much more cheaply. Like, if you have to change the tax system, given the way we fund campaigns right now, how much would that campaign cost? That would cost a billion dollars to be able to raise the attention and energy to be able to fight the tax system so long as we have the way we fund campaigns now. But change that? And I don’t know, it begins to feel like it’s a winnable fight.
Archon Fung: Yeah. Larry, do you think that the current—it’s so early days, right? So it’s hard to make any evaluations—do you think that the Musk problem is qualitatively different from the problems that you were addressing in money and politics and the institutional corruption, or do you think it’s kind of the same thing? And if it’s different. Like how sad would you be if we could take care of the Musk problem, but the institutional corruption remains?
Lawrence Lessig: So actually the Musk problem is a harder problem to take care of.
Archon Fung: Oh.
Lawrence Lessig: The Musk problem was created not by Citizens United. Right? It was created by Buckley vs Vallejo. Because even though Musk gave his money to Super PACs, he didn’t have to. And if you got rid of Super PACs, which I think there’s a good chance this case will ultimately do, still, under Buckley vs Vallejo, Musk is allowed to spend as much money as he wants as long as he spends it independently of the campaign. I think the hard thing to recognize is that we can, I think we can deal with the kind of gross middle problem that you described.
Archon Fung: I see.
Lawrence Lessig: It will still create this risk of these extremes. And to address that, we’d have to either get the Supreme Court to reverse this whole line of thinking, which it’s a hard thing to imagine. Or even harder to imagine, but I totally support the effort, is the effort to get an amendment to the constitution to give our government, our Congress, our people the power to protect themselves against this kind of corrupting influence.
Ralph Ranalli: So is there a hopeful take on this that there is somewhere to start? What would that first thread be that you would pull to unravel this sweater? Where would you each start?
Archon Fung: A couple of things. I do have hope. I think that your initial proposition that maybe the extreme disruption that the country is feeling raises attention to the money and politics version, and that the extreme version of it that we’re seeing right now with DOGE, awakens and mobilizes more people. And that sets a possibility space or increases the possibilities, I think, for attention and for change that weren’t there before.
In terms of forward movement, I mean, this is several steps back from actual policy, but I think that another possible kind of thing that’s happening is a pretty high level of disillusionment with Democratic leadership and responses to this. And I think a necessary step forward is a set of leaders who is more connected to the bottom 80%. Right now in Congress, the least represented demographic groups are people without a college degree and people whose last job was blue collar, which in both cases, about 60% of the U. S. population. it’s approximately zero, right? And so I think we need a set of leaders who’s more organically connected in a way to feel and articulate these problems.
Ralph Ranalli: You know one thing I wanted to add, which I think is important, is the reality of what is likely to come from all this chaos and disruption, which is real pain and suffering. There are real people who are served by the departments that are being slashed and funds that are being impounded. So, while there may be a hopeful take that this disruption forces some important conversations and debates, people are going to get hurt. I didn’t want that to go unsaid. So that point made, Larry, what would you say would be your starting point?
Lawrence Lessig: Well, I think that there’s a cacophony of, like, criticism and panic. And I think we have to find a way to bring it into harmony, and to focus it in ways that will connect with ordinary people. And so, I think the focus around the deeply corrupted system, political system we have, is a focus that, people on the right and the people on the left, at least ordinary people, share. They would, they would agree with that. And if that becomes a constant rhythm, and you like point at every single example, you begin to build momentum around the idea that this is the problem we have to, we have to address first.
I completely agree with Archon about the need for the Democratic Party in particular to remake itself. Not just by having different members in Congress, which of course we can’t do tomorrow, but also the leaders in Congress. I mean, the idea that AOC was denied a leadership position for a person I can’t even tell you who he is. It’s a 90-year-old, and he’s not quite 90…
Ralph Ranalli: He’s 74
Lawrence Lessig: He’s 74, I mean he’s unfortunately suffering a health like concern, but the idea that one of the most compelling members the Democratic Party has had in the last 50 years is shuttled aside because we have to pay our dues inside of Congress, and she hasn’t paid her dues yet. I mean, give me a break. You’ve been paying dues and losing twice to what has got to be the worst candidate for president in the history of America. So you’ve got to accept the fact there’s something wrong with the system you’ve got, and you’ve got to fix it.
Ralph Ranalli: And in terms of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—while I’m not opining on AOC herself or her policy position—what she represents is also a savviness and ability to communicate in this political moment. She should be the de facto social media advisor for the Democratic Party,
Archon Fung: Almost as good as Trump. Right?
Ralph Ranalli: She can go and communicate in the way that the Republican and MAGA influencers are communicating.
Archon Fung: Yeah. You know, Larry, I really think you’re right on the current situation really focusing people’s attention on money in a way that they’ve really tried to avoid focusing on. Democratic reformers, small D democratic reform organizations for a very long time. It’s more crystal clear that it’s the money that is the problem. Now doing something about that, in policy terms, is hard, but organizationally is hard because Democratic Party organizations would have to rewire and 99% of nonprofit organizations would have to rewire, in a way that makes them less reliant on billionaires, which is a very difficult proposition.
Lawrence Lessig: We found this in Maine, where we were trying to get progressive organizations in Maine to join with us to try to pass the initiative, which ultimately passed with 74.9% of the vote. But these progressive organizations, on the surface, they would give you all sorts of reasons why well, we’re not sure the Supreme Court…
Archon Fung: It’s not our focus...
Lawrence Lessig: It’s not our focus. But when you get them in a quiet room, they’ll explain that… actually in Maine they were told that some of these super funders were going to back out of Maine if they passed this initiative. And I realized when I looked at these 20- something, 30- something year old executive directors of these organizations, they had never lived in a time when they weren’t dependent on billionaires to do their work. Right. They can’t even imagine how you…
Archon Fung: There’s no other oxygen.
Lawrence Lessig: There’s no other oxygen, right? And we’re old enough to remember that there was a time before this. And there were lots of democratic organization and people like building movements without depending upon the good favor of a handful of billionaires. So I do think it’s hard to get people to recognize that, but that’s got to be the first.
Ralph Ranalli: I like to call that the Willie Sutton problem. When they asked the old-time bank robber Willie Sutton why he robbed banks, he said, “Well, that’s where the money is.”
Archon Fung: And the money is increasingly concentrated.
Ralph Ranalli: Exactly. So we’ve reached the time in PolicyCast where we talk about specific policy recommendations. So what would a couple of recommendations be from you for people who are policy makers, policy implementors, influencers, or just policy curious. And given where we are, maybe federal policy is not the place to start? Is it state policy? Is it local policy? So if you could both give me a couple of concrete, specific policy recommendations that you think might at least start to move the needle in what you would consider a positive direction, I’d appreciate it.
Archon Fung: Yeah, one. To the very, very present issue of DOGE and the unaccountability issue of Musk and his team of evidently six 20- to 30-year-olds, according to Wired reporting. There’s a whole Office of Government Ethics with dozens and dozens of employees that try to vet and raise up big bars to conflict of interest. So I think it would be great to have real conflict of interest applied in this case. That seems like a real reach and nobody’s clamoring for that. That would be one demand.
Another very current policy demand, that would just be about transparency, is what is going on in these offices? What is the code that’s being modified? What is the access and what isn’t? And what are the controls on that? So that’s very, very short-term, dealing with, on the administrative and implementation side. And then there’s a lot of upstreams on the money and politics and campaigning side.
Ralph Ranalli: Larry, what would your policy recommendations be?
Lawrence Lessig: Yeah, so I don’t think we ought to say there there isn’t federal work to be done. I think first, there’s a lot of work to be done to build the support to get the court to do the right thing in this case that will potentially end super PACs. That would be a huge, huge victory. And if you could get super PACs off the table, that would revive people’s interest in alternative ways of funding campaigns.
So, Seattle experimented and Oakland and LA is now considering, a voucher program that would hand vouchers to everybody to help fund campaigns, which would radically change the attention that members of Congress would give to the super wealthy as opposed to ordinary people. In the bill that almost passed, the Freedom to Vote Act, which was the version in the Senate of the For the People Act, they had a very interesting and aggressive program to give block grants to states, that states could choose to use to fund campaigns in different ways and experiment with different methods, like maybe matching grants, maybe vouchers, whatever. But the point is we’ve got to fuel this experimentation so that we begin to identify a way to fund campaigns that doesn’t produce candidates who are obsessively focused on the tiniest fraction of the one percent.
After this last defeat of the Democrats, Bernie criticized the Harris campaign by saying she spent too little time talking about issues that were important to working class people. And that’s true. But it’s obvious why she spent so much time talking about issues that would make her super PAC funders happy, right? So they’ve got to realize that the money, this gold, is golden handcuffs. It’s stopping them from addressing issues that their base cares about. And the only way they get rid of it is just to give it up. Like to commit themselves to doing something that would stop the corrupting influence of money here.
And here, there are people that are pushing the idea that in the Democratic primary the party ought to adopt a rule that no candidate will accept and will actively try to block the support from any super PACs. Now, you can’t do that in the general election so long as the other side is not doing it. But in the primary system, why allow candidates to be selected and dependent on these super PACs? Why not adopt rules that push that off the table so we can begin to commit and demonstrate to ordinary people that this really is a commitment of the party and they’re living up to their commitment.
Ralph Ranalli: Just sort of lead by example.
Lawrence Lessig: Yes.
Ralph Ranalli: Well, if it is possible for a discussion to be enlightening, frightening, and perhaps a little bit hopeful at the same time, I think this was it, and I want to thank you both for being here.
Lawrence Lessig: Thanks for having us.
Archon Fung: Thanks very much, Ralph.
Outro (Ralph Ranalli): Thanks for listening. Please join us for our next episode, when my guest will be Professor Ricardo Hausmann of the Growth Lab. We’ll explore about how industrial policy—which fell out of favor during the heyday of neoliberal economic globalization—has made a big comeback and what its future is in Donald Trumps increasingly protectionist global order. And if you liked this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app, and while you’re there, hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any of our important upcoming episodes. So, until next time, remember to speak bravely, and listen generously.