Utne Reader Visionaries Special Project: An Interview with Lawrence Lessig

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It’s intended to be bipartisan, so these issues are actually selected because they’re the kind of reform being suggested by both Democrats and Republicans. But we haven’t taken one as the solution that we would put forward.

How optimistic are you about accomplishing the sort of change you’re pushing for with Change for Congress?

Well, nothing is going to happen in the next cycle, or the next two cycles, and there’s no illusion that it’s going to take a pretty big movement, and we’re nowhere close to having that movement right now.

You’re talking about presidential election cycles, or congressional ones?

Congressional election cycles. One of the biggest problems we have is that politics in America has been reduced to a presidential cycle. People think only about the president. But even if you got the most committed reformer president, that’s only a tenth of the solution, because that president still has to deal with Congress, and Congress is still the same Congress. So it’s going to take a number of cycles.

We’ve been working very hard to figure out what the strategy is that makes this issue increasingly salient and important, and I’m pretty excited about the strategy. My more fundamental view about it is, even if I thought we weren’t going to succeed, I think failing is actually a pretty important part of the ultimate process of getting things done.

Trying to build a movement and seeing that movement stopped by those who don’t want to support change might be the first step necessary to getting the next movement going that’s much more strongly supported.

And if you believe as I do that we we’re not going to be able to solve any of the critical public policy problems that we face, from really important issues like global warming to somewhat esoteric issues like copyright issues, and everything in between—we’re not going to solve any of those until we solve this more fundamental problem.

So we don’t really have a choice—this is the issue we’ve got to fix, and whether or not you believe you’re going to succeed ultimately, I think there’s a moral obligation to try to do something about it.

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