Not Visible

On Tuesday, December 17, Harvard law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig spoke at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. The professor shared salient points made in his new book, THEY Don’t Represent US. In a clear and compelling presentation Lessig illustrated the differences in the way the voting populace has obtained news and information, and the difference in how Americans have reacted, from the time of the first impeachment of a US President through today. 

Lessig also noted that where once voters’ beliefs and attitudes were not well evident on the national level, today scientific polls can be used to both read and affect voters’ attitudes. The combined effect of voter manipulation and fragmented intake of (so-called) news sources has divided our citizens as never before. 

Lessig’s observations and insights are riveting and disturbing. His proposals for remedies needed to save what remains of democratic representative government in America are unique and different. It may be no exaggeration to say that every American citizen should read Lessig’s book carefully, to understand the perils operating in our government today and discover ways and means to counteract them. 

Some of Lessig’s points: 

Congressmen and women spend 30 - 70% of their time asking for campaign contributions from 120,000 individuals and organizations. As a result, government policies that offend these key donors are rare. 

Voters then and now: in the 1800’s newspapers were the only mass media. Published by men who cleaved to partisan beliefs, newspapers were not objective news sources. Lessig shared an incident from his visit to Russia in the 80’s wherein a Russian professor claimed that Russians are less gullible than Americans because they knew their papers were lying, and so read more publications and analyzed differences between them to gain some idea of actual occurrences. ‘You Americans believe what you read’, was the professor’s accusation. 

Political polls were rare and mostly local phenomena, until 1936, when George Gallup contradicted the Literary Digest’s confident assertion that Alf Langdon would defeat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the general election. The Digest had polled 2.3 million voters, but most of them were affluent Republicans. Gallup not only predicted that Roosevelt would win, he predicted the landslide that kept Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression. 

Lessig examined the history of Presidential impeachments to illustrate differences in voters’ awareness and reactions to events in early times and the present era: 

In 1868 Andrew Johnson was brought up on 11 articles of impeachment by Republican congressmen who disliked Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction of the defeated Southern states of the Confederacy. (Johnson was acquitted in the Senate by one vote—twice, because Republicans in Congress filed charges against Johnson a second time, again failing by the same marginal single vote as the first.) 

In that day no one knew what voters knew or thought of the issues at play in Johnson’s impeachment trial. Issues were decided in the Congress and the Senate, heavily influenced by political maneuvering. 

In1974 Richard Nixon was almost impeached in Congress following revelations about the Republican-sponsored break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at Nixon’s direction. At that time virtually all Americans watched the three broadcast television networks, and were thus exposed to the same information. As more details of the break-in were revealed, both Democratic and Republican voters’ opinion of the President plunged at virtually the same rate. Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment and the obvious guilty finding by the US Senate. 

However, a dinner-hour phone call asking one or two questions that are deliberately limited in scope is by no means equivalent of legislators’ informed, well-counseled, and deliberate statements in government and to the press. Citizens’ input is not well formulated or delivered, and for this reason is a matter of concern when policy is written on the basis of ‘public opinion’. Professor Lessig indicates this disparity with the thematic phrase, Just as THEY do not represent US, We also do not represent US. 

Today, instead of three big television broadcasters, most Americans’ news comes from the big cable networks. Different groups view different programming, with virtually no commonly-shared news sources. Today voters subjected to widely differing information sources are unlikely to see eye-to-eye on Presidential impeachment. 

Lessig was not wholly pessimistic, though he did emphasize that all of US need to do more, think more, and express ourselves in more unified, and more strategic, ways toward legislators—in order to leverage public opinion to effect needed change. Examples were drawn from Mongolia, Iceland, and Ireland, where citizens have influenced major policy decisions using processes that, Lessig believes, would work equally well in America. What are they? One and all are sincerely urged to obtain a copy of THEY Don’t Represent US to find out.