They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy

Written by Lawrence Lessig

Narrated by Lawrence Lessig

“This urgent book offers not only a clear-eyed explanation of the forces that broke our politics, but a thoughtful and, yes, patriotic vision of how we create a government that’s truly by and for the people.”—DAVID DALEY, bestselling author of Ratf**ked and Unrigged

In the vein of On Tyranny and How Democracies Die, the bestselling author of Republic, Lost argues with insight and urgency that our democracy no longer represents us and shows that reform is both necessary and possible.

America’s democracy is in crisis. Along many dimensions, a single flaw—unrepresentativeness—has detached our government from the people. And as a people, our fractured partisanship and ignorance on critical issues drive our leaders to stake out ever more extreme positions.

In They Don’t Represent Us, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts the way in which the fundamental institutions of our democracy, including our media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the needs and wishes of the nation’s citizenry. But the blame does not only lie with “them”—Washington’s politicians and power brokers, Lessig argues. The problem is also “us.” “We the people” are increasingly uninformed about the issues, while ubiquitous political polling exacerbates the problem, reflecting and normalizing our ignorance and feeding it back into the system as representative of our will.

What we need, Lessig contends, is a series of reforms, from governmental institutions to the public itself, including:

• A move immediately to public campaign funding, leading to more representative candidates
• A reformed Electoral College, that gives the President a reason to represent America as a whole
• A federal standard to end partisan gerrymandering in the states 
• A radically reformed Senate
• A federal penalty on states that don’t secure to their people an equal freedom to vote
• Institutions that empower the people to speak in an informed and deliberative way

A soul-searching and incisive examination of our failing political culture, this nonpartisan call to arms speaks to every citizen, offering a far-reaching platform for reform that could save our democracy and make it work for all of us.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9780062945747

Lawrence Lessig

Lawrence Lessig is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard Law School, host of the podcast Another Way, founder of equalcitizens.us, and co-founder of Creative Commons. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. Lessig has received numerous awards, including a Webby Life Time Achievement Award, the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, the Fastcase 50 Award, and he was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and the author of ten books, including Republic, Lost. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Reviews for They Don't Represent Us

[breic-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There wasn't enough novelty for me in this book. Much of it summarizes other people's ideas (e.g., campaign finance "democracy coupons," quadratic/square-root weighting). It is a good collection and a decent summary, but not that interesting if you are already familiar with them. Lessig isn't naive, but he is definitely an idealist, and his relentlessly positive viewpoint doesn't always fit with the reality of our political situation. In his idea of deliberative polling or civic juries, for example, he supposes that Americans will learn to respect the conclusions of a random sample of Americans who are given facts about the issues. Republican policies aren't based on facts. (And as Lessig himself writes, "most Americans identify with identities, not policies; with tribes, not truth. Political parties are attitudes, not collections of party platforms.")

I did appreciate the imagination.

> Democracy had been liberated from the politicians and the pundits, just as religion had been liberated from the priests and the pretenders. And while Gallup's revolution didn't trigger the wars that Luther's did, it was resisted, too, for it too "threatened to topple one local priesthood and replace it with another." It is hard for us today to realize just how profound George Gallup's invention was. We live at a time when polls are ubiquitous

> The jury has the lawyers and the judge spoon-feeding the information they need to make their decisions; the president has an army of brilliant souls feeding every relevant fact and consideration; the judge has clerks as well as lawyers to frame her decisions; the representative has a modest number of staff and an endless army of lobbyists. All of these public officers get support before they are "represented." But the citizen gets no support before she is "represented." It is a system designed to render us embarrassing. So is there any doubt that public opinion polls make Americans look stupid?

> one advanced by FairVote and embodied in the Fair Representation Act. This system would create multimember districts for Congress, and then give every voter a chance to rank his or her choices for Congress within those multimember districts. The ordinary district would have five members of Congress. Each voter could rank up to five candidates running within that district.

> the history of humanity when most were focused on the same set of stories—and most viewed those stories as the product of truth, not spin—was a weird quarter century that will never happen again. There will be no rerun of the 1970s. That age is over. The question now is how to build a democracy that does not assume that we all, at any particular time, know anything, and that accepts that what's told to us is told to us with partisan spin

> As Van Reybrouck describes, and as Oliver Dowlen explains as well in his wonderful pamphlet, Sorted: Civil Lotteries and the Future of Public Participation, there are many examples—from ancient Greece to much of the history of Florentine Italy—of governments that were filled with people selected randomly. The Greeks invented a device that would do the random selection. Their commitment to sortition survived for more than two hundred years. A Venetian lottery system survived for more than five hundred years.

> Imagine we did this by paying people to watch political ads. Imagine you would watch an ad—preferably a longer ad—and then answer some questions. If you answer the questions correctly, you get paid. Every voter would get a number of chances to get it right to get paid. But the very act of choosing to listen would change the character of what could be said.

> Represent.us is among the most impactful in this space. They've pushed corruption reform across the country, as well as gerrymandering reform and RCV. … EqualCitizens.US. Equal Citizens aims to practice the lesson this book wants to teach. By taking on cases and causes that show a commitment to political equality, we want to build a movement of political egalitarians. Our initial strategy was through litigation. Our first cases aimed to reform the Electoral College, by challenging winner-take-all. We have a case pressing the courts to adopt the original meaning of "corruption" so as to allow the regulation of SuperPACs. And we have been pushing the cause of RCV in both presidential primary and general elections.