Harvard Law professor and Congressional reform champion Lawrence Lessig is interviewed in the latest edition of Boston Review as part of promoting his new book, Republic Lost. If the book title doesn’t give it away, it should: his take on the political situation in this country is that we are in serious danger of reaching a tipping point where our democracy is completely lost to the big money interests that dominate Congress. Despite the seriousness of the situation, it’s clear that Lessig thinks that real reform of the system is stil possible, and that populist movements like the Tea Party and OWS are capable of working together to accomplish some of their common goals. Be sure to have a look at the website for his activist group, Rootstrikers.org.
Keep Lessig’s interview in mind when reading this next link, an op-ed in Sunday’s NYT from Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. The piece is entitled “The New Progressive Movement” and argues nothing less than that the successes of OWS hallmark the dawn of a new era of progressive reform, the swing of the pendulum of American history back away from the counter-reform of the last three decades. The optimism in Sachs’s editorial is a lot sunnier than Lessig’s, and honestly, I feel like you have to go with “it’s always darkest before the dawn” and see that Lessig’s argument that we are not *quite* where Sachs says we are is the more realistic outlook to have. (But, as you well know, I am a glass-half-empty man from way back.) Still, it’s reassuring that even at this point there are Serious People who believe that all is not lost.
