Harvard law professor and political activist Lawrence Lessig declared his unlikely candidacy for president, last summer, on a single-issue platform: campaign-finance reform. He was forced to drop out before the second Democratic debate and has since been overtaken by his better-known (and, to be sure, better-financed) competitors. But that doesn’t mean he is done agitating, especially since the American public has caught on with his anti–Citizens United v. F.E.C. message. Here he expresses his admiration for Donald Trump, frustration with Bernie Sanders, and speculation on the future of both parties.

Vanity Fair: Is it surprising that that the candidates who raised the most super-PAC money this cycle, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, either performed terribly or worse than expected? Does this suggest that the Citizens United case has had an adverse effect on voters?

Lawrence Lessig: I never thought money was a problem because it corrupts the voters. I thought money was a problem because of how fundraising corrupts candidates. And I don’t even think it’s such a big problem at the presidential level. The real place where this is a problem is in Congress, when you spend 30 to 70 percent of your time calling people to get money to run your campaign or party. So whether or not money can buy you votes, raising money in a completely humiliating way, it turns you into a sycophant, or somebody who isn’t a leader.

Donald Trump likes to point out that he is self-funded. Does this benefit the cause of campaign-finance reform?

Absolutely. It’s enormous progress. I think he's made it possible for Republicans to acknowledge what those in the party outside of the Beltway all understand to be a critical problem: the dependence that big money has produced inside of our political system.

__There are a lot of public figures speculating that the G.O.P., in its current iteration, may not survive past this election. __

I think it’s too early to see what exactly the consequence of this election will be for them. But I do believe that we will see another round of Republicans in the next election cycle who are more open to explicitly talking about how to address campaign-finance reform in a constructive way. Already you see groups developing, like Take Back Our Republic, which is comprised of right-wing organizers trying to pull people together to support changing the way campaigns are funded. I think you’ll see more of that.

Do you think the Democratic Party faces a similar shake-up?

People have framed this issue as a fight between the right and the left. I think that what we’re seeing is a fight between the inside and the outside. So, Donald Trump is a quintessential outsider, and his effort has, I think, made it more possible for people on the inside to talk about the corrupting influence of money in politics. And I think you’re going to see the same thing on the Democratic Party’s side, too. I think that Bernie, and the pressure that has been raised about this issue from the outside, is going to force more pressure on insider Democrats to address this problem aggressively.

Has Bernie Sanders been as good an advocate for campaign-finance reform as everyone says?

Well, he has been great at identifying a problem with big money, and in the fifth debate, he was fantastic in saying this is going to be the first thing he addresses. But when you ask, “O.K., so how? What are you going to do?” Nobody has any sense of what he’s going to do, and the things that he would say first will not solve the problem.