Lessig’s super PAC has “the biggest chance to fail of anything I’ve ever done,” he says. Illustration by Nishant Choksi

Last spring, Lawrence Lessig, a fifty-three-year-old Harvard legal theorist who opposes the influence of money in politics, launched a counterintuitive experiment: the Mayday PAC, a political-action committee that would spend millions of dollars in an attempt to elect congressional candidates who are intent on passing campaign-finance reform—and to defeat those who are not. It was a super PAC designed to drive its own species into extinction. Lessig adopted the motto “Embrace the irony.”

Others had tried pouring money into politics in order to end the pouring of money into politics, but never on the scale that Lessig wanted. In 2012, Jonathan Soros, a son of George Soros, the billionaire and liberal donor, raised and spent $2.7 million to help nine candidates committed to campaign-finance reform. Lessig and his co-founder, the Republican consultant Mark McKinnon, planned to spend more than four times that amount in the six months leading up to midterm elections, on November 4th. If their efforts succeeded, they aimed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars on as many as eighty races in the 2016 election. Lessig believed that the campaign-finance system needed the political equivalent of an “atomic bomb,” he told me. Change would become impossible, he said, “unless we blow it up now and we find some way to make it so that these bones don’t set.”

In 2010, in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court, arguing that campaign contributions were a form of “political speech,” struck down limits on the amount of money corporations, unions, and rich individuals could spend on elections. The decision led to a surge of money greater than anyone predicted. Between 2008 and 2012, campaign spending shot up by nearly two billion dollars. Much of that growth came from super PACs, the committees that are allowed to spend whatever they want as long as they don’t work directly with candidates. In 2012, super PACs spent a billion dollars; seventy-three per cent of the money came from a hundred people. The other large source of growth has been in so-called dark money—donations from nonprofits that are allowed to keep their donors anonymous. In late August, before the midterm campaign had reached full speed, dark-money spending had climbed to fifty million dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—seven times the sum that had been spent by that point in 2010.

In Washington, Lessig’s effort to effect rapid change was generally perceived as doomed or foolish. A piece in Politico, headlined “THE PAC TO END ALL PACS IS A FARCE,” described it as “political performance art.” Of the prospects for imminent reform, a blog on the Washington Post observed, “No politicians are even talking about it.” Conventional wisdom holds that people tell pollsters that they hate money in politics and vote based on more visceral issues. Lessig speaks, instead, of “the politics of resignation.” He will have to prove that voters care enough to “knock out some incumbents, and make some people victors.” He’ll need what he called a “Roger Bannister moment”—the political equivalent of breaking the four-minute mile—to show what is possible. Mayday, he acknowledged, has “the biggest chance to fail of anything I’ve ever done.”

On a weekday morning in August, Lessig was at the Cajundome Convention Center, in Lafayette, Louisiana. The marquee advertised upcoming visits by the men and women of World Wrestling Entertainment and the 2014 Louisiana Bridal Expo. Lessig had flown in the previous afternoon. He has a pronounced forehead, small round glasses, and an expression of quiet alarm. In speaking, he’s come to use the hyperbolic shorthand of online discourse: things aren’t big or bad; they are “insane.” He projects an air of oracular intensity. When he was featured by name as a character on “The West Wing” (advising a foreign government on its constitution), he was played by Christopher Lloyd, the wild-eyed inventor in the “Back to the Future” movies.

An hour before his talk, Lessig left the hotel wearing a charcoal suit, a blue shirt, and black shoes, a uniform that allows him to pack for any trip without having to think but wasn’t optimal for Louisiana in August. He had been invited to Lafayette to speak at a local business event, the ABiz Top 50 Luncheon. He hoped that Louisiana voters might be receptive to his message. In the past decade, Louisiana convicted more people per capita for public corruption than any other state. The former governor Edwin Edwards liked to say that the only surefire threat to his political future was getting caught with “a dead girl or a live boy.” (Edwards later served more than eight years in prison on corruption charges, for extorting payoffs in exchange for casino licenses; he is now running for Congress.) Lessig also planned to use his speech in Louisiana to argue that politicians’ reliance on a small group of funders denies equal citizenship in a way that resembles racial discrimination in voting.

The Cajundome luncheon had attracted about seven hundred people. The audience was less diverse than Lessig had expected: mostly prosperous-looking white men, taking their seats at round tables marked with the names of local businesses. I chatted with Pearson Cross, a political scientist from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who told me, “These are the people writing the checks.”

Lessig began, “It is an astonishing—one could say humbling, embarrassing—fact that almost one hundred years after the American Constitution effectively granted the right to vote to African-Americans, African-Americans still didn’t have the right to vote.” On two large overhead screens, he showed slides of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr., and of German shepherds lunging at demonstrators. “As all of us look back at that history, we wonder: How could they have thought like this?” He asked, “Are there things that will make our kids look back on us and say, ‘Seriously?’ . . . How could we believe that the thickness of one’s wallet is the metric of citizenship?” He sketched a dire portrait of American politics. More than ninety-nine per cent of Americans are excluded from the access that large campaign donations afford, he said. And yet people have accepted this state of affairs. He cited a poll in which ninety-six per cent of Americans said they believe that it’s important to reduce the influence of money in politics but only nine per cent believe that it is likely to happen. The Mayday PAC, Lessig said, was intended to elect a Congress that would pass reform and demonstrate to Americans that change was possible. “This is the moral question of our age,” he said. “Can we reclaim our democracy?”

When he finished, there was polite applause, but not the standing ovation he sometimes receives. He signed a few copies of his 2012 book, “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It”; dozens were left on the table. “I misread the audience,” he told me.

When I lived in Beijing, the Chinese often complained that their government was riddled with corruption, and they asked me if America had similar problems. I usually replied that though our government has its crooks, the naked exchange of favors for money is minimized by the rule of law and a free press. Now I’m not so sure. Getting elected to the House today takes more than double the money required in 1986, so a candidate must be blunter and broader in the hunt for cash. In Georgia, a leaked memo from the Senate campaign of the Democrat Michelle Nunn advised her to spend eighty per cent of her first month fund-raising. In Wisconsin, a consultant working for Governor Scott Walker told him to visit the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson: “Ask for $1m now.” In spite of the Supreme Court’s approval, Lessig describes this fixation on money as a “corruption of the system.” He rejects the term “campaign-finance reform” as a euphemism comparable to “liquid-intake problem” for alcoholism.