Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and 2016 candidate for the Democratic nomination. In this interview filmed at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he explains how money’s influence in politics threatens American democracy. Congress has become deeply unrepresentative, he says, because politicians are focused on answering to their biggest campaign donors rather than the general population. This is why people are drawn to anti-establishment candidates like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. “We could fix these problems if we had a Congress with the will to address the corruption that has broken the representative system,” Lessig says. “Unfortunately we don’t have that will right now, we have to find a way to create it.”

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