THEY DON’T REPRESENT US

Reclaiming Our Democracy

By Lawrence Lessig

THE GREAT DEMOCRACY

How to Fix Our Politics, Unrig the Economy, and Unite America

By Ganesh Sitaraman

One of the biggest divides in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is whether Donald Trump is a cause or a symptom of the current dysfunction in American politics. Joe Biden has argued the former — replace Trump and everything will go back to normal — while the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have based their campaigns on the need for “big, structural change.” This is not just an ideological divide but a generational one: In a recent New York Times poll, 85 percent of prospective Iowa caucusgoers under 30 said they were likely to support a Democrat who “promises fundamental systematic change” while 70 percent of voters over 65 preferred a candidate who “brings politics in Washington back to normal.” Two new books — “They Don’t Represent Us,” by Lawrence Lessig, and “The Great Democracy,” by Ganesh Sitaraman — are firmly in the big, structural change camp, making a strong case that there is no normal to go back to. “The crisis in America is not its president,” Lessig writes in his opening pages. “Its president is the consequence of a crisis much more fundamental.” That crisis is the state of democracy itself.

You could fill an entire bookshelf with works about the crisis of democracy in the Trump era, but Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been eloquently hammering this point longer than most. He isolates the problem with American democracy to one word: “unrepresentativeness.” Voter suppression undermines free and fair elections, gerrymandering allows politicians to pick their preferred electorate, the Senate and the Electoral College favor small states and swing states over the rest of the country and the post-Citizens United campaign-finance system gives a tiny handful of billionaires far more clout than the average small donor. “In every dimension, the core principle of a representative democracy has been compromised,” he writes.

This is by now a familiar critique, but Lessig tells it with skill, citing a plethora of studies and historical examples to make a persuasive case about the unrepresentativeness of America’s political institutions. He suggests a wide range of policies to fix this, ranging from practical ideas like universal automatic voter registration and a $100 “democracy coupon” for every voter, to more controversial ones, like scrapping the Electoral College and reducing federal funding for states like Georgia that disenfranchise their voters.