EZRA KLEIN's review essay of new books by Jack Abramoff, an infamously disgraced super-lobbyist, and Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor, is a smart discussion of the role of money in politics. Mr Klein draws from Mr Abramoff's "Capitol Punishment" the insight that that the influence of lobbyists on politicians isn't a matter of money so much as a matter of exploiting pre-existing relationships of trust and affinity. Lobbying firms buy access to politicians by hiring trusted former staffers and colleagues who already had access. Lobbying rarely alters congressional votes, Mr Klein notes, but instead alters the way elected officials allocate scarce time, energy, and political capital to various issues. Mr Klein writes:

If all a client needed was the money, all he would need to do is cut a big check to one lobbyist. But what you need isn't the money. It's the relationships. And each lobbyist only has so many of those. Which is why it's so damn difficult to actually kill off lobbying. Outlawing bribes is easy. Outlawing relationships isn't. But it's worth asking another question, one that often goes unasked, perhaps because the answer is assumed to be so obvious. If we got the money out of politics, which problems, exactly, would we have solved?

Mr Klein then turns to Mr Lessig's "Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It", and argues that the good professor has misidentified the real problem. Increasing partisan polarisation, Mr Klein contends, is the basis of growing popular dissatisfaction with and distrust of Washington.

Take any issue that you've actually heard a lot about. The headline clashes. The big-ticket bills. They've all got money on both sides. They've all got platoons of lobbyists swarming onto Capitol Hill. They've all got activists and interest groups and even ordinary Americans pestering their congressmen. And they all go the same way: the Democrats vote with the Democrats, and the Republicans vote with the Republicans. That's true even when the big money lines up in favor of another outcome. In 2011, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO joined together to call for a major reinvestment in American infrastructure. None passed. In 2010, most of the health care industry was either supportive or neutral on the Affordable Care Act, and if any one of them could have swung the votes of even a few Republican senators or congressmen, the desperate Democrats would have let them write almost anything they wanted into the bill. But not one Republican budged. In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce endorsed the stimulus bill as a necessary boost to the economy. Not one House Republican voted for it. Almost every major business group has been calling for tax reform and a big, Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package for years now. But Congress remains deadlocked.

Mr Klein allows that monied interests affect the content of legislation, but they don't "decide which votes ended up in the 'nay' column and which ended up in the 'aye' column" on the big-ticket issues "that have convinced America that Washington is broken".

On his blog, Mr Lessig complains that Mr Klein has misrepresented his view of how money corrupts the political process in part by failing to mention that "[a] central part to my argument is that the current system for funding campaigns may actually exacerbate polarization." This intrigued me, so I turned to Amazon and discovered this passage in Mr Lessig's new book:

The reasons for this shift [ie, increasing partisan polarization] are many, and complicated. But without hazarding a strong claim about causation, it is important to recognize that for both the Right and the Left, a shift to the extremes made fund-raising easier. Direct marketers told campaigns that a strong and clear message to the party base is more likely to elicit a large financial response that a balanced, moderate message to the middle. Extremism, in other word, pays—literally. "As one study summarized the research, "An incumbent's ideological extremism improves his or her chances of raising a greater proportion of funds from individual donors and small individual contributors in particular. Extremism is not the only way to raise money, [... but] to some legislators, extremism is an advantage."

Mr Lessig goes on to note that extremism hurts candidates among "swing voters", but that this isn't so much a worry in "safe" house districts, and that would be upwards of 85% of them nowadays, thanks to gerrymandering.

Of course, the need to raise small amounts of money from many individual donors is a direct consequence of prior attempts to reduce the role of money in politics by setting legal limits on the size of individual donations. So it seems to me Mr Lessig is arguing that campaign finance reform, plus gerrymandering, may be responsible for polarisation. But isn't gerrymandering the really serious problem here? The "safer" the seat, the less competitive the district. The less competitive the district, the more the party primary becomes the "real" election. Party primaries are won by targeting the party's median voter, who will naturally be rather closer to a partisan extreme than the whole district's median voter. But this logically has nothing to do with money. If we left the definition of congressional districts to an algorithm expressly designed to minimise the "safeness" of seats, the fund-raising advantages of "extreme" positioning would decline, elections would produce more moderate representatives, and partisan polarisation would decline, regardless of the campaign-finance scheme. That suggests "the current system for funding campaigns" isn't the crucial variable. If the need to raise many small donations nevertheless continued to "exacerbate polarization" by exerting pressure to raise funds through relatively purist partisan rhetoric, couldn't we lift that pressure by raising the cap on donations?