After years of Washington gridlock, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold among issue activists across the political spectrum: Real change has to come outside the Beltway, and state and local organizing is the best place to start. It’s the model that paved the way for victories on gay marriage and minimum wage hikes on the left, and anti-union laws, tax cuts, and anti-immigration laws on the right. The overarching hope seems to be that more incremental change will help drive a broader popular consensus, more diverse coalitions of advocates, and political will for change on the national level, ultimately making Washington less broken and dysfunctional.

Larry Lessig doesn’t buy it. The Harvard Law professor, author, and activist believes our democracy has more fundamental problems that need to be fixed from the top down, and that’s why he’s running for president in 2016. While his diagnosis is correct, his solution is unlikely to move us in the right direction.

Lessig is exploring a bid for the 2016 Democratic nomination that’s premised on a single idea: He’ll be president until Congress passes a single bill, the Citizen Equality Act, to eliminate roadblocks to voting, outlaw gerrymandering, and create a new public campaign financing system to counter the influence of big money in politics. Then he’ll resign.

“The view that we can just win this incrementally, over time, and eventually have enough votes in Congress to bring this about I just think is wrong,” Lessig told me. “We need the most powerful political force in our system to stand up to that resistance, and the way that American politics works, the president is the most powerful strategic political force.”

Lessig describes his candidacy as “a bet” that America will suddenly awaken to a fundamental, profound new realization about what went wrong with its democracy and want to fix it all in one go—a moment of Gestalt recognition. “It’s a test to see if you give this bigger idea, whether they rally to it,” he said. If he’s elected, then Congress will simply feel compelled to pass the Citizen Equality Act because of the extraordinary circumstances that led to the country’s first “referendum president.” If he raises $1 million by Labor Day, he’ll officially jump into the race; as of Friday morning, he’s already raised more than $840,000, putting him well on the way there. (Lessig's interviews this week with the New Republic and other media outlets are part of his attempt to get over the finish line.)