Underlying that disappointment is a central corruption in our electoral system, says legal activist Lawrence Lessig: the fact that Congressional candidates depend on funding from a tiny percentage of citizens, who in turn control what the rest of us get to vote on. Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim That’s the argument at the core of his blistering talk from TED2013. In his new TED Book, Lesterland, Lessig takes a deeper look at the problem and describes a powerful method for fixing this broken system.

In the great literary tradition of metaphors, Lessig has created Lesterland, a large country run by a small group of people named Lester. In the book, he uses Lesterland to describe what happens when the wealthy control the powerful. While political corruption is not new, Lessig believes we now have both the technology and the social media tools needed to expose and strike at the root of this corruption. To hear more about his ideas, and how he arrived at this metaphor, we caught up with Lessig and asked him a few questions.

Your book paints a pretty grim view that our political system is undermined by money and corruption. How did we allow this to happen? 

We allowed it to happen simply because we’re busy with our lives: We’ve got jobs, or kids, or hobbies — maybe all together! We expect the Congress to do their job. Most of us don’t have the patience to try to keep up.

Why has this system of corruption taken hold so firmly?

Because it pays so well. K Street — where most lobbyist offices are in Washington, D.C. — has become one of the most profitable businesses in America. And they have convinced other businesses across America that they need K Street. So the cycle feeds itself: businesses pay lobbyists; lobbyists channel money to politicians; politicians reward the businesses.

What gives you hope that we can change this cycle?

The only hope is that most Americans get this and — if pushed — will create the political force to change it. What we need to do now is to push them.

How do we do that? What can the average person do?

The first step is to get involved. I started an organization called Rootstrikers — inspired by Thoreau’s quote: “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root” — which recruits citizen teachers: people who recognize the corrupting influence of money and who are willing to help spread this message. At Rootstrikers you can be assigned tasks to help do that essential work. If we’re successful, then we will create the political conditions necessary to make reform possible.

Any other specific ideas you have for how we can turn things around?

The problem isn’t simple, but the first step is a no-brainer: We have to change the way elections are funded. If we change that, we make every other change possible. If I were King for a Day, at a minimum, I’d enact John Sarbanes’ Grassroots Democracy Act. More ambitiously, I’d enact the American Anti-Corruption Act put forwarded by the Represent.us organization.

What are the consequences of the corrupt and money-driven system we live with?

It’s very simple — a government that doesn’t work, or if it does, not for us. None of the most important issues facing us today can be addressed sensibly given the senselessness of this system: climate change, health care, financial reform, food safety, a tax system, the debt, inequality. You name it, and I’ll tie it to the money.

The folks who are pulling the strings — the Lesters — have a lot to lose if your ideas are implemented. Do you expect to see an active quashing of your ideas?

The closer we get, the more they will squeal. We need to have in place the political force that can overcome that squeal.

Lesterland is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

Read an excerpt »

Lawrence Lessig talks about a fundamental corruption at the core of the U.S.’s political system. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

“Once upon a time, there was a place called Lesterland,” Lawrence Lessig begins today’s talk. “Of its 311 million people, it turns out 144,000 are called Lester,” Lessig says.

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaimIn Lesterland, this .05% of the population is granted extraordinary power. Each election cycle, there’s a general election, in which the people get to vote, and a Lester election, in which only the Lesters can vote. “In order to run in the general election, you must do extremely well in the Lester election,” Lessig explains. “So we have a democracy, no doubt, but it’s dependent upon the Lesters and dependent upon the people. It has a competing dependency—we could say a conflicting dependency—depending on who the Lesters are.”

The trick: the United States is Lesterland, only instead of the Lester election, we have the “money election.” As in Lesterland, to run in the general election, you’ve got to win with the funders first. The “relevant funders” comprise .05% of the population; in fact, Lessig says, just 132 Americans, or .000042% of the country, gave 60% of the latest Super PAC funds. So holding office has become about catering to the funders rather than the general public—and sometimes the funders’ interests run counter to everyone else’s.

Lesterland, then, provides a piercing allegory for what Lessig describes as our political system’s fundamental corruption. “The corruption I’m talking about is perfectly legal. It’s a corruption relative to the framers’ baseline for this republic,” Lessig says. “It’s a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption.”

To hear what we can do to correct this corruption, watch Lessig’s talk or read the companion TED Book, Lesterland.

Because we’re so moved by Lessig’s Lesterland analogy, below we’re rounded up more examples of allegories that have described — sometimes brilliantly, sometimes less so — political and societal problems.

1. Whether or not L. Frank Baum intended for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to be read as an allegory, it’s been interpreted as one for decades. Henry M. Littlefield wrote in 1964, “Dorothy is Baum’s Miss Everyman. She is one of us, levelheaded and human, and she has a real problem. For all the attractions of Oz, Dorothy desires only to return to the gray plains and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry … Dorothy sets out on the Yellow Brick Road wearing the Witch of the East’s magic Silver Shoes. Silver shoes walking on a golden road; henceforth Dorothy becomes the innocent agent of Baum’s ironic view of the Silver issue.” Littlefield continues dissecting the Oz storyline for its parallels to late-1800s economics and Populism, writing, “Baum created a children’s story with a symbolic allegory implicit within its story line and characterizations … The relationship and analogies outlined above are admittedly theoretical, but they are far too consistent to be coincidental.”
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2. In James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, the Na’vi — an alien race — is threatened by invading Earthlings. It’s been analyzed as an allegory for a “surprising” range of situations, as Joshua Keating posted on Foreign Policy at the time, from the exploitation of Chinese citizens to the exploitation of an indigenous tribe in India to a justification of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize.
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3. The new documentary Room 237 argues that Stanley Kubrik’s 1980 film The Shining wasn’t just a horror film, but an intricate and meaning-laden work filled with “important and, in some cases, truly dark meanings,” per Bill Wyman on the New Yorker’s blog. What meanings, exactly? Less clear: as Wyman has it, the supposed allegories involve “the Holocaust (stemming from Nicholson’s German typewriter), the Apollo Space project, fairy tales, and more and more and more.”
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4. Perhaps the paradigmatic political allegory is George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which uses, yes, a farm full of animals to depict and critique the situation in 1940s Russia. “Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole,” Orwell later wrote.
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5. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis depicts a city of “soaring towers of glass and steel” sustained by a working class “far below, in cellars and catacombs,” as David Edelstein put it in Slate in 2002. Although the film is sometimes seen as a Marxist appeal, Edelstein argues that it’s much more nuanced than that. “Part of what makes Metropolis such a complicated allegory is Lang’s fear of the fascism of the mob,” Edelstein writes. “Lang understood why the mob would want to tear the city down. But he also believed that the technology it embodied promised a better life for people of all classes, and that only the innocent would suffer in the course of a revolt.”

Lessig’s powerful talk brought the TED2013 audience to its feet. And he has so much more to say about how we can overturn this deeply entrenched system. In a TED first, on the same day his talk premieres, Lessig is releasing a new TED Book expanding on the ideas he presented on stage. In Lesterland: The Corruption of Congress and How To End It, Lessig takes on the deep flaws in our campaign finance system and lays out a plan for fixing it. As he says in the book’s pages: The American political system has been weakened by a corrupt campaign funding system, but we can change it. And the time to do it is now.

Here is how Lesterland begins:

Once upon a time, there was a place called “Lesterland.”

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaimLesterland was a lot like the United States. Like the United States, it had a population of about 311 million souls. Of that, like the United States, about 150,000 were named “Lester.”

Lesters in Lesterland had a very important power. There were two elections every election cycle in Lesterland — a general election, and a “Lester election.” In the general election, all citizens got to vote. In the Lester election, only the “Lesters” got to vote.

But here’s the catch: To run in the general election, you had to do extremely well in the Lester election. You didn’t necessarily have to win, but you had to do extremely well. Democracy in Lesterland was thus a two-step dance. The Lesters controlled the first step.

What can we say about “democracy” in Lesterland?

First, we could say, as the United States Supreme Court said in its remarkable ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, that “the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials” — for, after all, there is a general election. But the people have that influence only after the Lesters have had their way with the candidates who wish to run in that general election. The people’s influence is ultimate. But it is not exclusive. Instead, the field of possible candidates has been narrowed to the field of Lester-plausible candidates, just as the field of candidates that citizens in the Soviet Union could select among had been narrowed by the choices of the Communist Party.

Second, and obviously, this primary dependence upon the Lesters would produce a subtle, understated, and somewhat camouflaged bending to keep the Lesters happy. For all candidates, both prospective and already successful, would know that they couldn’t gain or retain power without Lester support. Such bending couldn’t be too obvious, for fear it would trigger the votes of voters who resented the Lesters’ influence. (No doubt, there were some.) But neither could it be too subtle, for fear the Lesters would miss who their real allies were. Thus the Goldilocks principle of Lesterland politics: Not too little, and not too much. The best politicians were the best precisely because they practiced this balance well.

Lesterland is thus a democracy. But it is a democracy with two dependences: The first is a dependence upon the Lesters. The second is a dependence upon the citizens. Competing dependences, possibly conflicting dependences, depending upon who the Lesters are.

That’s Lesterland.

There are three things to see now that you’ve seen the democracy called “Lesterland.”

 (1) The United States is Lesterland.

Like Lesterland, the United States also has 311 million souls. It also has about 150,000 people named “Lester.” And it also has two types of elections: One, the traditional “voting election,” where citizens cast ballots. The other, a distinctively modern “money election,” in which the relevant “funders” give money to afford candidates the chance to run effectively.

Voting elections are discrete — they happen on a particular day, in a regular cycle. They include the vote in the general election; for a small portion of us, they also include the vote in the primary. In both cases, every citizen eighteen and older has the right to participate. And as the constitution has been interpreted, he or she has the right to participate equally. If the vote I cast for my representative to Congress is weighted more than yours (because there are fewer voters in my district than in yours), the Constitution requires the state to redraw that congressional boundary.

By contrast, the money elections are not discrete. They are continuous. Every day, throughout the election cycle, every citizen is in effect asked to contribute to one candidate or to another. That contribution is in effect a “vote” for that one candidate or the other. But unlike “votes” in the discrete elections, to vote for one candidate in the money election does not mean you can’t vote for another as well. Citizens are free to hedge their money votes in the money election by voting for both candidates in a two-person race, or as many candidates in as many races as they wish. The only regulation is that no citizen is permitted to give more than $2,600 to any one federal candidate per election, or more than $123,200 to all federal candidates and federal PACs combined in an election cycle. And finally, and obviously, while the Constitution has been interpreted to require equality in the voting election, there is nothing close to equality in the money election. The per capita influence of the top 1 percent of American voters is more than 10 times the per capita influence of the bottom 99 percent.

As in Lesterland, the money election and the voting election have a special relationship in U.S.A.-land too: To be able to run in the voting election, one must do extremely well in the money election. One doesn’t necessarily have to win — though 84 percent of the House candidates and 67 percent of the Senate candidates with more money than their opponents did in fact win in 2012 — but you must do extremely well. The average amount raised by winning Senate candidates was $10.4 million; losing candidates raised $7.7 million. The average amount raised by winning House candidates was $1.6 million; losing candidates raised $0.774 million. Money certainly isn’t the only thing that matters. But anything other than money is way, way down the list of “things that matter.”

And here is the key to the link between Lesterland and the United States: There are just as few relevant “Funders” in U.S.A.-land as there are “Lesters” in Lesterland.

“Really,” you say?

Yes, really.

Read more of this fascinating and, ultimately, inspiring book. Lesterland is available for Kindle and Nook, as well as through the iBookstore. Or download the TED Books app for your iPad or iPhone.

On Friday, Aaron Swartz — the 26-year-old internet innovator who helped create RSS and had a hand in the building of Reddit — was found dead in his apartment in an apparent suicide. Swartz, who suffered from depression, had reportedly found out just days before that a plea bargain deal with federal prosecutors had fallen apart. A longtime proponent of free information online, in 2010, Swartz took to MIT’s computer network and downloaded nearly five million articles from the pay-per-use database JSTOR, with the mission of making the data publicly available. While JSTOR chose not prosecute, the U.S. government did. (MIT is internally reviewing its own role in the prosecution.)

According to the Wall Street Journal, Swartz was coming to terms with how the case — in which he faced up to 35 years in jail and $1 million in fines — would affect the rest of his life. “Aaron’s death is not simply a personal tragedy,” his family and girlfriend wrote in a public statement. “It is the product of a criminal justice system rife with intimidation and prosecutorial overreach.”

(See Peter Ludlow’s fascainting piece in the New York Times about the verbal warfare over positioning the term ‘hacktivist,’ a word that’s been used many times in the days since Swartz’s passing.)

TED speaker and legal activist Lawrence Lessig was a mentor to Swartz and sent out an email sharing his sadness about Swartz’s passing.

“When I decided in 2006 to give up the work I was doing on internet policy and copyright reform, Aaron Swartz — the Internet turned social activist found dead in his apartment Friday — was there. Sipping a cup of water on a cold December night in Berlin, he pressed me, ‘How do you think you’ll get anything done so long as there is this corruption?’

I didn’t have an answer for him, because of course he was right. Six months later, I made the announcement that I was turning my focus to the problem of corruption. Six months after that, Aaron was among the first board members of ‘Change Congress.’ Change Congress is what morphed into Rootstrikers.

People have called me Aaron’s mentor. The truth is the other way around. Aaron was my mentor. Since I first met him 12 years ago, he had pressed questions exactly like that. Again and again, his questions steered me, and guided me.

But no longer. I have written about the bullying that I believe contributed to this outrage. But I wanted to write to you to remind all of us that our fight was his fight … Our thoughts and prayers are with his incredible parents.”

Watch Larry Lessig’s talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

Read more about Larry Lessig on TED.com.