Coffee Party Book Club is now reading:
One Way Forward
The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing the Republic by Lawrence Lessig
by Linda Cook, Coffee Party Book Club
Larry Lessig, an esteemed professor of Harvard, is a great citizen activist, educator, presenter, writer and truth teller of our time. He speaks to the root of our paralyzed government, to crony capitalism, and the fight to break its control over our government. In One Way Forward ($1.99, Byliner) he speaks of the new tools at our disposal, of the “read/write” ability we have regained with the Internet.
One Way Forward, is a continuation or update to our last featured selection, Republic: Lost. This tiny book speaks to the political movement in which we, the Coffee Party USA, is working. Professor Lessig asserts that we currently have the “insiders” or the funders and those inside the D.C. beltway. Then there are the “outsiders” or the rest of us. The insiders (them) believe that the outsiders (us) are powerless and need not be consulted. Professor Lessig asserts that the Internet is the tool that will change this perception. In fact, he says, it already is. Recently we stopped SOPA and the “legal” congressional insider-trading that had been going on for years. We can use the new read/write technologies to correct the crony capitalism that we are today stuck with.
He starts his book with this statement: “Spring comes in waves. At first, unrecognizably. And then, unavoidably. And when it finally fully comes, we wake up. We, the People. The sovereign. We tumble out of the stupor that is our sleep and exercise a power that is ours exclusively.” This is what is happening in America today. People are waking up. We are an example of that. The volunteers of the Tea Party, the Coffee Party, MoveOn, Move to Amend, Backbone Movement and the Occupy movement are proof of that. We are all citizen activists. To quote the professor: “It is instead a story about all of us. While on the one hand we all aspire to the ideal of working as one, on the other hand we all thrive by rallying us against them.” This is the Croix of the problem. We can’t trust the other tribe.
Professor Lessig argues that it was not always so. “ But the difference then . . . (was) there were also mediating institutions that could . . . do the work of the Republic. There was a Congress that wasn’t campaigning full-time. There were social organizations that asked . . . what could be done for the country.” Instead we now have political organizations that only vie for power and funds. They certainly are not working for the “general welfare” as charged in our Constitution. They are working for the welfare of the insiders.
The argument is that we can change this, we don’t need to stand here in horror to what has happened. We can take action. He gives three items in the plan. First, get congress to pass reform legislation. Second, get a reform president that will lead. Third, we must amend the constitution to clearly state that people are living souls with hearts that beat.
The professor states it best, “The core argument of this book is that the reform we need will require a critical discipline by all of us. It will take each of us, and the networks that constitute us, learning to work with people who are different—who believe in different things, who want a different politics.
I highly recommend this book. In fact, I would say this is a must read for anyone in the Coffee Party.
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CLICK HERE for Eric Byler's review of One Way Forward
