What history teaches us about tackling corruption

“How does revolution happen?” asked Janine Wedel.

“Maybe it doesn’t,” mused Lawrence Lessig, evincing a mild case of political resignation that the Harvard law professor’s campaign finance revolution was meant to inoculate against.

It was an old home week of sorts for the corruption crowd on Tuesday night, as Lessig, Wedel and Zephyr Teachout gathered at New America NYC to discuss the corrosive influence of money in politics and beyond. In the course of the evening, and in her new book, a sweeping account of the Unaccountable: How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finance, Freedom and Security_, _Wedel argues that corruption pervades nearly all spheres of society.  In Corruption in America, Teachout, law professor turned unlikely gubernatorial candidate, provides the historical arc, rooting our national concerns in the debates of the Constitutional Convention.

“We have fixed on a narrow definition of corruption, one which now dominates in our political space and jurisprudence,” Lessig opened.  “These two books come at that in different ways. Zephyr’s is optimistic…Corruption is tied to a mistake, which is fixable, perhaps by changing a seat or two on the Supreme Court.  Janine’s book is incredibly depressing.  If we are in this problem in so many spheres, how can we proceed?”

Listen: Lawrence Lessig on why Washington is so dysfunctional.

The discussion, for one, proceeded with some historical context. In order to understand today’s “crisis of corruption” Teachout, who teaches at Fordham Law School, researched its constitutional origins, discovering in the process that Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Adams, Franklin and their fellow framers were deeply concerned with corruption in many forms. It was a “national fixation.”  In their view, independence meant freedom from undue influence, first from the English crown, then more broadly from other kinds of institutional dependence.  Teachout, like the framers, drew on Montesquieu, who in turn channeled Aristotle.  The founders, she noted, held a very broad view of both “civic virtue“ and corruption; the remedy to shield the former from the latter was structural: laws, rules, and institutions to restrict the flow of money, directly and indirectly, into political life.  Teachout, Lessig, Wedel and other scholars and activists contend that this “institutional” conception of corruption was  “a broad and 200 year view.” The problem we face today is that it has been dismantled by a series of Supreme Court rulings, among them Citizens United, and, more recently, _McCutcheon, _which have as much to do with the size and source of political donations as a narrow definition of corruption as “quid pro quo.”

If Teachout penned a letter to the Supreme Court – a reminder that “the constitution is an anti-corruption document” – Wedel painted a dystopic portrait of a society so suffused with corruption “the players don’t even realize what’s going on.”  A professor at George Mason University and a social anthropologist by training, Wedel cut her research teeth in Eastern Europe under communism.  There, she observed a kind of “dirty togetherness,” people engaged in all kinds of deal making “to get meals, gasoline, passports” a kind of “need corruption” just to survive.  Even after the fall of communism, Wedel explained how she observed the “re-corruption” of officials who held multiple, overlapping and self-dealing roles in government and emerging private sector.

“Fast forward to today,” Wedel unmasked unsettling parallels in the U.S. and “a divergence between what the system purports to be and what is actually happening.”  Wedel cited what she believes is a highly “systemic problem” across industries. Retired generals, high profile academics, prominent physicians, and many others are constantly engaged in “representational juggling” across their different roles, as government advisors, at think tanks or universities, on corporate boards or at investment firms, as recipients of pharmaceutical company or other industry perks, and as experts in the media where their numerous allegiances are “obscured.”  Wedel suggested that we have experienced a loss of public trust – beyond Wall Street, lobbying and other overt revolving door activities – because “unaccountability invades practically every area of public life.”

Wedel’s diagnosis of such saturating corruption made the problems Teachout identified seem positively tractable.  “I have two solutions,” said the smiling Cuomo challenger. “We have to have public financing of campaigns and we have to break up all the big companies.”

Transparency, both Teachout and Wedel noted, is also critical.

“You have to follow the money and the players,” explained Wedel, as Teachout insisted, “I think there is a value in calling out and shaming individuals. ” Both called for regular and vigorous investigative reporting although noted that this, too, was no panacea.  As Tim Wu, Teachout’s running mate in the New York race, who also joined Tuesday’s discussion, lamented “there are limits to transparency.  Journalists may reveal something, but unless it’s criminal, nothing really happens.”

Just how _do _we proceed? Wedel suggested that the only way to truly restore public trust is to bring more “outsiders” back into the political process, candidates like Wu and Teachout, whose surprisingly strong showing in the Democratic primary this fall has re-injected the issue of corruption and money in politics into the political arena.  This is certainly the hope of corruption fighters, including Lessig, whose Mayday Super PAC – modeled in part on Friends of Democracy, Every Voice, and others efforts – looked to support candidates who themselves championed campaign finance reform.  The idea is not to completely rid politics of money – a Sisyphean task – but rather to loosen candidates’ dependence, in the framer’s sense, on “big donors,” and open today’s “money” primaries to much larger universe of potential candidates in the first place.  “Public finance is a key feminist issue, person of color issue, class issue,” said Teachout.  “It changes who runs and what their job is.”

This article is published in collaboration with New America. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum. 

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Author: Georgia Levenson Keohane is a Senior Fellow at New America and Director of the Program on Profits and Purpose.

Image: A gambler counts out cash while making a proposition bet on Super Bowl XLV at the Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, Nevada January 27, 2011. REUTERS/Steve Marcus.