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Once upon a time,

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there was a place called Lesterland.

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Now Lesterland looks a lot like the United States.

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Like the United States, it has about 311 million people,

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and of that 311 million people,

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it turns out 144,000 are called Lester.

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If Matt's in the audience,

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I just borrowed that, I'll return it in a second,

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this character from your series.

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So 144,000 are called Lester,

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which means about .05 percent is named Lester.

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Now, Lesters in Lesterland have this extraordinary power.

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There are two elections every election cycle in Lesterland.

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One is called the general election.

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The other is called the Lester election.

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And in the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote,

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but in the Lester election, it's the Lesters who get to vote.

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And here's the trick.

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In order to run in the general election,

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you must do extremely well

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in the Lester election.

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You don't necessarily have to win, but you must do extremely well.

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Now, what can we say about democracy in Lesterland?

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What we can say, number one,

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as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United,

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that people have the ultimate influence over elected officials,

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because, after all, there is a general election,

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but only after the Lesters have had their way

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with the candidates who wish to run in the general election.

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And number two, obviously, this dependence upon the Lesters

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is going to produce a subtle, understated,

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we could say camouflaged, bending

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to keep the Lesters happy.

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Okay, so we have a democracy, no doubt,

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but it's dependent upon the Lesters

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and dependent upon the people.

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It has competing dependencies,

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we could say conflicting dependencies,

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depending upon who the Lesters are.

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Okay. That's Lesterland.

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Now there are three things I want you to see now that I've described Lesterland.

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Number one, the United States is Lesterland.

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The United States is Lesterland.

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The United States also looks like this, also has two elections,

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one we called the general election,

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the second we should call the money election.

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In the general election, it's the citizens who get to vote,

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if you're over 18, in some states if you have an ID.

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In the money election, it's the funders who get to vote,

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the funders who get to vote, and just like in Lesterland,

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the trick is, to run in the general election,

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you must do extremely well in the money election.

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You don't necessarily have to win. There is Jerry Brown.

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But you must do extremely well.

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And here's the key: There are just as few relevant funders

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in USA-land as there are Lesters in Lesterland.

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Now you say, really?

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Really .05 percent?

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Well, here are the numbers from 2010:

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.26 percent of America

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gave 200 dollars or more to any federal candidate,

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.05 percent gave the maximum amount to any federal candidate,

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.01 percent -- the one percent of the one percent --

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gave 10,000 dollars or more to federal candidates,

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and in this election cycle, my favorite statistic

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is .000042 percent

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— for those of you doing the numbers, you know that's 132 Americans —

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gave 60 percent of the Super PAC money spent

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in the cycle we have just seen ending.

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So I'm just a lawyer, I look at this range of numbers,

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and I say it's fair for me to say

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it's .05 percent who are our relevant funders in America.

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In this sense, the funders are our Lesters.

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Now, what can we say about this democracy in USA-land?

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Well, as the Supreme Court said in Citizens United,

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we could say, of course the people have the ultimate influence

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over the elected officials. We have a general election,

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but only after the funders have had their way

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with the candidates who wish to run in that general election.

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And number two, obviously,

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this dependence upon the funders

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produces a subtle, understated, camouflaged bending

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to keep the funders happy.

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Candidates for Congress and members of Congress

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spend between 30 and 70 percent of their time

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raising money to get back to Congress

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or to get their party back into power,

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and the question we need to ask is, what does it do to them,

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these humans, as they spend their time

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behind the telephone, calling people they've never met,

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but calling the tiniest slice of the one percent?

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As anyone would, as they do this,

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they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness

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about how what they do might affect their ability to raise money.

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They become, in the words of "The X-Files,"

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shape-shifters, as they constantly adjust their views

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in light of what they know will help them to raise money,

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not on issues one to 10,

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but on issues 11 to 1,000.

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Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia,

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describes that when she went to Congress,

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she was told by a colleague, "Always lean to the green."

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Then to clarify, she went on,

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"He was not an environmentalist." (Laughter)

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So here too we have a democracy,

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a democracy dependent upon the funders

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and dependent upon the people,

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competing dependencies,

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possibly conflicting dependencies

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depending upon who the funders are.

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Okay, the United States is Lesterland, point number one.

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Here's point number two.

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The United States is worse than Lesterland,

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worse than Lesterland because you can imagine in Lesterland

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if we Lesters got a letter from the government that said,

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"Hey, you get to pick who gets to run in the general election,"

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we would think maybe of a kind of aristocracy of Lesters.

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You know, there are Lesters from every part of social society.

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There are rich Lesters, poor Lesters, black Lesters, white Lesters,

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not many women Lesters, but put that to the side for one second.

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We have Lesters from everywhere. We could think,

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"What could we do to make Lesterland better?"

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It's at least possible the Lesters would act for the good of Lesterland.

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But in our land, in this land, in USA-land,

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there are certainly some sweet Lesters out there,

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many of them in this room here today,

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but the vast majority of Lesters act for the Lesters,

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because the shifting coalitions that are comprising the .05 percent

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are not comprising it for the public interest.

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It's for their private interest. In this sense, the USA is worse than Lesterland.

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And finally, point number three:

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Whatever one wants to say about Lesterland,

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against the background of its history, its traditions,

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in our land, in USA-land, Lesterland is a corruption,

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a corruption.

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Now, by corruption I don't mean brown paper bag cash

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secreted among members of Congress.

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I don't mean Rod Blagojevich sense of corruption.

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I don't mean any criminal act.

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The corruption I'm talking about is perfectly legal.

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It's a corruption relative to the framers' baseline for this republic.

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The framers gave us what they called a republic,

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but by a republic they meant a representative democracy,

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and by a representative democracy, they meant a government,

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as Madison put it in Federalist 52, that would have a branch

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that would be dependent upon the people alone.

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So here's the model of government.

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They have the people and the government

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with this exclusive dependency,

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but the problem here is that Congress has evolved a different dependence,

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no longer a dependence upon the people alone,

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increasingly a dependence upon the funders.

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Now this is a dependence too,

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but it's different and conflicting from a dependence upon the people alone

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so long as the funders are not the people.

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This is a corruption.

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Now, there's good news and bad news about this corruption.

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One bit of good news is that it's bipartisan,

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equal-opportunity corruption.

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It blocks the left on a whole range of issues that we on the left really care about.

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It blocks the right too, as it makes

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principled arguments of the right increasingly impossible.

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So the right wants smaller government.

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When Al Gore was Vice President, his team had an idea

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for deregulating a significant portion of the telecommunications industry.

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The chief policy man took this idea to Capitol Hill,

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and as he reported back to me,

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the response was, "Hell no!

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If we deregulate these guys,

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how are we going to raise money from them?"

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This is a system that's designed to save the status quo,

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including the status quo of big and invasive government.

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It works against the left and the right,

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and that, you might say, is good news.

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But here's the bad news.

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It's a pathological, democracy-destroying corruption,

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because in any system

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where the members are dependent upon

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the tiniest fraction of us for their election,

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that means the tiniest number of us,

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the tiniest, tiniest number of us,

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can block reform.

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I know that should have been, like, a rock or something.

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I can only find cheese. I'm sorry. So there it is.

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Block reform.

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Because there is an economy here, an economy of influence,

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an economy with lobbyists at the center

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which feeds on polarization.

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It feeds on dysfunction.

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The worse that it is for us,

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the better that it is for this fundraising.

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Henry David Thoreau: "There are a thousand hacking

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at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

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This is the root.

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Okay, now, every single one of you knows this.

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You couldn't be here if you didn't know this, yet you ignore it.

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You ignore it. This is an impossible problem.

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You focus on the possible problems,

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like eradicating polio from the world,

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or taking an image of every single street across the globe,

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or building the first real universal translator,

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or building a fusion factory in your garage.

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These are the manageable problems, so you ignore —

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(Laughter) (Applause) —

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so you ignore this corruption.

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But we cannot ignore this corruption anymore.

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(Applause)

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We need a government that works.

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And not works for the left or the right,

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but works for the left and the right,

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the citizens of the left and right,

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because there is no sensible reform possible

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until we end this corruption.

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So I want you to take hold, to grab the issue you care the most about.

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Climate change is mine, but it might be financial reform

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or a simpler tax system or inequality.

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Grab that issue, sit it down in front of you,

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look straight in its eyes, and tell it there is no Christmas this year.

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There will never be a Christmas.

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We will never get your issue solved

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until we fix this issue first.

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So it's not that mine is the most important issue. It's not.

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Yours is the most important issue, but mine is the first issue,

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the issue we have to solve before we get to fix

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the issues you care about.

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No sensible reform, and we cannot afford

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a world, a future, with no sensible reform.

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Okay. So how do we do it?

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Turns out, the analytics here are easy, simple.

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If the problem is members spending an extraordinary

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amount of time fundraising from the tiniest slice of America,

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the solution is to have them spend less time fundraising

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but fundraise from a wider slice of Americans,

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to spread it out,

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to spread the funder influence so that we restore the idea

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of dependence upon the people alone.

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And to do this does not require a constitutional amendment,

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changing the First Amendment.

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To do this would require a single statute,

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a statute establishing what we think of

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as small dollar funded elections,

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a statute of citizen-funded campaigns,

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and there's any number of these proposals out there:

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Fair Elections Now Act,

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the American Anti-Corruption Act,

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an idea in my book that I call the Grant and Franklin Project

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to give vouchers to people to fund elections,

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an idea of John Sarbanes called the Grassroots Democracy Act.

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Each of these would fix this corruption

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by spreading out the influence of funders to all of us.

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The analytics are easy here.

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It's the politics that's hard, indeed impossibly hard,

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because this reform would shrink K Street,

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and Capitol Hill, as Congressman Jim Cooper,

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a Democrat from Tennessee, put it,

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has become a farm league for K Street, a farm league for K Street.

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Members and staffers and bureaucrats have

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an increasingly common business model in their head,

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a business model focused on their life after government,

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their life as lobbyists.

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Fifty percent of the Senate between 1998 and 2004

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left to become lobbyists, 42 percent of the House.

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Those numbers have only gone up,

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and as United Republic calculated last April,

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the average increase in salary for those who they tracked

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was 1,452 percent.

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So it's fair to ask, how is it possible for them to change this?

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Now I get this skepticism.

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I get this cynicism. I get this sense of impossibility.

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But I don't buy it.

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This is a solvable issue.

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If you think about the issues our parents tried to solve

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in the 20th century,

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issues like racism, or sexism,

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or the issue that we've been fighting in this century, homophobia,

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those are hard issues.

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You don't wake up one day no longer a racist.

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It takes generations to tear that intuition, that DNA,

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out of the soul of a people.

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But this is a problem of just incentives, just incentives.

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Change the incentives, and the behavior changes,

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and the states that have adopted small dollar funded systems

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have seen overnight a change in the practice.

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When Connecticut adopted this system,

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in the very first year, 78 percent of elected representatives

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gave up large contributions and took small contributions only.

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It's solvable,

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not by being a Democrat,

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not by being a Republican.

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It's solvable by being citizens, by being citizens,

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by being TEDizens.

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Because if you want to kickstart reform,

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look, I could kickstart reform

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at half the price of fixing energy policy,

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I could give you back a republic.

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Okay. But even if you're not yet with me,

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even if you believe this is impossible,

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what the five years since I spoke at TED has taught me

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as I've spoken about this issue again and again is,

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even if you think it's impossible, that is irrelevant.

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Irrelevant.

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I spoke at Dartmouth once, and a woman stood up after I spoke,

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I write in my book, and she said to me,

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"Professor, you've convinced me this is hopeless. Hopeless.

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There's nothing we can do."

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When she said that, I scrambled.

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I tried to think, "How do I respond to that hopelessness?

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What is that sense of hopelessness?"

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And what hit me was an image of my six-year-old son.

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And I imagined a doctor coming to me and saying,

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"Your son has terminal brain cancer, and there's nothing you can do.

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Nothing you can do."

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So would I do nothing?

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Would I just sit there? Accept it? Okay, nothing I can do?

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I'm going off to build Google Glass.

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Of course not. I would do everything I could,

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and I would do everything I could because this is what love means,

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that the odds are irrelevant and that you do

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whatever the hell you can, the odds be damned.

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And then I saw the obvious link, because even we liberals

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love this country.

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(Laughter)

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And so when the pundits and the politicians

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say that change is impossible,

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what this love of country says back is,

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"That's just irrelevant."

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We lose something dear,

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something everyone in this room loves and cherishes,

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if we lose this republic, and so we act

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with everything we can to prove these pundits wrong.

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So here's my question:

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Do you have that love?

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Do you have that love?

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Because if you do,

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then what the hell are you, what are the hell are we doing?

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When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention

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in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said,

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"Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?"

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Franklin said, "A republic, madam, if you can keep it."

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A republic. A representative democracy.

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A government dependent upon the people alone.

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We have lost that republic.

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All of us have to act to get it back.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)

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Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)