Tweedism

We already know that democracy as we know it simply doesn't work. We also know that concentration of money and power doesn't bode well for a functioning democracy, but how exactly does money influence the democratic process? Enter Lawrence Lessig, as he explains what Tweedism is.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

I'll leave the more elaborate explanation with Larry Lessig in the video at the end of this post, but in short Tweedism is the procedure by which a very small group of the population get to nominate the candidates in any election. "I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating" is a famous quote by William M. Tweed who invented this anti-democratic process. This statement about nominating the candidates the general public can give their vote inspired Lessig to coin the word "tweed":

The "tweeds" within the political system are thus the people in that system who get to nominate the candidates who get to run in that system. They are the veto point. They are the interest that the candidates must satisfy before the candidates get the chance to persuade the voters.
_{source: In Rev}

It should be clear immediately that the "tweeds" in modern western "democracies" are the wealthy donors who fund the increasingly expensive campaigns. It's a well known fact that election campaigns are extremely expensive. The consequence is that to have a chance to be elected, you need money, and a lot of it. Another consequence is, and this might be common knowledge, is that in the United States, members of Congress spend between thirty percent and seventy percent of their time raising money for their campaigns! So, the candidates you get to choose from are filtered by the wealthy, and when elected they still spend most of their time raising money from those same donors. Which also means they won't enact policies that might risk alienating those donors. This is the process by which we end up with governments that work for the rich. To find out how just 0.02% of the American population decides who the rest of us get to vote on, and to hear his solution to fix this, listen carefully to Larry Lessig's TED talk titled "Our democracy no longer represents the people. Here's how we fix it."

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