Translator: Milenka Okuka Reviewer: Denise RQ
If 70 years ago you would ask your grandparents,
maybe your great grandparents, maybe your great great grandparents,
what the world needs now,
the answer is not 'love, love, love, ' - that's your parents -
but the grandparents, the great grandparents,
what the world needs now, the answer they would have given is democracy.
At the turn of the last century,
just a handful of countries were democracies,
and the great dream of people after the Second World War was
"if we could just spread democracy around the world,
the world would be a happy place."
And indeed, for most of the 20th century,
there was an extraordinary explosion of democracy around the world,
so that by the end of the 20th century
there was incredible number of countries
who could claim that they were democracies,
and the belief was we therefore had rule by the people.
But any honest accounting
of the nature of government around the world right now is
rule by the people, not so much.
So what I'm going to do today is to give you a sense of why that's true,
not in countries like Ukraine,
or not in countries that think about this in a traditional way,
but in countries like my own.
I want to describe it for you and to give it a name.
So here's where we start, we start right here, in Vilnius.
I want you to imagine us taking a drone about 10,000 kilometers west,
a little bit south, ending up in the town of El Paso, Texas.
And then I want you to imagine getting into your Apple time machine
and going back by about 90 years in El Paso, Texas,
until you come to old El Paso, Texas.
And when you get to old El Paso, go downtown.
And if you do go downtown in old El Paso, Texas,
you might run into this man, doctor Lawrence Nixon.
Nixon was an extraordinary physician.
In 1910 he moved to El Paso.
And every two years between 1910 and 1922,
he walked to the polling place in El Paso,
paid his poll tax and voted.
But in 1924 when he went to pay his poll tax and vote,
he was told by the registrar:
"Dr. Nixon, you know you can't vote."
And he said: "I know I can't. But I've got to try."
And the reason he couldn't is that in 1923 Texas had enacted a law, a statute
that said explicitly that the democratic primary was an all-white primary.
By law, explicitly, only whites could vote in the democratic primary
and Democratic Party was the only party in Texas.
So what that meant was Texas had created a two-stage process.
There was the general election
where all citizens in principle, white or black, could vote.
But there was a white primary.
And to run in the general election, you had to run in the white primary.
You had to win in the white primary,
so there was a two stage process with this filter in the middle,
a filter which excluded a significant chunk of Texas' population
in this critical first step of the election
with the consequence, obviously
of producing a democracy responsive to whites only.
OK, what Texas did wasn't actually invented by Texas.
It was probably this man, Boss Tweed,
who ran the criminal political organizations in New York,
and who invented this technique.
Tweed used to say: "I don't care who does the electing,
as long as I get to do the nominating."
So Boss Tweed was a figure who understood exactly
how to create the democracy that he could subvert.
And we should call his theory: tweedism.
Tweedism.
And tweedism is any end stage, let's just say two staged democracy,
where the Tweeds control the first stage,
before the rest of us get to participate in the second stage.
And that first stage, thus creates a filter,
a filter.
So that the Tweeds exercise their control over the way the democracy works.
That's what the tweedism is.
A consequence of tweedism, obviously, is the system responsive to the Tweeds,
whoever the Tweeds are, but the Tweeds only.
So think about the protests that broke out in Hong Kong last summer.
Kids from across Hong Kong, and then eventually their parents
showed up to protest the proposed law that China had
for selecting the Chief Executive in Hong Kong.
A law that said: "The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive
by universal suffrage
upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee
in accordance with democratic procedures."
Nomination by committee comprised of 1,200 citizens;
which means, out of seven million people in Hong Kong,
about .02% of Hong Kong,
got to participate in the stage that selected the candidates
who got to run in the General Election.
Now .02% is really tiny. There it is. See how small that is up there?
If you imagine a person out of all the people in Hong Kong
it would be exactly one out of every 5,000 people
would have the right to participate in the selection of the candidates
who would run in the general election.
This is an example of tweedism,
and that tweedism is what triggered the strike
because what people in Hong Kong believed
was that that first stage was a biased filter.
Biased because the 1,200 would be dominated
by a pro-Beijing business and political elite.
With the consequence, obviously,
of producing a democracy that would be responsive to China,
not Hong Kong only.
I think these cases are obvious. We all get them.
So then consider this case:
in America today, we take it for granted
that political campaigns will be privately funded.
But the funding of political campaigns is its own contest.
It's its own primary.
Members of Congress, and candidates for Congress spend
anywhere between 30 and 70% of their time
raising money to get back to Congress or to get their party back into power.
Dialing for dollars, calling people across the country they've never met,
begging them for the money they need to run their campaigns.
And as they do this, they learn what works.
They learn the techniques that convince people to give them money.
They develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness
about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money.
They become, in the words of X Files, shape shifters,
as they constantly adjust their views
in light of what they know will help them raise money.
Not on issues one to ten but on issues 11 to 1,000.
Leslie Byrn a democrat from Virginia describes
that when she went to Congress she was told by a colleague,
"Always lean to the green."
And to clarify she went on, you know, "He was not an environmentalist."
So B. F. Skinner from the Harvard Psychology Department
gave us this image of the Skinner box,
the Skinner box where we can demonstrate
how any stupid animal could learn which buttons it had to push
to get the sustenance it needed to survive.
This is a picture of the modern American congress-person
as they learn which buttons they must push to survive
to get their candidacy successfully back into office.
This is a primary too.
It is the money primary.
Not a white primary, but a green primary.
It is one stage in a multi-stage election,
the critical first stage that decides, that determines, who gets to run.
And the filter that this money primary creates, this filter is biased.
And is biased because of who the funders of these campaigns are.
The funders.
In the 2014 election cycle, 5.4 million Americans gave even a dollar
to any congressional campaign.
That means less than 2% gave even a dollar.
But the top 100 gave
as much as the bottom 4.75 million funders of that campaign.
Those were the biggest funders,
but we should think about is the relevant funders,
the people who give enough to be relevant to the candidates,
as they're thinking about which way they need to shape shift
to assure they get the money they need to win their campaigns.
So let's say we take the number of 5,200 dollars.
That's the maximum amount
you can give to one candidate in the United States.
5,200 dollars.
In 2014, there were 57,854 Americans
who gave 5,200 dollars.
And for those of you doing the math which you might have figure out,
it's 57, 854 Americans turns out to be .02% of America.
.02% dominating this first stage,
this tiny fraction of the 1%.
We can say a Chinese fraction of the 1% dominates the first stage of the election
with the consequence, obviously,
of producing a democracy responsive to the funders only.
Now I'm a Harvard Professor, this is a Princeton study;
I'm not allowed to talk about Princeton studies,
let me put that off the stage as quickly as I can.
By Martin Galens and Ben Page, the largest empirical study
of actual policy decisions by our government
in the history of political science.
And they related those decisions to the views of the economic elite,
organized interest groups, and the average voter.
And what they found is
if you map the decisions to the attitudes of the economic elite,
as the percentage of the economic elite who support a policy change goes up,
the probability of that policy change being enacted goes up as well.
Same thing for organized interest groups:
as the number of organized groups supporting a policy change goes up,
the probability of that policy change happening goes up as well.
OK, here's the graph for the average American voter.
It's a flat line.
A flat line.
What that means is that it doesn't matter
what percentage of the average American support a particular policy change;
it doesn't change the probability that that policy change will be enacted.
As they describe this in English: "When the preferences of economic elites
and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for,
the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule,
near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."
OK, this is a profound indictment of a democracy.
This is the picture we have of democracy, right?
You know, this is the average American from the middle of the country.
The average American sitting at the steering wheel,
we the people at the steering wheel.
The idea is that we would steer the democracy in the direction we want,
but here's the reality of the way this democracy is actually functioning:
the wheel has been detached from the axles,
we no longer control the way the car goes.
This is the product of tweedism.
OK, I want you to see three things
now that I've described this idea of tweedism.
Number one, tweedism is a form of corruption, too.
I don't mean the corruption of bribery,
I'm not talking about the corruption of crimes,
Money laundering, or any of the things
that were discussed in the previous really fantastic presentation today,
not the corruption that Transparency International focuses on
when they draw this map with its indictments
of the vast majority of countries as being corrupt.
That's not what tweedism is.
What tweedism is, it's systemic corruption.
It's corruption of the system,
a corruption of representative democracy
because when we think about this corruption we should recognize
that both legal and illegal corruption exists and both of them cheat democracy.
And so, when we look at the map like this, what we should actually be doing
is recognizing that this country too needs to be colored in red
so that we see the full picture
of the way corruption defeats the objective of democracy.
That's number one.
Number two, Tweedism is inequality.
Inequality.
It manifests the unequal status of citizens within a democracy
because this unequal vote,
not the vote in the ballot election but in the money election,
not in the general election, but in the green primary,
this unequal vote denies equal standing to citizens.
Denies the equality.
Unequal vote means unequal citizens.
And point number three.
This fight against tweedism
is part of a much bigger fight.
We should recognize, we should talk about, we should begin to celebrate
the explosion of a global anti-corruption movement.
In countries across the world,
from Brazil to India, to Russia to Ukraine, to the United States,
there are movements developing from the grassroots up
to demand a government responsive to the people.
As you look at that range of countries,
there are different corruptions in each of these countries,
but what unites these different corruptions
is the recognition of the fundamental inequality
those corruptions produce.
The inequality that all corruption is.
The common failure across these democracies
is this inequality,
even if there are different causes for the corruption
in these different democracies.
Now, what's not clear in this fight,
what's not clear is whether we can win.
Social psychologists describe what they call the bystander effect.
The bystander effect says: "As the number of people
who recognize a tragedy, or a disaster increases,
the probability that they will actually do something about it goes down."
And the reality is most people in most democracies
recognize that democracy is not working.
And so, as most people recognize it,
it becomes harder, and harder to imagine people standing up
and doing something about it.
It's not clear we can win.
But what is clear is that this is how democracies grow old.
They grow old
by allowing a tiny fraction to build the infrastructure
so that they control what we, the people, are meant to control.
So as I come to this incredibly beautiful country,
the first time I've had a chance to be here,
- although I've been across most of this part of the world
many, many times before -
this is what I have to you:
stay young.
In this democracy, stay young.
And more importantly, help us to become young again.
Help us to become young again.
(Applause)
Because the truth is,
as much as my government would deny it,
the truth is we have lost the capacity to govern.
We, the people in America,
have lost the capacity to govern,
and that should scare you.
Because there's not just one drunk grizzly bear on the world today,
there are at least two drunk grizzly bears on the world stage today
and unless we can find a way to recover that control
of we, the people, over our government,
our drunk grizzly bear will be as dangerous as any.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)