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The evening could have come off an especially gratuitous instance of political theater; Lessig has been a longtime friend and colleague of Warren's at Harvard, so it might have been more parsimonious of him to simply invite her over for dinner and discuss her candidacy privately. But Jones and Teachout are two of the most compelling orators the progressive wing of the Democratic Party has to offer, and Lessig's energetic slideshows never fail to inform and entertain. They conjured an air of conviction strong enough to make it seem possible that Warren might appear from a cloud of smoke and duly accept the mantle being offered her—though, at the evening's end, there was only an open bar and hors d'oeuvres."The cage that politicians are in right now is something that we have to break open." –Zephyr Teachout
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Onstage at Civic Hall, all the speakers agreed that the solution is Elizabeth Warren, but from the sidelines one could notice some variance in how they conceive of the problem.Teachout, like Lessig, geeks out about corruption. She wrote a history of the subject, Corruption in America, that was published last year. "The cage that politicians are in right now is something that we have to break open," she says. "We're trapping our politicians in a terrible system."The cage, to Teachout, results from concentrations of corporate power. This is something she saw evidence of wherever she went on the campaign trail in New York State—monopolies everywhere, suffocating small businesses and leaving workers with little choice of where to work. Her hope is in resurgent forces that can help to challenge the corrupting effects of big money: minimum-wage campaigners, anti-fracking activists, and unionized teachers impressed her in particular. And they were calling for deep change to the economic order, not just tweaks to the rules for running elections. "If you talk about inequality but you don't talk about power structures," she told me, "people feel like you're not going to do anything about it."Lessig sees things differently. Once a teenage Republican, it doesn't keep him up at night that some people amass a lot more wealth than others. "I'm a more conservative reformer," he said. "I don't think the problem is changing the economy. I think the problem is changing the incentives that people in the economy face." He wants to reduce the return on investment for campaign contributions. Rather than buying off politicians in order to secure favorable policies, he'd like businesses to focus on making money the old-fashioned way—making stuff and selling it. From the start of his campaign-finance efforts, Lessig has sought the support of the right as well as the left, though with only limited success; it's not equally evident to everyone that the outsized influence of the rich is a problem."There is a sense in which we've kind of learned our helplessness," he told me. "We see reformer after reformer—quote-unquote—and we see nothing reformed."And yet we are to believe Warren will be different. Her entry certainly could certainly throw a wrench in the Hillary machine. But that would mean giving up a kind of campaign that is so far more energetic, and probably more democratic, than the one with an actual, declared candidate.Nathan Schneider is the author of God in Proof and Thank You, Anarchy. His website is TheRowBoat.com, and he tweets here.