“This urgent book offers not only a clear-eyed explanation of the forces that broke our politics, but a thoughtful and, yes, patriotic vision of how exactly we produce a government that’s truly simply by and for the people.”-DAVID DALEY, bestselling writer of Ratf**ked and Unrigged

In the vein of On Tyranny and exactly how Democracies Die, the bestselling author of Republic, Lost argues with insight and urgency that our democracy no longer signifies us and demonstrates reform is both necessary and possible.

America’ about They Don’t Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy s democracy is in crisis. Along many sizes, an individual flaw-unrepresentativeness-has detached our federal government through the people. So that as a people, our fractured partisanship and ignorance on vital issues drive our leaders to stake out ever more severe positions.

In They Don’t Represent Us, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig charts how the essential institutions of our democracy, including our mass media, respond to narrow interests rather than to the requirements and wishes of the nation’s citizenry. However the blame does not just lay with “them”-Washington’s politicians and power agents, Lessig argues. The issue is also “us.” “We the people” are significantly uninformed about the issues, while ubiquitous political polling exacerbates the issue, reflecting and normalizing our ignorance and feeding it back to the system as representative of our will.

What we need, Lessig contends, is a series of reforms, from governmental institutions to the public itself, including:

A move immediately to open public campaign funding, resulting in more representative candidatesA reformed Electoral University, that provides the President grounds to represent America as a wholeA federal government standard to end partisan gerrymandering in the us A radically reformed SenateA federal government penalty in states that don’t protected to their people the same freedom to voteInstitutions that empower the people to speak in an informed and deliberative wayA soul-searching and incisive study of our failing political culture, this non-partisan call to arms speaks to every citizen, supplying a far-reaching platform for reform that could save our democracy and make it happen for all those.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.