Lawrence Lessig Wants To Run For President So He Can Resign

An anonymous reader writes: Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has announced his intention to explore a bid for the U.S. presidency. By Labor Day, he will decide whether he has the support necessary to enter the Democratic primary. His goals are rather unusual — he says, "I want to run to be a different kind of president. 'Different' not in the traditional political puffery sense of that term. 'Different,' quite literally. I want to run to build a mandate for the fundamental change that our democracy desperately needs. Once that is passed, I would resign, and the elected Vice President would become President."

His top picks for a running mate include Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Lessig calls it a "Presidency as referendum," a hack for the U.S. Constitution to give more power back to the citizens. "In no plausible sense do we have a representative democracy in America today." In an interview with the Washington Post, Lessig added, "Until we find a way to fix the rigged system, none of the other things that people talk about doing are going to be possible."

Comments

Re:Socialism

[NostalgiaForInfinity]

You are talking about communism, not democratic socialism like in parts of Europe.

Europeans have social democracies, not democratic socialism. From Wikipedia:

Democratic socialism is a political ideology advocating a democratic political system alongside a socialist economic system, involving a combination of political democracy with social ownership of the means of production.

Social democracy is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving welfare state provisions, collective bargaining arrangements, regulation of the economy in the general interest, interventions to promote greater equality in the distribution of income and wealth, and a commitment to representative democracy.

Yes, the difference matters a great deal. I know of no European country that is governed as a democratic socialist country. Many countries nominally have "democratic socialist parties", but they largely do not actually pursue democratic socialism anymore.