Could Politics Be Fairer? Two New Books Say Yes

One of the biggest divides in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is whether Donald Trump is a cause or a symptom of the current dysfunction in American politics. Joe Biden has argued the former — replace Trump and everything will go back to normal — while the likes of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have based their campaigns on the need for “big, structural change.” This is not just an ideological divide but a generational one: In a recent New York Times poll, 85 percent of prospective Iowa caucusgoers under 30 said they were likely to support a Democrat who “promises fundamental systematic change” while 70 percent of voters over 65 preferred a candidate who “brings politics in Washington back to normal.” Two new books — “They Don’t Represent Us,” by Lawrence Lessig, and “The Great Democracy,” by Ganesh Sitaraman — are firmly in the big, structural change camp, making a strong case that there is no normal to go back to. “The crisis in America is not its president,” Lessig writes in his opening pages. “Its president is the consequence of a crisis much more fundamental.” That crisis is the state of democracy itself.