Matt is correct here: "the point is that while voters care a lot about corruption, they aren’t really primed to detect a qualitative difference between a politician running a shakedown scheme and the banal vicissitudes of partisan politics. This makes it hard to mount the corruption case against Trump without a lot of deliberate and focused effort, which progressives are poorly positioned to engage in. "
The regime is destroying structures that took centuries to build.
When I first came back from a Peace Corps stint in Moldova in 2015 I scoffed at U.S. complaints about "corrruption". At that time I was learning phrases like "state capture" from Maia Sandu, who was the Minister of Education while I was there but has since served as Prime Minister and President of the country. While I was there "someone" (Ilan Shor it was finally proven) stole a billion dollars from Moldovan banks.
I like to use the terms "legal infrastructure" and "financial infrastructure" in this regard. Since the Florentines invented double-entry accounting, Europeans and the rest of the democratic world have been slowly building laws and procedures for preventing and prosecuting corruption in governments and embezzlement in the private sector. When we look at the struggles of post-Soviet countries like Moldova, and Romania (a satellite), to address corruption, we get an understanding how difficult it is to build these structures from scratch. I haven't explored how Asian democracies have managed to do this. Maybe there are answers there on how we can rapidly rebuild when the time comes.
The problem with modern politics is not corruption (although there are too many corrupt officials), but polar opposite takes on key issues. Abortion is one. Another is the Big Government/Small Government arguments. While the latter has always been present, the conservative consensus since Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich (to name just a few) is that compromise is tantamount to surrender, and a left wing backlash has resulted. That tension will surely taint American democracy for many years to come.
I like this piece and agree with almost all of it. But I do think Matt is being a little dense on the “agreeing with social elite over constituents is corruption” piece. I don’t think you have to think very hard to realize what a normal person probably means by this.
If a politician has constituents who want X, and said politician knows that. And the politician instead does Y not because they HAPPEN to disagree with their constituents in a way that aligns with a powerful friend or social elite but BECAUSE the powerful friend or social elite wants Y, that seems like a fairly standard and uncontroversial case of corruption (in colloquial terms).
And maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s pretty obvious that’s what the polling option is capturing.
I have a pretty low opinion of the knowledge base and logical consistency of the average voter, but even I do not think you have to twist yourself in knots to make that poll result mean that voters think all disagreement with median sentiment is corruption.
Okay substack ate this comment *multiple times* so super quickly I also was disappointed in the polymarket sponsorship. It was poorly disclosed and not what I want substack to be. You do you, this is just data from a reader, but I hope it isn't a future trend.
One idea to tease apart the self interest of politicians from an honest dive into complex problems is to setup working groups composed of random citizens. Sort of like what we do with juries. Ask them to reach agreement (or a majority) on what our policy should be for x. Give them access to experts, but importantly keep their tenure short and they opportunity for outside influence limited. Then compare where they land vs our representatives. At the very least it will highlight the impact of self interest and extraneous influences on our public policy.
Most normies don’t care that much about politics and know that government is and has always been corrupt. Trump is more open and honest about how the system works but he’s also doing everything we voted for.
"After all, the basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt."
No, the view is “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is corrupt. Voters expect their elected representatives to vote in favor of their constituents, not to satisfy the opinions of rich elites in their social group.
"Holding an unpopular opinion" and "voting in favor of one's rich friends over one's constituents" are very different things.
"I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites."
FDR once said ~"you've convinced me, now put pressure on me." Rich elites paying for politicians who happen to agree with them can avoid this problem by working to persuade the electorate prior to the voting to change the law. Then the law change will reflect the popular will, not just the opinions of the rich elite and the politicians they pay / happen to agree with.
People trust the Fed because it’s the last frontier of nonpartisanship in government. SCOTUS legalized corruption in 2010 so most of Congress’ time is spent fundraising and yes they do insider trading. People are consumers and therefore trust businesses more than the government because at least businesses have a bottom line and must answer to their patrons.
A big and constant issue is just that the public has a lot of terrible opinions. Take "Congress is overpaid." That's a fantastically wrong view. If a member of Congress isn't independently wealthy or doesn't have a high-earning spouse, it makes serving in Congress prohibitive. Members have to essentially maintain two households-- one in DC, and one in their home districts. $174K a year is more than enough for a single twenty something to live in DC. It's not great for a mid-career person with a family. And that's for one household. Trying to represent, say, a district in San Francisco while living in DC on that salary is just not feasible.
And this ties back to the thrust of the post-- that fomenting outrage is easy, regardless of the merit, and that makes it really hard to push for good policy, especially to people whose worldview is that society is zero-sum, and the only way to improve material living standards is to take stuff away from "the rich." You don't have to particularly care about things like how rich "the rich" are to recognize that sometimes good policy has the unintended side effect of also improving the lives of "the rich," and sometimes soaking "the rich" just makes life worse for everyone.
How about directing some of this criticism towards Bernie Sanders, whom Yglesias seems to like? All the man does is accuse everyone, both sides of the aisle, of corruption. He’s convinced his supporters that the nomination was stolen from him both times he ran for president.
Masked men are kidnapping people off the streets, and he is *still* crowing when one of his favored candidates beats “the Establishment Democrats.” There is no presumption of good faith whatsoever.
As I said last night in the afternoon post, Stoller and his cronies are kind of dumb, but they're not the reason progressives think moderates are corrupt.
Progressives think moderates are corrupt because they vote for, support, etc. a lot of policies they think supporting makes you corrupt and wrong. Like, at the end of the day, Matt and other moderates have to understand a lot of Democratic voters think taking money from crypto and other companies is morally wrong and corrupt, no matter if said representative personally came to a pro-crypto or whatever position on a non-corrupt basis.
Like, if many Democratic voters think crypto is terrible and is only basically used for crime and crime-adjacent things, a Democratic politician saying "I'm pro-crypto because I just think it's good" probably is worse than saying you were paid off.
As pointed out by somebody else, I can probably convince somebody personally that Joe Manchin is just a Guy with Dumb and Wrong Ideas based on his background, but when there are politicians like Sinema and others who just do appear to be voting how rich and powerful people tell them, especially on less consequential bills or very specific bills.
For example, a super majority of Democrats (and probably 80%+ of college educated Democrats) agreed with a $15 minimum wage. So when Democratic voters see 8 Senators vote down that $15 minimum wage, when they likely no basically zero Democrats in their own circles (because there were basically none), the only conclusion many people can come too is corruption.
Matt is correct here: "the point is that while voters care a lot about corruption, they aren’t really primed to detect a qualitative difference between a politician running a shakedown scheme and the banal vicissitudes of partisan politics. This makes it hard to mount the corruption case against Trump without a lot of deliberate and focused effort, which progressives are poorly positioned to engage in. "
The regime is destroying structures that took centuries to build.
When I first came back from a Peace Corps stint in Moldova in 2015 I scoffed at U.S. complaints about "corrruption". At that time I was learning phrases like "state capture" from Maia Sandu, who was the Minister of Education while I was there but has since served as Prime Minister and President of the country. While I was there "someone" (Ilan Shor it was finally proven) stole a billion dollars from Moldovan banks.
I like to use the terms "legal infrastructure" and "financial infrastructure" in this regard. Since the Florentines invented double-entry accounting, Europeans and the rest of the democratic world have been slowly building laws and procedures for preventing and prosecuting corruption in governments and embezzlement in the private sector. When we look at the struggles of post-Soviet countries like Moldova, and Romania (a satellite), to address corruption, we get an understanding how difficult it is to build these structures from scratch. I haven't explored how Asian democracies have managed to do this. Maybe there are answers there on how we can rapidly rebuild when the time comes.
The problem with modern politics is not corruption (although there are too many corrupt officials), but polar opposite takes on key issues. Abortion is one. Another is the Big Government/Small Government arguments. While the latter has always been present, the conservative consensus since Goldwater, Reagan and Gingrich (to name just a few) is that compromise is tantamount to surrender, and a left wing backlash has resulted. That tension will surely taint American democracy for many years to come.
While being a Senator is an elite job, $174,000 is a lot of money to most people.
I like this piece and agree with almost all of it. But I do think Matt is being a little dense on the “agreeing with social elite over constituents is corruption” piece. I don’t think you have to think very hard to realize what a normal person probably means by this.
If a politician has constituents who want X, and said politician knows that. And the politician instead does Y not because they HAPPEN to disagree with their constituents in a way that aligns with a powerful friend or social elite but BECAUSE the powerful friend or social elite wants Y, that seems like a fairly standard and uncontroversial case of corruption (in colloquial terms).
And maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s pretty obvious that’s what the polling option is capturing.
I have a pretty low opinion of the knowledge base and logical consistency of the average voter, but even I do not think you have to twist yourself in knots to make that poll result mean that voters think all disagreement with median sentiment is corruption.
Okay substack ate this comment *multiple times* so super quickly I also was disappointed in the polymarket sponsorship. It was poorly disclosed and not what I want substack to be. You do you, this is just data from a reader, but I hope it isn't a future trend.
One idea to tease apart the self interest of politicians from an honest dive into complex problems is to setup working groups composed of random citizens. Sort of like what we do with juries. Ask them to reach agreement (or a majority) on what our policy should be for x. Give them access to experts, but importantly keep their tenure short and they opportunity for outside influence limited. Then compare where they land vs our representatives. At the very least it will highlight the impact of self interest and extraneous influences on our public policy.
Amen
Most normies don’t care that much about politics and know that government is and has always been corrupt. Trump is more open and honest about how the system works but he’s also doing everything we voted for.
"After all, the basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt."
No, the view is “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is corrupt. Voters expect their elected representatives to vote in favor of their constituents, not to satisfy the opinions of rich elites in their social group.
"Holding an unpopular opinion" and "voting in favor of one's rich friends over one's constituents" are very different things.
"I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites."
FDR once said ~"you've convinced me, now put pressure on me." Rich elites paying for politicians who happen to agree with them can avoid this problem by working to persuade the electorate prior to the voting to change the law. Then the law change will reflect the popular will, not just the opinions of the rich elite and the politicians they pay / happen to agree with.
People trust the Fed because it’s the last frontier of nonpartisanship in government. SCOTUS legalized corruption in 2010 so most of Congress’ time is spent fundraising and yes they do insider trading. People are consumers and therefore trust businesses more than the government because at least businesses have a bottom line and must answer to their patrons.
I thought the Polymarket post was a joke
I always get a little bummed when there are ads added to paid subscriptions
A big and constant issue is just that the public has a lot of terrible opinions. Take "Congress is overpaid." That's a fantastically wrong view. If a member of Congress isn't independently wealthy or doesn't have a high-earning spouse, it makes serving in Congress prohibitive. Members have to essentially maintain two households-- one in DC, and one in their home districts. $174K a year is more than enough for a single twenty something to live in DC. It's not great for a mid-career person with a family. And that's for one household. Trying to represent, say, a district in San Francisco while living in DC on that salary is just not feasible.
And this ties back to the thrust of the post-- that fomenting outrage is easy, regardless of the merit, and that makes it really hard to push for good policy, especially to people whose worldview is that society is zero-sum, and the only way to improve material living standards is to take stuff away from "the rich." You don't have to particularly care about things like how rich "the rich" are to recognize that sometimes good policy has the unintended side effect of also improving the lives of "the rich," and sometimes soaking "the rich" just makes life worse for everyone.
How about directing some of this criticism towards Bernie Sanders, whom Yglesias seems to like? All the man does is accuse everyone, both sides of the aisle, of corruption. He’s convinced his supporters that the nomination was stolen from him both times he ran for president.
Masked men are kidnapping people off the streets, and he is *still* crowing when one of his favored candidates beats “the Establishment Democrats.” There is no presumption of good faith whatsoever.
I'd be curious to hear what Yglesias thinks about Bernie nowadays. Maybe worth a mailbag question.
From what I’ve seen, he still speaks about him with affection.
As I said last night in the afternoon post, Stoller and his cronies are kind of dumb, but they're not the reason progressives think moderates are corrupt.
Progressives think moderates are corrupt because they vote for, support, etc. a lot of policies they think supporting makes you corrupt and wrong. Like, at the end of the day, Matt and other moderates have to understand a lot of Democratic voters think taking money from crypto and other companies is morally wrong and corrupt, no matter if said representative personally came to a pro-crypto or whatever position on a non-corrupt basis.
Like, if many Democratic voters think crypto is terrible and is only basically used for crime and crime-adjacent things, a Democratic politician saying "I'm pro-crypto because I just think it's good" probably is worse than saying you were paid off.
As pointed out by somebody else, I can probably convince somebody personally that Joe Manchin is just a Guy with Dumb and Wrong Ideas based on his background, but when there are politicians like Sinema and others who just do appear to be voting how rich and powerful people tell them, especially on less consequential bills or very specific bills.
For example, a super majority of Democrats (and probably 80%+ of college educated Democrats) agreed with a $15 minimum wage. So when Democratic voters see 8 Senators vote down that $15 minimum wage, when they likely no basically zero Democrats in their own circles (because there were basically none), the only conclusion many people can come too is corruption.