Americans think everyone is corrupt

Voters have weird views about this, and progressive advocacy groups do a lot that’s counterproductive.

A participant at a Tea Party Express rally displays a sign critical of the Obama administration on April 13, 2010. (Photo by Spencer Platt)

Donald Trump is running easily the most corrupt administration in decades. Whether selling off pardons for cash, delivering sweetheart deals on rare earth metals to donors, or earning hundreds of millions in deals with the United Arab Emirates while authorizing them to buy America’s most powerful computer chips, he is at every opportunity leveraging political power for personal financial gain.

This hasn’t translated to political success, though. After starting his second term much more popular than he was in 2017, he’s converged on his own poor approval ratings from his first term.

And yet, it’s not as if there’s been massive political mobilization against his corruption.

The money machine works in part because Trump has, through persuasion or intimidation, induced the vast majority of Republicans to refrain from criticizing or challenging him on any of this in any kind of meaningful way.

So will the party pay a price for Trump’s corruption? They’re set to lose the House, which almost always happens to the president’s party during a midterm, but remain the odds-on favorites¹ to hold the Senate, in which case Trump will be able to keep MAGAfying the judiciary and getting away with his corrupt schemes.

So how does he get away with it? Some people think it’s because the voters don’t care about corruption, but I think that’s probably wrong.

Searchlight Institute polling on this shows that voters just have an incredibly low estimate of the baseline level of integrity of politicians. Seventy-one percent say the “typical politician” is corrupt. Typical Republican? Sixty-eight percent. Typical Democrat? Sixty-one percent. Seventy-two percent say that “long-term elected officials” are probably corrupt.

I think it’s hard to make political hay out of Trump’s corruption because, while it looks extraordinary to me (and probably to you if you’re reading this), many voters see it as pretty normal.

Voters take a very expansive view of corruption

To be totally honest, I think this is a pretty risible slander against America’s hard-working elected officials.

I have a lot of bad things to say about Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, but the idea that after getting law degrees at Yale and Harvard they moved back to their home states to run for office in order to get rich doesn’t make sense.

The same Searchlight poll shows a lot of support for fairly draconian political reforms. Banning congressional stock trading is something that people talk about a lot and is wildly popular, but even more popular are ideas like mandatory drug testing of elected officials and a (terrible on the merits) idea that we should track and report politicians’ work hours.

The fact that enacting term limits is way more popular than banning stock trading is telling about the public’s broad attitude. Elsewhere in the poll (though not shown in the graphic) Searchlight finds that voters think current congressional salaries are too high.² Voters just think politicians are generally bad and favor crude measures to arbitrarily cycle them out or make their lives worse.

This appears to be driven in part by the electorate’s extraordinarily expansive conception of corruption.

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

If there’s one thing I learned in college philosophy classes all those years ago, it’s that words are somewhat arbitrary and people can use language however they want as long as we understand each other. And what I love about this series of questions is that it indicates that most people are not using the word “corruption” in the way that I or most political practitioners or most investigative reporters would use it.

After all, the basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. 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.

When you put it that way, it all sounds a bit insane. Do voters really believe that the mere fact that a politician disagrees with them about something is evidence of corruption? It seems that maybe they do!

Stealth Democracy

A 2002 book by John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse called “Stealth Democracy: Americans’ Beliefs About How Government Should Work” provides some useful context for this.

Consider the paradox that Jerome Powell is the government official that voters have the most confidence in.

We are allegedly living in a populist era where voters say they highly prize transparency and accountability in government, and yet the best-liked part of the government is the least-transparent, least-accountable part — one that’s run by a WASPy ex-banker and quintessential D.C. insider. And yet that’s not unusual. It’s typical for the Fed and its chair to be highly rated even though it goes against almost everything that people say they want from the government.

The Stealth Democracy thesis is that people like the Fed because the Fed has been very successful at operating — or at least appearing to operate — by consensus. The board members do not debate each other on television, dissenting statements are rare, and when statements happen they are politely worded. What’s more, the actual range of disagreements expressed in dissents tends to be small. You don’t see the Fed raising rates by a quarter of a point while a large bloc of dissenters says actually they should have cut by three-quarters.

This is not a law of nature. Trump’s recent moves at least raise the prospect that the Fed will soon become a much more contentious, much more partisan institution. And if that happens, public support for it will probably collapse.

Because what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse find is that most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

Sophisticated people know that this is not true. It’s not that balancing the budget is an unsolvable problem. But it involves difficult tradeoffs and reasonable people are going to disagree about those tradeoffs, both because of significant empirical disagreements about tax policy and because of divergent moral intuitions about distributive questions. Debates about which forms of spending are “wasteful” do not have uncontroversial answers and politically popular support for the elderly has significant economic costs. As a result, making a big change will almost inevitably involve controversy.

And voters’ intuition is that controversy and fighting is bad.

Think about the average consumer-facing Fortune 500 company. You go years at a time without hearing anything at all about internal disagreement at Home Depot or Apple or Delta Air Lines or Hilton or McDonald’s. These companies are, presumably, making decisions. But if articles start showing up in the newspaper about board members fighting with each other or uncertainty about executive succession, that company’s in trouble. When things are good, they just move smoothly and quietly. The fact that politics is almost never smooth and quiet is, to most voters, evidence that the politicians are doing something wrong.

The ubiquity of “corruption”

Hibbing and Theiss-Morse are, I think, a little too sympathetic to the public’s view.

They write that rather than wanting a more participatory political system, voters are simply angry about the existence of:

[a] political system in which decision-makers — for no reason other than the fact that they are in a position to make decisions — accrue benefits at the expense of non-decision-makers. Just as children are often less concerned with acquiring a privilege than with preventing their siblings from acquiring a privilege, citizens are usually less concerned with obtaining a policy outcome than with preventing others from using the process to feather their own nests. Since the people constitute one obvious check on the ability of decision-makers to be self-serving, it often appears as though the people want more political influence for themselves, when in fact they just do not want decision-makers to be able to take advantage of them.

That’s the sympathetic view: Voters are angry because of the systemic levels of corruption in the American government.

I think a less generous but more accurate take would be that because voters do not bother to inform themselves about the actual difficulties involved in assessing policy problems, they wrongly conclude that everything they don’t like reflects corruption or self-interested behavior from elected officials.

This is annoying, but we can mostly live with it. Secret Congress is, along with the Federal Reserve, one of the key institutions of Stealth Democracy. One reason I am never that interested in questions about public opinion on housing reform is that most significant zoning bills that pass do so on a bipartisan basis. My advice to elected officials interested in reform in their states is to spend a lot of time trying to find opposite-party partners to work with and very little time stressing about polling.

If you push something through on a party-line basis, people will probably find it alarming. But if you get a nice bipartisan bill signing flanked by business and labor leaders and affordable housing advocates, it’ll be great. Two somewhat different bipartisan housing bills have passed the House and Senate this year by overwhelming margins without much debate or discussion, and I’m optimistic that the relevant committee chairs and ranking members will work something out and something constructive will pass and there will be no voter backlash.

Those exceptions aside, 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 circular firing squad

Something that I think everyone in the anti-Trump sphere should consider is that not only does the mass public have an expansive conception of corruption, so do left-wing advocacy organizations when pursuing inter-factional conflict.

The entire premise of the Revolving Door Project, for example, is that not only are moderate Democrats bad, but all intra-party disagreement about ideology and policy is a form of corruption.

This was also my experience of writing for the New York Times about a different approach to oil and gas policy in the United States. To my way of thinking, the idea that Democrats should approach American oil and gas in a similar way to how center-left parties in Norway, Canada, and Mexico handle it seems like a pretty natural hypothesis to consider. But my take on this was greeted not by mere disagreement on the merits, but by wild accusations that I am somehow on the take.

Matt Stoller, the research director at the American Economic Liberties Project, will just make stuff up about who funds organizations that he disagrees with. It’s an unusually crude version of the tactics that were deployed against me on the fossil fuel issue, but not really so different in kind.

This is a pretty good way to pursue factional infighting since, per the Stealth Democracy thesis, the mass public is very open to the theory that it’s impossible for people to disagree on the merits and that everything is featherbedding and corruption.

But obviously if progressive donors spend money on building a bunch of progressive nonprofits and aligned media outlets, all of which are constantly flinging accusations of corruption at Democrats, then it’s going to be incredibly challenging to turn around come the general election and try to convince people that actually Trump is the corrupt one.

Donors who believe in these causes could, but clearly do not, ask the recipients of their money to observe a norm of presuming good faith and debating on the merits. And since they don’t, a casual observer of the political scene will hear that — according to progressives themselves — every single instance of a Democratic Party politician standing up for a home state industry or prioritizing economic growth over some other consideration is corruption.

I think this has worked pretty well as a strategy for pulling Democratic politicians further to the left. But using this tactic to go further left not only makes it harder to win elections, it also damages the image of non-leftist Democrats in a way that makes it harder to beat Trump. There are certainly sincere factional warriors who are achieving exactly what they care about here. But there’s also a lot of thoughtless behavior on the part of people who are genuinely appalled by the MAGA movement and frustrated by the difficulty of mounting a strong corruption attack against Trump.

1. Polymarket is sponsoring this post, but the odds are not meaningfully different in other markets.

2. This is in a question where they state what the current salary is, so it’s not that people are guessing wrong and believe members are highly paid. They think the current amount of $174,000 per year is too much.