The Stakes by Robert Kuttner

Author:Robert Kuttner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-07-17T16:00:00+00:00

Corruption: A Brief History of an American Scourge

There is a huge literature in political science on the breakdown of trust in large institutions as one key indicator of the danger to democracy. But too little attention is paid to role of the imbalance of economic rewards in that breakdown. In 1958, when the National Election Study first asked whether people trusted the federal government to do the right thing all or most of the time, 73 percent of respondents reported that they did. That support peaked in 1962, at 78 percent. By 2018, confidence had fallen to less than 20 percent.

To be sure, in the intervening years government’s credibility suffered from the assassinations of the 1960s, Vietnam, Watergate, the Iraq War, the Monica Lewinsky mess, and a lot more. But it took a prolonged economic slide in the security and prospects of ordinary people for government legitimacy to collapse. In the post–World War II era, government was not without its blemishes, from the rampages of Senator Joe McCarthy to an unpopular stalemated war in Korea. But it is more than a coincidence that in the 1950s and 1960s, when government enjoyed broad credibility, the postwar social contract still held and government was accurately perceived as delivering a fair deal for ordinary people.

Democracy, it turns out, can survive a fair amount of corruption, as long as the benefits are delivered with rough economic justice. What it cannot survive for long is corruption that serves primarily elites.

The founders of the American Republic were obsessed with two civic ills. The better known of the two was tyranny. They dealt with this risk by devising separation of powers and other ingenious checks and balances. They abhorred not just unchecked executive power but the passions of direct popular rule, and they made sure that they were creating a republic rather than a democracy, to be governed by an aristocracy of talent.

The founders’ less appreciated but equally fervent concern was corruption. The men who created the republic had a very straightforward conception of corruption: the use of public office for private gain. Corruption, they feared, could undermine republican government just as surely as tyranny might. This concern is expressed repeatedly in the Federalist Papers, and it is reflected in several constitutional provisions. In Federalist 10, James Madison writes that leaders may “by corruption . . . betray the interests of the people.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 75, warns that “an avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth.” The Articles of Confederation explicitly prohibited any officeholder from accepting “any present, emolument, office or title of any kind.” Similar language was carried over into the emoluments clause of the Constitution in 1787.

The founders, for the most part classically educated men of high principle, saw corruption as emblematic of all that they abhorred in the rule of European monarchs. They saw the British Crown eroding the independence of Parliament with bribes, patronage, and special favors. Patents and royal monopolies granted by the king to courtiers epitomized the blend of political and economic corruption.

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