Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently. I don't think it's a good thing. It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks, which suggests that they believe they no longer have to be. That's not a healthy sign for what's supposed to be a democracy.
Saying “US corruption isn’t new” is a truism. There are probably isolated incidents, and many unproven theories, but everyone is quick to agree with this statement because it’s a common feeling everyone has now for some reason. The reality of corruption is likely much smaller and more boring than people think.
What we’re witnessing now is what should be called corruption. That corruption that everyone has been screaming for years. But finally real.
Remember, the job of these people’s propaganda is not to say that they’re better than the other side. It’s to say that they’re all the same. That’s it. And when you claim that this corruption is just a continuation of previous corruption, just bigger, and not a difference between essentially not having and having corruption (there’s always some small percentage of corruption, just like any crime) is essentially sweeping for them. It’s repeating their talking points.
Yup, if i claim everyone is corrupt, then i can be corrupt. Ironically, if im corrupt, i probably honestly assume everyone else is, or at least superficially assume that, because if i don't, i might think other people are good and i am bad.
Read this and imagined corruption as non-linear. What before is “isolated incidents”, spreads like an SIRS (Susceptible → Infectious → Recovered → Susceptible) infection model.
I guess it’s more accurate to say that corruption didn’t start with Trump (he wasn’t even involved in politics when Citizens United was happening, for example). The US has been marching in that direction for a while.
The difference now is the openness and also the scale. If a president does one bad thing the press will dig into it, committees will investigate, etc. But what if the president does 20 bad things every single day? The press doesn’t know how to report on that and the legal process is as slow as molasses. And by tomorrow everyone will have forgotten because there’ll be new bad things.
Not really interested in getting into a debate here, I’m just pointing out that GGP said “openness and also the scale”, to which you ignored the “scale” part and pretended it’s only about being corrupt in the open versus in private. I can point this out without making a comment at all (although I have my opinions) on whether I agree if the scale has changed.
(To be clear, I absolutely believe the scale has increased tremendously, but arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it, and anything I can point out, you can just say “well that’s because they’re doing it in the open now, they were always doing it”, which is just as unfalsifiable. There’s basically no good outcome to debating this.)
> arguing about this is gonna be fruitless because it’s all subjective, there’s no hard numbers for any of it
I was just genuinely curious what somebody with your set of opinions has in mind for a time frame, because "1/100th the corruption" is too vague for me to quantify in my head.
As for arguing, I generally don't expect to change opinions with comments, especially those of whom I'm engaging with directly, so no worries there.
1/100th is hyperbole. But it has gone up. My opinion on the timeframe is the obvious one:
Since Trump. Entirely.
I generally think there’s actually not that much corruption in politics in the US. Mostly just insider trading, if you count by dollar amount. But I think generally there have been studies on the net worth of people before they are elected to public office versus after, and it’s within a few percentage points of the general population. There’s also the issue of lobbying firms hiring ex politicians but to be honest there’s something to be said for an ex-politician as a lobbyist: they have expertise and connections, they’re valuable to lobbying firms even if there’s no favors involved.
What we have now is:
- The president openly hocking a cryptocurrency and making billions off of it
- Taking money for early access to his posts on truth social, which is essentially how he communicates to the public. “Give me money and I’ll tell you first”
- Giving pardons to his supporters in a brazen and obvious way
- Taking donations from private donors to fund his pet projects like the White House ballroom
I could go on but like I said, I’m not really interested in the actual debate here because nobody’s gonna change their minds if they haven’t already.
Where do you get the $250B crypto number. He is corruptly profiting of his position, plain as day, but $250B in crypto? Really? What's the point in ridiculous exaggerations like this when the truth is bad enough?
> The US has been marching in that direction for a while.
It's trivial to remember corruption issues from 100+ years ago (I learned about one in middle school with Teapot Dome and political "machines", and those are hardly the full extent) so this is another one of those cliches that is easy to claim but is never proven. There's always some. Humans gonna human. But that doesn't mean either (a) there's always a high and critical amount in magnitude-of-impact OR (b) it's been definitely increasing.
Let's stop saying it as a general trend without examples.
On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.
It's naive to believe that corruption is impossible or vanishingly rare. It's also naive to believe that the current administration is not a major step change.
There's a few I could recount from before this current onslaught, but the delineator is that those incidents of corruption were a once a year sort of thing. If you want examples there's the PATRIOT Act in 2001, No Child Left Behind in 2002, the 2004 rewrite of CAFE standards for vehicle emissions, and the 2007 bailouts of General Motors and Wells Fargo. From about 2000 to 2013 every year you would have one big thing that all the major news outlets like NBC or CBS covered, and then about a dozen smaller things that specialized entities with specialized interests like Mother Jones or Chalkbeat would cover. After Citizens United in 2013 things started to accelerate to about twice and two dozen times a year because the perpetrators could argue it wasn't corrupt, merely "politically motivated speech." Since 2017 however that has been shortened to twice a week and a dozen a day.
> On the flip side, let's keep pointing to all the specific Trump examples.
"They" (the cult that worships Trump) would simply presume "TDS" over such an idea, but the fact here is that Trump absolutely is "off his rocker batshit insane" (to a degree we've not seen before in any U.S. president yet), and anyone who claims that he's "good for America" is just as (or more) insane than he is (or they genuinely do hate the U.S.A. and only support him because they know the kinda harm he's capable of doing).
Another fact is that if one really gives a damn about corruption, then you gotta start dealin' with it sometime or it just continues to get worse, and now is probably a good time to start, since it's currently lookin' so outta control that nearly everyone with more than a couple of braincells can easily see it and can't plausibly deny it, and givin' it time to fester doesn't seem like such a great idea. Historically it's never once been good to let the rot fester, and it never led to anything good for anyone to do so.
The big cheap lever that everyone has is voting, and using whatever social leverage you have to get people around you to change their vote.
Primary legacy democrats. In NYC, the primary was the real election. Then vote in the replacement Democrat. Replace any Republican in any elected positions, then start taking a closer look at the local D machine.
Ah yea, the famously successful political approach of “discard half the people, they don’t matter, then throw away half of the ones left over”. Works very well.
"Many of the most damaging emails suggest the committee was actively trying to undermine Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign. Basically all of these examples came late in the primary -- after Hillary Clinton was clearly headed for victory -- but they belie the national party committee's stated neutrality in the race even at that late stage."
Maybe if they don't like the results of the elections, they'll hold new ones until the "good" result comes out (true story, happened in Romania (a EU country) two years ago).
Protest. Insistently try to convince people around you to join you. Initiate and organize these things.
The have been many, many protests throughout history. Some did nothing, some changed history. Many of them were done under much, much more dangerous and difficult circumstances than a protest today in the US. Yes, some American protesters have already died at the hands of the authoritarian government, but that is only going to get worse and worse if you let it.
That's a lot of words to issue a reproach of people using manipulating "truisms" and propagandic non-specifics, without using any specifics of your own.
You might have a strong argument but you seem to be afraid to name anyone or anything.
When people say that US corruption is nothing new, they aren't condoning it, they're (in every case I've seen) drawing exactly the contrast you are making - it was like this before, but now it's so much worse!
Corruption was not isolated incidents and unproven theories before, there have been corruption scandals throughout US history and even similarly flagrant actions earlier in the US (read about the "robber barons" of the industrial era, the early figures in long-lived political dynasties like the Bushes or Kennedys or the history of organized crime groups like the Irish or Italian Mobs). Political machines built on graft and money laundering were just thought to be something of history books because nobody pays attention when things are going well and the past century has been pretty great for US citizens overall. We've come to dominate the world militarily and economically, righted historical wrongs and corrected contradictions in our society, and achieved a level of global cultural and political influence that is truly unprecedented in history. Now, we are probably going to go through another few tumultuous round of reforms and changes just as previously happened.
I refer you to the Knapp Commission Report of 1972.
Page 1 (the very first words):
"We found corruption to be widespread".
Page 10:
"Commissioner Murphy in his early statements about corruption regularly included a pointed statement indicating that the corruption in the Department was limited to a few officers. On one occasion he went so far as to imply that there were no more than about 300 corrupt police officers in the entire Department. After Patrolman Phillips had completed two of his three days of testimony at our public hearings, Commissioner Murphy found it necessary to discount his testimony of widespread corruption, referring to him as a 'rogue cop.'"
"Smith defined it [the rotten apple doctrine] as standing for the proposition that 'police departments are essentially free of corruption except for the presence of a few corrupt officers who have managed to slip into police service and also into key assignments such as gambling investigations, despite rigorously applied screening procedures designed to keep them out.'"
"the Department now rejected this approach 'not just on principle, but because as a way of controlling corruption it had utterly failed.'"
Page 7:
"The Commission examined and rejected the premises upon which the rotten-apple doctrine rested"
Page 11:
". . . they [the public] are sick of ‘bobbing for rotten apples"
Page 5:
"investigations have occurred on the average of once in twenty years since before the turn of the century, and yet conditions exposed by one investigation seem substantially unchanged when the next one makes its report. This doesn’t mean that the police have a monopoly on corruption. On the contrary, in every area where police corruption exists it is paralleled by corruption in other agencies of government, in industry and labor, and in the professions."
Page 61:
"The Commission’s findings were hardly new. As long ago as 1844, when the state legislature created the New York police force as the first municipal police department in the country, historians record an immediate problem"
(This was followed by a brief summary of every previous scandal and Commission dating back to 1844).
The US has been suffering from late-stage capitalism for quite a while now. The obvious example is Citizens United allowing corporations to make unlimited political bribes. We just pretend it is okay by calling it "lobbying", but with the current slide into fascism the megacorps no longer feel the need to pretend.
It has been there over 50 years, with the ratchet tightening toward where we are now not each year - but mostly in the shadows, not in your face laughing.
Two things change each year:
- how much the populace has been proven to “take”
- how much further the empire’s attention is spread out, leading to it not serving its own interests and citizens, aside from continuity of governance
Not everyone pointing out corruption is normalizing it, by the way. I’m personally looking forward to the conclusion of that.
Wow, i really dislike your argument. So instead of cleaning their acts on corruption, war crimes, and other abuses, the Democrats should just be held accountable to nothing because Trump is worse?
I'm sorry but your mindset is precisely what got Trump elected. The democrats abandoned the working people, propped up the military industrial complex even more, and enriched CEOs and bankers. Trump propaganda is not the reason people are not voting for them.
Just look at DSA. Why do you think so many both democrats and republicans end up supporting DSA candidates? Because they are the only mainstream candidates who are not 100% corrupt.
The ones (perhaps not so much candidates but national leadership?) that outright pursue Russian interests are surely 100% corrupt, if you count 'semisecretly serving an entirely different and hostile country' as corrupt. I get that the counterargument is 'yes but USAID and NATO are existentially evil and so anything for the purposes of destroying NATO is legitimate', but at that point you're Sephiroth-posting and I don't feel obligated to respect that at all.
I dont think it existed nearly at the same level, not even close. And honestly, even now, i still think it's a handful of actors doing a lot of it.
Kinda like when women say that men harass them in the bars and a lot of men seem confused because we don't think we harass them, when it can be like 1 guy harassing 20 women in a bar on the same night.
Can you prove any corruption from another President similar to one very obvious case of corruption, where the UAE invested in a very clearly scam crypto company run by Trump's family (who have no crypto expertise) and then very soon after got contentious export licenses for Nvidia chips?
Grant and Harding are famous for being personally corrupt.
Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment for political corruption.
Reagan colluded with Iran to prevent the release of hostages during Carter's re-election campaign and later sold them weapons to bypass congressional oversight.
These are just a couple well known examples at the presidential level, I am sure that for every one we know about there are dozens if hundreds of similar examples.
Go further down the scale to the congressional, state, city, and municipal levels and you encounter even pettier levels of corruption where you can buy votes for 5 figure construction contracts or just simple cash handoffs.
Like everyone here said, they just don’t even care about being “caught”. Not ten years ago most of this stuff would likely end a career or land you in prison.
Now it’s just, “So what? Nobody can do anything.”
It’s not better that the corruption is blatant. They’re rubbing our faces in it, and not the least bit concerned about consequences. The message is clear… there aren’t any, anymore.
And the most insulting was how they telegraphed it all. Accuse people of things they clearly didn’t do… and then actually do all those things.
They've always rubbed our faces in it in modern times. There was a time, not that long ago, when Presidents wouldn't accept payments for speaking after office. It only began with Gerald Ford. Previously it was felt that it would impugn the integrity of the office, and obviously it 100% does. Nonetheless, now presidents are happy to e.g. bail out companies and then take tens of millions of dollars in speaking fees for 30 minute chats with those exact same companies.
The real issue is that partisanship tends to blind certain people to corruption when 'their side' is in office, which largely works as an enabling factor. When nobody cares or nothing happens over a 'little' corruption, it just leads to a little more, and the next thing you know - you get to where we are.
My feeling about all the corruption talk is that everyone is at different points on the "oh yeah now I see it" curve. I've noticed that I'm really annoyed at people who are just now getting it as I've been seeing it for 20+ years. Because people who are further behind didn't see it before they have no idea how bad previous corruption was and only see the new corruption as a unique evil, unmatched by anything that ever happened in a million billion years. Which then makes for very tiresome arguments about how bad it used to be back in the day. They actually argue that it used to be fine, but NOW it's bad.
Anyhow kind of a rant but it's an insight I had as to why nobody can agree on anything despite lots of folks probably being honest/good faith actors.
I think when people grow up with something it grows to become all they know, and so they assume it's normal and everything else is aberrant. So the overt corruption of now a days (or at least of yesterdays) is not even seen as corruption, because otherwise surely somebody would do or say something about. Surely.
So large 'awakenings' require localized extreme circumstances, or at least the perception of extreme circumstances. That perception keyword is what makes everything so dumb, but I won't complain. More people being 'aware' is a great thing, regardless of how we get there.
Reading things like this help me understand how so many people fall for scams. You're so extremely trusting that it's hard to wrap my mind around... I can't relate on any level.
Bad news is, you're probably in the midpoint of that meme bell curve. Grown up structures and institutions are designed well, with accountability built-in. Many many good people work in them, who hate corruption as much as you do. Bad actors are whistle-blowed upon, persecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. It's incredibly difficult in practice to do anything significantly corrupt and stay unnoticed. I don't know if you work (like, at a large-size workplace), but imagine doing something shady at your work, surrounded by your colleagues. It's not easy. The amount of surveillance, paper trail, auditing that government work entails is way more than any normal business.
The irony is that your unending cynicism is actually turning you into a fool for the other side: the populists that constantly discredit institutions. They figured out that your cynicism (aversion to being scammed?) is so strong, that it can be used to scam you. They only need to discredit everyone else, that's easy. Make conspiratorial allegations based on perceived outcomes, not actual proof. Sell you all the cynicism in the world: everything is broken, everyone's bad, and you're one of the smart ones who sees it. US institutions are corrupt and worthless. This lets them pretend to be experts, because you're now a guest in their version of reality. And they directly financially benefit from your attention.
Institutions maintain real internal accountability (none of these alternative media populists do), implement real processes that work, tackle real issues in ways that take into account all stakeholders, and don't just produce slogans and talking points. I know they're old and not cool, but they work. Unfortunately, very few groups are left that actually defend them, you all got scammed by relentless, self-serving, financially incentivized alternative media into thinking that everything is broken.
Just because things are complex, doesn't mean they're broken. Just because measures taken aren't always satisfying, doesn't mean they are malicious. Don't get scammed into this world view by people who directly financially benefit from selling it.
Prove him wrong. Show us documented cases of corruption from, say Obama, or Biden, or Bush Jr. And then we'll compare it to the documented cases of Trump corruption, starting with his 2 crypto pump-and-dump schemes and his family's fake crypto company (3 already very brazenly open ones and there are more!) and let's see if you can pull similar for any of the previous presidents of the 21st century
Looked this up and it seems like most if not all high level officials divested from companies they worked for or would profit from. Cheney still owned stock in haliburton but it seems he gave away profits when selling those to charity, he did get a large parachute when he left them.
This is very different from the current admin at least. But direct profiteering by high level officials didn't happen or they were very good at hiding it. They did make their friends and old colleagues very rich, maybe that it reason enough?
And I am someone that considers that administration to be full of war criminals that manufactured a reason to invade Iraq.
Do you have a source that says it was an analytical error? Everything I've read over the years suggested they knew there were no WMDs, yet went with the narrative. Here's one post that cites a CIA report that shows the administration knew there were no WMDs.
Not directly, but indirectly by declining any punitive actions. Ideally the banks earnings should've been used up towards the bail out punishing shareholders in the spirit of the free market. But if I remember at that time, execs paid themselves large bonuses immediately following the bail out.
Most of the big ones. The government in fact was issued equity in these banks that they later sold to recover the funds. So it was very much necessary to preserve shareholder value.
This arrangement probably wouldn't have upset people so much were the people responsible for the crisis held accountable. Worse still, they paid themselves huge bonuses as soon as they got bailed out from the bailout money itself! All this made people question the real intention behind the bailout. Corruption is often effected indirectly, so as to give the perpetrator plausible deniability.
No, they’re not examples of corruption. Did Bush or Biden seek to profit from their actions financially? Not that I know of, unless you have proof showing what and how.
Corruption is not limited to financial profit. There are many ways to engage in acts of self interest like grant personal agenda, favours to friends/donors, quid-pro-quo etc.
These people are also all wealthy with stable fortunes - they don't need a lot of cash because they have everything. Trump is also a rich guy, but he has a lot of debts and legal troubles and worries about leaving office, so he urgently needs cash to bankroll and bribe and attract likeminded individuals to help him.
I think it's worse. It's not that the government doesn't care that the public hates it; it's more like the government is doing whatever it wants and half the public is going wild absolutely loving it.
I also gotta wonder what percentage of this group is amplified beyond reality by bot armies and hostile foreign actors. There can't really be that many people so completely detached from reality, can there?
isn't really the crux of the problem with modern day USofA, more and more people are completely attached to their algo tuned bubble, curated for them by the data scientists of <insert techno silo here>.
It's not just the hostile bot armies of foreign actors tugging on the strings of perception, the distortion is coming from inside the borders.
There is no local media in the US.
A wide swath of the electorate gets 100% of their news from Fox news.
In Texas, it is widely known that the Trump family are experts in crypto finance, and worthy of the gains they have made. (also that sharia law is widely practiced)
When people that aren't highly educated have no source of accurate current events, they have a warped view of reality.
That 35% will change their tune if it screws their stuff up. Trump et al is great in the large unless he's your business partner or boss screwing your money and life up, hitting on your wife or daughter, owes you money etc. Cheap symbolism is appealing in a fog only, not in your face.
I think you’re underestimating the true believers. Plenty of conservatives are willing to suffer if they think it makes others suffer more. See Dying of Whiteness.
> The national favorability rating for the Democratic Party sits around 39% to 41% favorable, with unfavorable ratings ranging from 48% to 54% across recent mid-2026 polls. [0]
And Congress as a whole...
> The approval rating for the U.S. Congress stands at 10%, while disapproval has climbed to 86%, according to data from Gallup. [1]
Diffuse organizations like "Congress" or "the party" aren't what you're voting for. Unfortunately Congress really does take it on the chin for the actions of the President in midterms, because that's very recognizable and personalized, and partisan votes (or just staying home) are the only lever people have to express displeasure.
"People hate Congress but love their Congressperson. "
I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country. But the system has become totally dysfunctional making it basically impossible to really work on issues. The influence of money is just too much. To me this goes hand in hand with the rising inequality that gives a few people at the top outsized influence. Super PACs don't even have to deploy their money anymore. The simple threat is already enough to bring most Congress people in line if they want to keep their job.
> I honestly think most Congress people want to do good for the country.
That seems wildly unlikely. Wouldn't there be evidence for it by now? Over the last decades there have been scant murmurs of the US congress sitting down and taking a serious look at what might be good for a country. I'm happy to say that the root cause is a voting public in the US (everywhere, really) rewarding unprincipled liars and punishing principled politicians. But the outcome is that the US Congress is full of unprincipled liars who have little regard for the good of the country, because that would be a principle that gets in the way of political expediency.
The system isn't some abstract concept foisted upon them from on high. They control it. There are some very high-level constraints on them that are all-weather good ideas and apart from that it is a free-for-all. The reason the system is dysfunctional is because that suits the congresspeople.
Most of the US airforce is executive transport. Clearly you dont actually know people higher up in government. As someone who dated a very high up state legislator in my state said: She totally doesnt care cause she doesnt suffer the consequences. And at the congressional level it is again a level apart. Michal Crichton has a name for this, I think!
I hate my congressman. Why, he won't listen to me. No public meetings, no interviews with real press. Only 1 way phone calls, where you can submit questions via e-mail a day before the event.
No private meetings either. I have repeatedly called both his local office and his DC office. If I have a donation, a staffer will meet with me.
His philosophy is simple "You love Donald, I love Donald". It is the focus of the mailers that are sent out every quarter.
This elections democrat has no polling. The prediction markets give her an 8% chance of winning.
I'm sure you understand the dystopian irony of your last sentence, but I thought I'd highlight it anyway. That's some "no fighting in the war-room" level commentary on the state of the USA.
People don't feel like they are well-represented by either party.
They may like some republican stances (say, reduced regulations and welfare spending), but despise others (Trump, wars, anti-renewable). Meanwhile they might like some democrat stances (Inclusivity, environment), but not others (high spending, rent controls, etc).
So you're stuck between a rock and a hard place where there's no good way to express your desires. I can totally understand not wanting to vote in such an environment, and disliking the government no matter what. You can't get your specific views represented because everything has been collapsed into two broad camps that average out - and as lots of research shows, no one is truly average.
You are in good company with most Americans in that regard.
It seems like the whole "we just blame the other side for everything we want to do, and then use that as justification when we actually do it" strategy must be well orchestrated, but the voters themselves legitimately seem to believe it is actually how things work. I am darkly impressed at the skillful manipulation.
Well friend, the current political climate in America might be unprecedented, but is not unique. As someone who lived under a mix of military, monarchy, psudo-democratic and democratic governments for first 30 years of my life, I've seen this played out many times before.
That's what blows my mind, nothing that is happening is actually new, we have seen this shit play over many times. And yet the system was completely incapable of shutting this down.
I think this whole "that half" and "this half" thing makes it significantly harder to hold people in the government accountable. I know plenty of conservative people who think the corruption in the government is out of control.
Do they act on their beliefs or merely parrot them?
I ask because I've known people who were shocked at what took place 2021-01-06 but who proudly voted to re-elect Trump.
Today isn't much different: talk to a conservative voter who complains about the tariffs, Iran war, etc. and ask them whether it would be enough for them to vote Democrat, and the answer is near universally no. Lots of people have performative outrage because they're supposed to be outraged at what's going on, but the truth is that there's no line the Republican party can cross which would make them switch votes. Exceptions to this rule are still few and far between as far as I can gather.
Elections are won and lost by the people who don't vote so not voting for Trump still counts as a win.
Most politics is sold as tribal. "Our leader" and "Our team" are not the same thing. If "Our leader" is a disappointment, "Our team" can still be the good guys who need to do some house clearing, introduce some fresh blood, and all will be well again, etc.
Reality in the US is most politics is billionaire-funded. Trump didn't just happen, and he certainly didn't pull himself into the top job through his own efforts. He was groomed for decades before being crowned.
That's the level of corruption most of the population never sees. It's why the establishment is so scared of wildcard politicians and the DSA as a movement - both threaten to snip the strings of corporate funding.
As long as those strings are there, what happens in the media is kayfabe. The real decisions are made elsewhere, and the big tentpole events - 9/11 and its aftermath, the various Middle Eastern wars, financial crashes and bailouts - are the special menu the rich get to feed off, and the public never sees in advance, never mind votes on.
Do those conservative people keep voting for Trump? Will they support his blatantly unconstitutional third term run? If so I think we need more words for nuances around what conservatism has come to mean.
I'm sad to say I don't feel like I have a good handle on what is going to happen in the near future. Between the ongoing daily "flood the zone" from the administration and how fast AI is moving I have no idea what happens even a few months out from here.
Do I think he will run? I don't know - he said he wants to, regardless of constitution, and I think he would love the vanity of it if he was sure to win. They've done a lot of work to be able to suppress votes, throw out mail in votes, and declare the election invalid, plus the legislature seems inexplicably spineless, so I don't know if he would run again or not. Anything but release the epstein files I guess?
It's not comprehensible without understanding that huge amounts of people are watching straight up lies and propaganda all day every day for their 'news'.
A lot of the early Trump responses were incredulous about some insane thing Trump said to a rally crowd, but he was basically repeating whatever insanity they'd all heard on Fox News the night before.
Once I understood that capitalism is (thinly) veiled slavery, and that it creates a system to suppress those that add value, I have found it easier to follow what is happening over there.
We just don’t see the slavery because we are the best compensated slaves. But most of us want to become masters, don’t we. “Entrepreneurs“, right? So at some level we know that that is the system we live in. And we are at the top of the bottom rung of that ladder. But it is still the bottom rung. And it is still a ladder.
If Trump tomorrow says communism is great, then every Fox news host, MAGA content creator, and MAGA bot would be extolling the virtues of communism. The republican house and senate would enable it, maybe with a small bribe here and there. There is no line. There is no integrity. It's just looting.
Imagine there had been no Nuremberg trials. The Nazis just got a slap on the wrist and almost immediately let back into politics as usual. That's how we got here. We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks.
As a general rule, anyone who tries to use slavery as a skeleton key to understand US politics is most likely an ideologue with an agenda. Sane people don't propose struggle sessions for events which happened 100+ years ago when everyone involved is long dead. You wouldn't point to a gigantic statue of Genghis Khan to explain what's wrong with modern Mongolia.
I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks.
The poster you responded to did not mention slavery, they mentioned the confederacy, which held a variety of views, many of which still inform the politics of many Americans today. Acknowledging this reality seems reasonable.
Your replies indicate your disdain for appeals to the history of American slavery in political discussions, yet you were the one who brought it into the conversation, diverting the thread by initially straw-manning the parents view.
This is bad faith hair-splitting. You know perfectly well what tshrimple thinks "Nuremberg trials" were needed for, or why they think confederates were "evil fucks".
They didn't say the Confederacy wasn't really about slavery, they said it was much more than that. And it's those more abstract ideologies which have persisted through American politics, as traced in the history podcast episode I posted in a sibling.
They were evil fucks. Slavery was one among many deplorable things conservatives supported and still mostly support to this day. They also opposed women's suffrage. They opposed civil rights and fought to maintain segregation. They fought against gay rights. They fight against trans rights. They literally fight against any minority who might land on an equal playing field. Hey... guess who has been stating lately that women shouldn't be allowed to vote?
They are always the first to cast someone as an "other" and scapegoat for all of their problems. You're the type of person to hear "Haitians are eating their cats and dogs!" or "Mexico is sending us rapists and murders" and say "That guy has a good point!". It's pretty fucking gross and you're a clown at best for defending them.
There has been a lot more than "some changes in alignment over the years"—the parties of 160+ years ago are essentially unrecognizable today. Given the nature of how the modern Republican party established its base over the course of the 20th century, this idea of taking pride in a legacy of ending slavery is basically comical, a fiction that falls apart with even a basic knowledge of the history of American political ideology and party alignment.
1800s Republicans were a big business, religious, nationalist party. The Union side in the Civil War was motivated by religion (cc "Battle Hymn of the Republic") and nationalism. Rich men paid to have poor men serve in their stead.
Some people believe they have a right to land based on claims from millennia ago.
I suppose you could question their sanity, but the point stands - history has a short memory, and a few generations are nothing.
Especially when the after-effects of slavery, including segregation, disenfranchisement through gerrymandering and for-profit imprisonment, and other forms of continuing violence, are still live issues today.
You seem to be missing important parts of US history, not least of all the century of Jim Crow. I mean, come on, my Boomer parents were already alive to see the Civil Rights Act passed.
For a trace of the thread directly from the civil war to the current Supreme Court, check out this podcast episode:
That map is inaccurate. Unfortunately slavery is still very much a thing in many parts of the world, including forced labour, prostitution and some sweat shop labour.
The PRC and North Korea still use slave labour as do some other countries. The Soviet Union had slavery with the Gulag system during the 20th century, and other places such as East Germany had some within living memory.
As a general rule, someone trying to use a simple single numerical measure as a skeleton key to understand politics across nations is an ideologue with an agenda.
As for the Genghis Khan comparison, I may have made an error. We may just be dealing with severe cognitive limitations here.
If you think slavery is the key to explaining everything about the US, the burden of proof is on you to show that. Just because something gets discussed a lot does not prove that it's important. Donald Trump is himself the child of immigrants who immigrated to the US well after the end of slavery, and maintained a residence in a state (New York) which opposed slavery. The relevance of slavery to his presidency is at best unclear.
The 1970s were 50 years ago. "Long dead", in other words. Did you know that Brazil didn't abolish until 1888? They also imported far more than the US: https://www.slavevoyages.org/static/uploads/01.jpg
I don't think you can say "long dead" until no one who met them is still alive. We have 6 serving Senators over the age of 80, meaning they were born in the 40s or earlier. We have a total of 76 serving Senators who were born before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed...
It's called penal labor, and it was and remains widespread around the world. (And, yes, Brazilian law requires mandatory labor for all prisoners.) It wasn't until the middle to late 20th century that countries began to reform penal labor. But it's complicated. Without penal labor you can't force prisoners to, e.g., do laundry or mop floors. Even mandatory community service is a form of penal labor, and you can still find that in some Western European countries.
The norm now is to require a wage for mandatory labor, but of course often it's just a pittance. (Only 6 US states have uncompensated labor.) But even when you require minimum wage, many criminals owe restitution, so it could be and is taken away again.
Many US states have penal labor systems just like in Europe, that is nominally opt out, mandatory wages, etc, but at the end of the day it's always open to accusations of coercion and claims of "slavery".
The rhetoric around the 13th Amendment is exactly why we're in the situation we are now politically. Everything is equivocated to maximize rhetorical impact. Every unethical thing a politician does is "corruption", so when you get open and egregious corruption as with Trump, people can't discriminate and assume it's all the same.
Was penal labor abused to roll back the clock on abolition? Yes. Is penal labor abused today? Yes. But calling it slavery, drawing parallels to chattel slavery, is just irresponsible.
"Around the world, at least eleven million people are imprisoned, either pre-trial or following conviction. Most sentenced prisoners will work while in custody...
...
Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work—sometimes for no pay, but typically for very low rates of pay.
There are, even so, multiple potential benefits to prison work. For example, ICPR’s recent research indicated that prisoners who could not work (when prison regimes around the world were restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic) reported many negative consequences, including to their mental and physical wellbeing. At the minimum, work may mitigate some harmful impacts of imprisonment. At best, it may increase prisoners’ prospects of successful reintegration into society, potentially also benefitting society by reducing recidivism."
The question isn’t whether prisoners work in other countries which I’m confident you know and dodged.
The question is whether the prisons in Brazil are private, and are allowed to sell prison labor FOR A PROFIT, incentivizing both greater incarceration rates, and disincentivizing release.
The answer is no, I’m not aware of ANY other country that allows a private organization to profit off the labor if people imprisoned by the state. At least not any country we would consider 1st world.
It’s absolutely absurd to suggest the current situation is beneficial to anyone but the ruling class and anyone claiming otherwise has never been to prison, never had a relative or friend who has been to prison, or is literally a psychopath who lacks basic human empathy.
Your comment stated: "And does Brazil have their own 13th amendment that allows them to use prison labor as their modern slave workforce?"
The article I linked states: "Most countries’ legal systems, however, carve out an exception for prisoner-workers, permitting the state to require them to work..."
So my quote directly answers your original concern.
Your new concern is about private prisons. Here's a new quote from the article which addresses your new concern:
"Involvement by non-public entities in prison work can take many forms. In most countries including all three of Brazil, the United Kingdom, and the United States, for-profit companies operate entire prisons (or provide services within prisons) under government contract. Similarly, the operators of both public and private prisons in all three countries contract with buyers, equipping prison workshops and using prisoner labour to produce goods and services which go on to be sold beyond the prison."
(p. 15, emphasis mine)
So no, the US system doesn't seem to be especially unusual, according to this article.
You're welcome to decry this practice as inhumane, btw. I just don't think it is some sort of skeleton key which will help us understand every aspect of US politics.
I'm anti-Trump. If you tell people "Trump is a corrupt asshole", that has a chance at convincing supporters to abandon him. If you tell people "the US needs a cultural revolution due to events from past centuries", that's what got him elected in the first place.
A good general wouldn't voluntarily shift the battleground to a region where their troops are weak. Political persuasion is no different. The Democratic Party keeps losing because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues. If Trump is as bad as you say, prove it to me by showing willingness to strategically cede ground on a few issues in order to win more voters.
>We're still fighting the remnants of the confederacy. Germany and Japan in particular purged most of those elements from their society. Here we built statues to the evil fucks
That is a historical fact which has important explanatory power. It may not directly be the best basis for public Democratic platform, which most people probably agree with. The core manifestation is in our institutions, and that's what we need to fix. I agree with you that framing it through the lens of corruption is the best overt political strategy.
I’m generally aligned with your point, but I also don’t think the official position of the Democratic Party is that we need a cultural revolution, nor do I observe most Democrats feel that way.
What I do see is media and politicians on the Right characterizing extreme positions held by a minority of folks on the far Left as though they are adopted by the entire Left, and that weak uncritical minds on the Right believe that nonsense. Rush Limbaugh pioneered this technique to profit himself, and Trump gave him a fucking Presidential Medal of Freedom in his first term.
I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence. Anyways, I do what I can to push back against them when they say things which seem wacky to me, as in this instance.
Maybe I should work harder to make my actual views clear. I added a few sentences to the end of my original comment in this thread: "I don't think this is a slavery thing. Trump just sucks." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49572347
Scared others into silence with what magical powers? Zero control of both chambers, zero control of the executive, military, cable news, Supreme Court, law enforcement etc. With what is this mighty far left minority scaring people? Protest sit-ins on campuses? That's what makes you quake?
> I think you're somewhat underestimating how effectively the far-left minority has scared others into silence
Besides all the YouTube videos, X posts, the addition of two new right-wing TV networks (OANN and NEWSMAX), “Truth” Social, WSJ, NY Post, etc.? Silence is a myth perpetuated by the right (“people are trying to suppress the truth and your 1A rights!”) to build a following when in fact opposition voices are plentiful.
> because they cling to unpopular positions on cultural issues.
The Republican propaganda machine will always be ready to make any cultural issue the dems hold 'unpopular'. They turn anything and everything into a culture war, and if nothing exists, they are more than happy to manufacture it.
Observe how they turned their own vaccine into a cultural issue.
There was a lot for people to be angry about, particularly the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush administration got us into as a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11, combined with the 2008 financial crisis and Wall Street public bailout that culminated in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street
You should check out this podcast episode with two historians, tracing the influence of the Confederacy ideology all the way to the current Supreme Court:
Pretty much everything that has happened in the past has consequences today. It's the butterfly effect.
Slavery has existed as far back as history. The idea that people are created equal, and are equal under the law, is very, very new, and that idea has resulted in a great many positive things happening.
It's recent enough that people living today knew former slaves. That's not ancient history at all, so I think the comparison is not good. I'm sure Brazil also has to deal with fallout of their practices, but I don't see how it changes how the fallout of US slavery impacts the US.
A full 76 of current serving US Senators were born before the passing of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which officially ended segregation and the Jim Crow era).
That certainly means it's recent to me. My own parents (both still alive) grew up while "separate but equal" was still law of the land.
So, yes, it's definitely racism. Or shall we say, the lasting imprint of slavery and the Confederate ideology more generally. Reconstruction failed and therefore allowed the Confederate ideology to persist for 100 years of Jim Crow and right on into today.
>It's recent enough that people living today knew a slave.
Slavery ended in 1865. That's 161 years ago. So maybe there are a few modern 80-year-olds who interacted with 80-year-old former slaves when the modern 80-year-olds were infants. Those 80-year-old former slaves would themselves have no memory of slavery since it would've ended before they could form memories. And the modern 80-year-olds would have no memory of the interaction, since they themselves were infants when the interaction happened.
In other words: There aren't very many of these people, and it's unclear if most of them would count.
You know something which happened more recently in the US than slavery? Prohibition. A trendy, self-righteous moral crusade which didn't accomplish what it set out to achieve, and ended up creating a bunch of problems instead.
I think Prohibition is a pretty good template for understanding the form and tendencies of modern left-wing activist movements. But--at least reducing alcoholism was a good cause that we had a shot at doing something about! Short of inventing a time machine, crusading against slavery from centuries ago seems rather pointless. That's not a problem for activists whose primary goal is to be trendy and self-righteous, of course.
Someone who died in 1964 was technically a slave, but not yet old enough to function as a slave. Real slaves were mostly dead by 1940, the few who remained are outliers
Someone replied to my comment. I composed a reply, then they deleted their comment. Since I already put in the effort to write my reply, I will paste it here.
* * *
Trump outperformed with black people relative to Romney and has appointed black people to his cabinet.
>problems going on to the present day
Often more noise than substance, e.g. the odds of a black man being unarmed and killed by cops in the US are something like one in a million annually.
>The white vote in the US was a solid majority for Democrats before the Civil Rights Act and is now a solid Republican majority.
Ethnic bloc voting is not at all unusual by international standards. I might as well interpret black loyalty to the Democrats as racism against white people.
>Those who "deserve it" are usually not white.
Trump has had many many "beefs" with white people such as Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Mike Pence, James Comey, Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, Megyn Kelly, Joe Scarborough, Rosie O'Donnell, etc.
What frustrates me is when activists take an issue which should be a winner ("Trump is corrupt, let's do something about government corruption, all Americans can unite around this") and immediately pivot to handwavey, divisive race-baiting and talking about how utterly depraved conservatives supposedly are. Sometimes it seems like you guys are determined to lose.
Sounds like you’re completely ignorant to US history post civil war. You seem to know nothing about the daughters of the confederacy. Know nothing about segregation and Jim Crow. You have no idea that conservatives fight to this day to maintain monuments to literal traitors to the country. Or that they still routinely fly the flag of traitors to the country. Or more likely you do know about all of that and agree with it and just want to white wash conservative history in the US.
I'm sorry you're too dense to see why "The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments. They must just really believe in states rights except where it actually helps people. Sort of like the confederates who pretended to be about states rights while demanding other states return their "escaped property". And it doesn't explain everything in US politics. I never claimed your strawman. It explains US conservative's degeneracy. Their complete lack of shame or civility. They never had any.
>"The Party of Lincoln" is defending the confederate flags and confederate monuments
I think the obvious answer here, insofar as that's true, is that historical continuity is simply not as strong as you are assuming. I mean you've basically admitted it yourself. In 1860 would you vote for the Democrats or the Republicans?
West Germany and Japan did not purge "most of those elements". Both places retained a surprising number of people from the early 1940s, for the simple, cynical reason that many of these people had skills and experience in administration. Many Nazis ended up in significant positions in NATO and even NASA, and some such as Walter Debus and Klaus Barbie ended up in American employ.
A few examples of prominent Nazi officials who worked in West Germany: Reinhard Gehlen, Albert Schnez, Adolf Heusinger (Inspector General of the West German Army), Hans Speidel (major NATO commander), Johannes Steinhoff (Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1971–1974), Johann von Kielmansegg (Commander in Chief of Allied Forces Central Europe), Ernst Ferber, Karl Schnell, Franz Joseph Schulze, Ferdinand von Senger und Etterlin etc.
“Researchers found that some 77 percent of senior officials in the [West German] Justice Ministry had once identified as Nazis, a portion higher than during the Third Reich, the period between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler controlled Germany, and much higher than researchers expected. The group included Nazi-era prosecutor Eduard Dreher, a man who sought the death penalty for petty criminals, and Max Merten, who played a role in deporting Jews from Greece.” – 2016 Christian Science Monitor Study
East Germany did purge most of its Nazi elements, but became a dictatorship in its own right. When Germany reunited, there was a purge of East German judges but a number of people involved in the old system continued in the new Germany. (Even Angela Merkel who had a significant position in the FJD.)
Most of former Soviet Union made a limited attempts to remove Communist era officials. Some of those responsible for Stalin era atrocities died in their beds. Russia is still full of them, and age, not officialdom . Even people like Valentina Tereshkova the former cosmonaut. PR China has never purged itself fully of Maoism, and Chairman Mao's picture still pops up everywhere despite being arguably the biggest mass murderer in history.
I was thinking more that Nazi's rounded up and gassed a million Jews. So I'm not in a forgiving mood if you're making joking comparisons or trying to be cute.
They did that in the end. In the decade leading up to the final solution they engaged in a lot of shenanigans that have already been replicated by maga.
Many governments engage in "shenanigans". One of the biggest mass deportations in US history was directed by Eisenhower, the same guy who beat the Nazis. Switzerland just recently considered a more severe halt to immigration than anything contemplated by the US.
> One of the biggest mass deportations in US history was directed by Eisenhower
About a quarter of a million, hardly the biggest .. and importantly this was at the request of the Mexican Government who wanted many of the Mexican workers who entered the USofA to be returned to work in Mexico.
Despite the derogatory name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback was a attempt to appease the Mexican Government and get their continued support to provide "legal" Mexican labour to the USofA.
Eisenhower did not gas Jews. Please fuck off with your weak ass what about Eisenhower bullshit.
I know you think you're being cute but some of us had grandparents that had to flee that shit and do not find quite so hilarious as you and your mates.
I think you and I are on the same page? I'm trying to push back on the handwavey Nazi analogies by pointing out that garden-variety "shenanigans" are not necessarily rare, i.e. the Nazi/Trump comparisons are not necessarily valid.
People who feel lost and disaffected would rather see the whole thing burn down than continue with the status quo even if it is objectively worse for them.
And its clearly been building for a while. Trump and Obama are about as opposite as possible, but they both won by campaigning on "change".
This is true in most political systems. Its how most revolutions start. The commoner is always screwed but they still support them.
I dont think america is all that exceptional. All sides just see it through their filter bubble and miss the forest for the trees.
Don't know why you're being down voted. I can't believe there are people who didn't vote for Harris because she wasn't anti-Israel, as if Trump would somehow be better for the Gazans.
(Well I can believe it, it shows a limitation of rational thought and second order effects, which our electoral system exploits. And some of them are outright "accelerationists" which is a looney strategy itself.)
Nobody does. The amount of teenage angst posted in this forum about the current admin is amusingly pathetic. None of it matters. Congress constantly gets a free pass while we focus on a figurehead largely enabled by a passive and embarrassing congressional electorate. “We found the scapegoat, blame that guy!”
It is from the Bible and the old testiment law. A goat were prepared for sacrifice (part of a much more complex ritual that I'm skipping), but then lead out in the wilderness and released instead of killed.
Corruption has been rampant under multiple administrations. I actually had hoped Trump might root out more corruption in his 2nd term, but two things happened: Congress wouldn't go afraid the corruption that was being found, and Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight...after 2-3 assassination attempts on Trump himself too.
It's easier to start looking the other way when bullets start flying.
Having said that, I'm not saying Trump was a saint, but it seems this board forgets we just had Obama and Biden running their corruption rings for 2 decades too...
Part of the problem with the open brazenness of the corruption is that the populace of the country will follow the lead. The rot will spread far and wide if it is seen that there is no consequence.
Yeah, just look at the eastern block countries - corruption was everywhere and considered totally normal. So much that it eventually brought the whole thing down.
But it still left a deep mark on people - people who grew up under the old regime still considered it normal to bring gifts (usually alcohol in some form) when visiting doctors - the idea being it would be rude not to!
This is having real consequences - I saw an interview with a doctor, where he showed the reports a big closet, full of alcohol from these gifts.
That was from just the last week. He also mentions colleagues with tendencies for alcoholism dying from this...
I find this optimistic, suggesting that the rot can be stopped with some consequence? The rotten "populace" in the country seem to love their corrupt politicians, and it's because they're corrupt too. Meritocracy began it's slow death with the banking bailouts.
Now, if you had some grand master plan to use some part of the federal government to stomp some people in some state for doing it wrong this is probably bad for you. But on a 30-40yr timeline it'll probably just mean a cycle of the feds doing less and the states doing more and the diversity that comes with that.
Like we'll all screech about the EPA revoking this or the DOT ceasing to do that but whatever those policies are, if people want them they will be picked up by the states. In most cases it'll probably be 40-something states continuing to do whatever it was or 40-something states saying that was stupid all along and stopping immediately.
The EPA is a good example of why this is so bad. Even if 90% of the states pass rules to protect the air and water it takes only a small number of states not following environmental regulations to cause a massive amount of harm to air and water quality and the effects of that can be felt in other states.
It also hurts businesses when they suddenly find themselves forced to follow an inconsistent/conflicting patchwork of state laws instead of a single federal law.
That said, it's still encouraging to see states picking up the slack and passing laws to protect their residents, even though I can't help but feel bad for people who become stuck in states where the government doesn't care about them. I hope that people will be begin to flee states where the government chooses to put corporate profits above the well-being of the public or wants to strip them of their rights, but realistically there will be many people who can't afford to move or who feel compelled to stay because of ties to their friends, family, and community.
You're only looking at the glass half empty side of things.
The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Not having to put up with rules that make sense in the arid plains or western deserts is gonna be a huge boon to everyone east of the Mississippi.
The "consistency" argument is like 99% red herring. There's already a huge patchwork because the way federal agencies work is the states do most of the enforcing so you have 50 states worth of precedents and political whims to keep track of. If we're gonna suffer that patchwork it should at least work for the state as they want it rather than just be various flavors of spin on federal rules nobody fully agrees with.
You can run this sort of exercise with just about every federal agency. Stuff like the FRA, DOT and other things where the literal subject matter is flagrantly interstate are where this sort of thing is least true.
> The environment in the US is very diverse so why is it federally regulated to the degree it is?
Because there’s relatively little need for diversity. Dumping toxic waste into river systems is as bad in Oregon as it is in Florida. Things that genuinely need local management (e.g. wildlife) can be managed locally.
You are ignorant of how much of what the federal agencies do is create rules and recommendations and best practices and then tell the states they don't qualify for grant bucks if they don't implement somme amount of all of it.
This is where most of the dysfunction comes from, not the classification of what is or isn't a pollutant. Because this is how you get some water rich municipality in the southeast having to adopt stupid rules they don't even want based on some guidelines that were written to be compatible with the water poor west.
There'd be a ton less people who are categorically opposed to the federal agencies if not for this sort of thing. And it goes for most agencies, not just the EPA.
Which are a completely different set of ecosystems with different needs than the gulf coast, or the southwest, or the northeast.
Like for example aquifer depletion is a serious thing in the southwest. It's borderline irrelevant in the northeast which is only getting wetter with climate change anyway.
So you split the difference when you write the federal rules and the result is insufficient for the southwest and their governments have to do a bunch of BS rule stretching crap to take it further and a nuisance in the northeast where their governments have to do a bunch of the same BS in the other direction to lighten it up.
Why not just let these states write their own laws that work for them. Sure you'll probably get one or two screw ups but most states will probably be better served.
The Supreme Court opened the doors to this with Citizens United. You can’t expect one party to unilaterally disarm while another rakes in hundreds of millions. We all just need to come together and agree on a constitutional amendment to end this.
I don’t think that’s right. The US government cares a lot about what the public thinks about them. They propagandize actively on social media, the president puts his personal name onceverything, they are extremely persistent in their messaging to loyal reporters and so on.
I think they have discovered that what the public thinks simply no longer tracks what they actually do: "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters“
>Corruption in the US isn't new, but it's never been done as openly as it has been recently.
It's been open a long time. Patriot Act/Snowden/Assange, JFK coverup, shutting churches to keep Walmart open, social media censorship, gerrymandering, immigration enforcement, etc
Well it’s almost certainly not just more open. But also more common and more intense. There is 100% absolutely no possible comparison to Trump’s personal acts of corruption in any prior White House ever.
Maybe it doesn't qualify as a personal act of corruption, but George W. lying us into the the Iraq war followed by capturing people off the street and then torturing them in military prisons, is comparable to what's happening today, in my opinion.
Dubya did some of the most horrific things in modern American history, and filled the pockets of many of his associates im sure.
But in terms of the letter of the law unfortunately he couldn’t be held accountable for much of it because it was legal! The US legal system has largely agreed that the president, especially with a bloodthirsty Congress behind him, can torture, kill and maim as much as he pleases so long as it’s outside the border.
Trump is bad, but please let's not excuse corporate neoliberal dems that are totally fine with insider trading, legalized bribes, and are quite proud that their consultant campaign workers get lucrative gigs at corporations/boards due to insider access. I mean we have people like Gillibrand that are openly in bed with the crypto industry while somehow decrying what Trump is doing. Feels like they're upset that Trump exposed how rotten this game has gotten.
At some point you realize there is a game that you were never playing and it becomes a bipartisan issue.
No one is excusing them. But it's worth pointing out that in every aspect of government ethics reform, from campaign financing to insider trading by government officials, the legislation promoted by Democrats is stronger than that promoted by Republicans, who often not only don't promote reform but actively oppose it. For example, the recent lukewarm ban on insider trading was opposed by Democrats on the grounds that it was too weak, excluded the President and VP, and included unrelated voter regulation measures. And the Democrats have been trying to pass legislation to correct Citizens United for years. So while it's a bipartisan issue, one party is much more pro-reform than the other.
After reading about Ground News, I am starting to gain a real appreciation for how effective "both sides are bad" is at benefiting the right. It may well be the closest I've seen to 4D chess in reality.
They help launder this idea that every issue has two reasonable sides. Which is patently false
There is some kernel of value to seeking out information from diverse sources. But groups like Ground News pervert that to mean that the left and right are on equally good terms with fact and reality (nevermind that collapsing politics and news media down to left and right is balderdash)
Huh... I'm super liberal (not so progressive necessarily) and I enjoy Ground News a lot. I don't feel like it gives an impression of both-sideism at all, and that's something I'm quite sensitive to?
That is their stated purpose, though? To give equal parts left & right so that you can supposedly be better informed. But the implicit assumption is that left & right are equally truthful & fact based, which is not the case, so the resulting coverage leans right.
Notably, like another allegedly unbiased news source (RealClearPolitics and related), Ground News is run by conservatives. They know precisely how it works and are taking advantage of sensible people who think they must be getting biased news and want more exposure to the other side, with the intention of ratcheting the Overton window ever more to the right.
No, I don't believe that is their stated purpose. It's to share stories from across the spectrum and then emphasize how differently they're reported or not-reported.
That does not necessarily imply giving equal airtime or equal legitimacy to the different sides at all.
Eh, to the extent that I care about it being "run by conservatives" it's only in whether it creates a distorted perception of reality. As someone with a very varied media diet I don't really find them to be distortive, so I don't really care whether the founders are conservative or not.
When I hear people making these claims (all unproven theories, or misrepresentation of what really happens), I want to know: what happened in democratic administrations that went in favor of a large corporate donor and against the public? Any specific example where they diverged, and a politician ruled in favor of the corp, and against their constituents?
I think a lot of these beliefs are downstream of some perceived aloofness and intellectual elitism in the party combined with sour grapes about how 2016 turned out for certain grassroots demographics in the party.
I don’t think the vibes argument there is incorrect, Dems have failed to deliver for a long time, but the claims themselves really just make a conspiracy out of the shitty electoral situation Dems / progressives have been in since the creation of the senate 250 odd years ago.
Okay and how do you think it helps the democratic candidate's ability to win elections when they are part of the same party that supports corporations over people? In the not so recent past the democratic party controlled Congress for 60+ years on the new deal coalition alone, now look what the party has morphed into...
I read the article too, in what sane world is it okay if 70% of citizens thought their governments + corporations are corrupt over a 20 year time span here. Society apparently has get quite bad for the last 20% to realize the state of things.
The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
>The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United. Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature. Not everything in politics is symmetrical, and misguided nihilism is actually how we got where we are. Turns out the road to hell is paved with "it's both sides."
> I don't know, if we'd had an overwhelmingly Democrat-dominated government, we'd have comprehensive bans on government insider trading
We had two years under Biden with Democrat control of the House and the Senate. They passed no legislation to ban insider trading.
It probably didn’t help that the poster octogenarian for insider trading was Speaker of the House
> and we'd correct the bad ruling in Citizens United.
CU was absolutely the correct ruling as it just means I can take money from wherever I’ve earned it and spend it on publicizing my message.
Prior to that you had to buy a media company to have the same effect. It was perfectly fine for Fox News or The NY Times to focus articles and segments on what they deem newsworthy to push their narrative. But if I made my money selling widgets, I couldn’t spend it the same way.
It’s a perfectly reasonable ruling.
> Corporatism is definitely a bipartisan issue, but at least Democrats recognize it as a problem, while to Republicans it's a feature.
The same people probably complain the Senate is an antiquated body that should not exist because mob rule is the only true voice of the people.
> two years under Biden with Democrat control of the House and Senate
Nobody has controlled the Senate since ‘09. The veneer of bipartisanship created by the filibuster meant that Congress has done nothing since ‘09 (outside of a few stimulus bills and the Green New Deal which was probably a good bill in the long run hampered by bureaucracy). It turns out that’s great for the party that wants to do nothing, and really bad for the party that wants to do something.
You could say that Dems should’ve killed the filibuster. But there was no appetite for it until Trump 2 because things weren’t going great but they weren’t going belly up
With just 48 Democratic senators and 2 independents caucusing with them, the 117th Congress had to deal with rampant GOP filibustering, starting with setting up an independent commission to investigate the January 6 riots. https://www.npr.org/2021/05/28/1000524897/senate-republicans...
> The only thing I got out of this article is that both parties + the F500 need to be destroyed.
Destruction is easy, as we are all witnessing.
Making things better is hard. It takes commitment to incremental change, often having to overcome setbacks, and accepting that the product of democracy is inherently nonlinear.
Democracy also demands that its participants understand that most of the time what each individual wants to be, will not be exactly as they envision, since that would be autocracy.
If you think I (or virtually anyone else) am a fan of the two-party system, you probably aren't paying very close attention to... anything.
Things can be varying levels of imperfect. Things can be imperfect and acceptable, imperfect and bad, or imperfect and extremely extremely bad. It's not a sign of intelligence not to be able to discern between them.
> Feels like they're upset that Trump exposed how rotten this game has gotten.
You make it sound like he's the one calling this out, "Drain the swamp" style, when instead he's the one elevating it to the next level. A month ago he sat for a TV interview in the White House, and he said, verbatim, "My children are insider trading all the time". And it was so on-brand for Trump's administration that it barely moved the needle.
Barron is an unemployed college drop out who gained $150M in net worth in a year. Donald Jr and Eric start companies or get paid millions for board seats that get billions in government contracts within days of their forming/joining.
You, unable to form more than three words about all of this, but able to go on a vague rant about how its the Democrats we should really be angry at. Corruption is endemic. It's never been as brazen, and as much, as now.
What is this argument really? Comparing one man’s corruption to a whole party with decades of history. “Honey my cheating on you is bad but look at this man Trump with decades of public philandering.” Whataboutism at its finest.
But we didn’t have to vote DJT into office as a counteracting force. Whether every decision is bad or not, not my point. It just seemed obvious that he wasn’t the right guy.
Some people can’t vote against their party. Some people believe write in is the move.
A write in, or even just scrawling "FUCK YOU" across the ballot is at least an active protest. It shows that you aren't apathetic to, or okay with, what is going on. It'd be interesting to see a write in campaign for someone with enough public support to be more than just a protest vote though. It'd be interesting to see someone campaign to the public with no interest in participating in the two party system at all, just asking the public to write them in when the time comes.
Well said. It's not that I disagree with the concept, just that the action itself is not meaningful to the overall process (not without a lot more people doing the same).
I've never written a name not on the ballot but wonder sorts of feelings arise afterwards. Is it "Good, I did the right thing"?
There are plenty of third-party candidates in most elections. However, most people are convinced that they have to vote for the lesser of two evils. In addition, a third party or independent candidate who starts getting too much public support will be likely be sabotaged long before election day.
For example look up Butch Ware's recent run for governor in California. It's just the tip of the iceberg in how the two party system maintains control.
> It shows that the government isn't concerned about what the public thinks
Similar to the "Death of a Euphemism" [0], where some politicians decide they don't have to cloak their proposal in the trappings of reasonability any more.
I highly recommend the whole series, as it has renewed relevance today.
Implying that it's always been this way is part of the reason we are now here. For my entire life, bad faith commentators insinuated that the federal government was rife with corruption. When under Democratic control, of course. The time that Al Gore made one long-distance telephone call from his official desk, using his own personal calling card, birthed over 200 New York Times articles, 30 of them on the front page. We just had to get to the bottom of all that corruption!
The problems that happened during the Clinton admin (with the exception of Whitewater) weren’t so much corruption as they were short-sighted neoliberal trade deals and hostility to organized labor, which accelerated the process of hollowing out the country. But this was also an unusual period in US history due to the end of the Cold War, so this administration could be an exception. Most of the scandals from this period appear quaint.
An under-examined axis of this problem is that people choose to believe in corruption because it's better than the alternative.
It's way more comforting to believe that Bill Clinton's buddies (or whoever) got rich selling industrial America overseas to the cheers of the progressives who thought all that stuff was dirty any way because at least that way it looks sane and planned and rational, albeit selfish, than it was done out of ignorance or malice.
And once enough people believe in the corruption, it manifests itself because it's perceived as how things are.
> short-sighted neoliberal trade deals and hostility to organized labor, which accelerated the process of hollowing out the country
What if they weren't short-sighted and not hostile? Look at Germany, which did not do this and instead kept strong provisions in favor of organized labor and protecting their domestic industry from foreign entrants.
They can't keep doing it anymore. That would have been our future. But we pivoted to high skilled services and it has served us immensely better than if we had tried to defeat other powers in industrial and manufacturing where they had a clear advantage we didn't, in terms of cost.
This ignores that Germany is not energy independent (unlike the US), and that it suddenly lost its main energy supply and followed this up by closing its remaining nuclear facilities, a massive self-own.
This also ignores that the US is now having serious trouble supplying its own military and tech sector due to the same deindustrialization! It also basically created its most formidable geopolitical competitor through this process.
"Both sides are just as bad" is copium for when the guy from "your side" is revealed to be a corrupt piece of shit. You don't like it, so you justify to yourself that the other party is also full of creeps and assholes and thieves, so you can continue to support your guy guilt free...
Of course the supporters of one particular political party is much more better at gymnastics of the mental kind than the other side. Having no spine makes it quite easier...
Thats just party politics operating as it was designed. You only have one real party just like communists and fascists. The democrats control everything in the country via bribes from their super pacs and "charitable" foundations and fundraisers.thats why they were so upset when us-aids got suppressed.
Thats why people give millions to the clintons for haiti and the Haitians never see a single penny. The corrupt take that tax money and give it to their friends who give it to charities which are owned and operated by their friends who then donate that money to campaigns or other charities who do the same thing.
The republicans are just as corrupt but their power comes from the dems pissing people off so instead they vote against the dems but the reps are the only other option so the reps do the exact same thing as the dems and steal tax payer money and set up laws that make it more difficult for small business to compete with government sponsored monopolies. The left and right parties are like a left and right hand they wont get in each others way or fight each other they cooperate to screw the american people over and the stupid americans keep pretending they have a choice between the left slap or the right slap. The only way to take control of the country is to root out the corruption but the corruption is perpetuated by party politics and stupid americans are more loyal to their stupid corrupt parties than their nation or neighbors.
It is perplexing how similar it looks when a stupid person who is elected by a stupid base is directing a country.
The difference between people doing corruption before and Trump is that the other people had a "legit" lifestyle and worldview but did corruption as a side thing. An ignorant business person like Trump has corruption/intimidation/coercion/deception etc. as a lifestyle because someone like him can't live in the world that he is living in without this lifestyle.
Trump isn't really corrupt in the same sense as Obama because they are fundamentally different. You could even say more educated politicians that are able to understand what is going on are more evil.
People won't tolerate evil politicians anymore because they understand they are being robbed by the financial system and aren't getting their piece of the pie. It has to be a break to democracy (war?) or economic reform or Mamdani/Trump style government from now, it is really unthinkable people will keep electing Biden/Hilary/Harris/JD Vance kind of politicians anymore unless there is a big breakthrough in brainwashing
What would anyone expect to happen when people are stupid enough to elect someone who tried, with multiple parallel methods, including an attack on Congress, to steal one election already.
Okay so now that everyone has been shown how they can cheat the election with mail in ballots. How do you propose to stop the republicans from using mail in ballots to steal the next election? Since clearly you cant use the feds to weaponize the post office.
How do the democrats secure an election? Do you just make sure you stuff the box with more mail in ballots than the other guy? You already made it illegal to show id when casting a ballot so if the republicans want to play the same game as the democrats how do you stop em? Do you just claim that its okay when we do it?
Our elections are already secure and have been secure. And mail ballots have never been shown in any significant way to constitute "cheating". Mail ballots are only issued to registered voters.
You need to cite some actual sources behind the question loaded in your comment.
Problem is, public thinks that the government is corrupt but it doesn't impact their voting choices. Public is OK with corruption.
If you look at many deeply corrupt countries, corruption is beneficial for majority of population there. As people in Belarus used to complain to Russians some 20 years ago, "in Belarus we live very poorly because Lukashenka does not allow us to steal unlike your bosses", and they were right.
When Congress people enrich themselves while serving in office[1] and there's a revolving door from public service into private and we have billions in unaccounted spending, fraud everywhere you look (especially since Covid), it's no surprise people feel upset by corruption.
My hope is we will, one day, have an administration that roots it out using modern fraud detection, gets rid of waste, shuts down non-profits that funnel monies to their founders (anything where "overheard" is over 50%), stops insider trading amongst politicians and government workers, but I don't see them voting against their greed.
All they have to do is persuade the public that all politicians are corrupt, then they can be as corrupt as they like. It’s the populist playbook the world over.
It is concerned, but not in the way one would think.
From what i hear politicians like Gavin Newsom from California are passing bills to prevent independent journalists like Nick Shirley from exposing fraud and corruption.
That signals that they (government officials) are extremely concerned with what the public thinks, but mainly in the sense that they don’t want the public to have the information that would put them in a thought spot.
On the other hand, the fact that fraud and corruption is only reported by some early-twenty-something independent youtuber/journalist should really tell you a lot on the state of mass media in the USA (in the sense that the mass media are essentially colluding with politicians).
More than that, in 2020 Trump got a record number of votes for any Republican or sitting president ever. In other circumstances he would have won. It’s just that Biden also got a record number of votes.
You are partially right. We used to collectively throw people out when they were exposed as corrupt. Now it works like this: Republicans get called out by Democrats, Democrats get called out by Republicans and Democrats. And if that goes on long enough Democrats will start overlooking their own transgressions, I see that starting already.
It's amazing that in a discussion about how bad corruption has become or is perceived to have become under this particular Republican administration, that there's several people hand-wringing about the Democrats and how they've been corrupt, or they're worse, or now "what if they get hypothetically get worse as a result of this?". Anything to avoid having to take direct action against those currently in power, currently openly selling pardons, shitcoins, and government contracts.
Looking at their charts, Democrats and Independents clearly think corruption is up a lot since 2024. But Republicans think corruption is down from 2024. The polarization of the electorate in the U.S. is pretty incredible.
It's not just a question of belief, it's also a question of their information environment. The polarization in the electorate isn't just a question of what people believe, but what information their fed. Unfortunately, information environment -> belief -> environment is forms a strong sustaining feedback loop.
It is also worth pointing out that that 83% of republicans (vs 90% of independents) still believe that the government is widely corrupt. Like given the ~20% "crazy threshold" in basically any type of political polling, 80% of republicans is effectively "every single republican you could ever convince".
I would not lose sleep over polarization in this context.
Same for supporting issues. If the "other" party proposes something, people are automatically against. As soon as "their" party supports it, they are all in.
The MAHA movement is a good example. If democrats had said something about the problems with high sugar food or additives, republicans would have shouted "nanny state". Now that Kennedy is talking about it, they support it.
And stood in front of a TV camera during Obama's administration and said that Republicans would not support bills that objectively made Americans lives better because their goal was only to make sure Obama was a one term President.
Oligarchy has completely subverted democracy in the US.
In this era, venal actions are official actions. Nothing is even hidden anymore. Racketeering and thuggery are on display even during supposed negotiations.
The US is under mob rule. Sure sure, we gonna make a deal. Da best deal evah. Da deal is dat we won't whack ya.
Since 2024, Democrats went from being the most trusting (57%) to the most skeptical (91%), bringing all groups to within 10 points of each other on the question.
This is not a "both sides" situation: Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics. There is no universal implication here IMO, this is just Democrats joining the 80-percenters, i.e. everyone
>...Republicans dropped from 87% to 83% after their guy was elected, whereas Democrats nearly 1.5x'd their number of skeptics.
This is not surprising; a big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years. No real evidence of that was ever uncovered, but it didn't stop Fox News and every Republican leader from constantly referring to the accusations as if they were true. One the other hand, Trump is openly accepting huge payments from foreign governments, and never even bothered to separate himself from his companies. Republicans were at 87% due to general distrust of government and the rumor of phantom corruption, while Democrats (who tend to be more trusting of government) rose to the same level only on clear evidence of real corruption. The authors don't break it out by parties, but the overall level during Trump's first term is about the same as Biden's. Since the article notes that Republican skepticism is higher in general and more consistent, this implies that Democrats' perception of corruption is much higher in Trump's second term than his first. Which makes sense, the Republican leadership was much more responsible in applying guardrails in the first term than the second. Trump is getting away with a LOT more in his second term.
Well, obviously not an appreciation for the distinction between evidence and opinion. The fact is that there is clear, uncontroverted evidence that Donald Trump has profited directly from his presidency, and no clear evidence that Joe Biden did. Not everything is symmetrical in politics, and it's not always "both sides."
The most corrupt things Biden has done were:
1. Hide the extent of health issues. Par for the course in politics at this point for some reason. This is broadly just downstream of him believing he could continue before a precipitous health decline as election season began
2. Pardon his son who was teed up by the Republican world to be target number 1 for low level drug and tax charges.
Trump on the other hand has made literally billions of dollars since starting his presidency, not to mention the fortunes of his family and various associates. 100x is not even just a few orders of magnitude off.
The implication is that even if I might agree with you, we ought not be subjecting each other to incoherent rants in lieu of substantive arguments. Just don't say anything, if the only thing you have to say is They Watch Fox News.
Even if you're inclined to believe the conclusions, this should recognizably be a silly rant and I don't want to live in a world where we justify sloppy arguments if we agree with the conclusions. If it triggers your defenses to the point where you can't see that this is a poor rant, it could be instructive to copy/paste it into an LLM and ask for an analysis or some counterarguments.
> Trump actually isn’t corrupt? Or Biden was actually secretly as corrupt as Trump is?
Incredible to me that you could think this is anywhere implied. Maybe you understand something better than I do, but I submit that it's brainrot to think my comment was somehow "Trump is not corrupt and/or Biden is equally corrupt".
However, the question of whose corruption rises to the level where a person is morally suspect if they don't speak out, is one that certainly cuts conveniently, isn't it?
> Maybe you understand something better than I do, but I submit that it's brainrot to think my comment was somehow "Trump is not corrupt and/or Biden is equally corrupt".
I don't really think you realize how that initial post comes across, because I'm re-reading your previous and struggling to come up with any other interpretation besides "both sides are bad".
If you are intending to say something different than that, maybe try stating it directly rather than sarcastically
When you vaguepost, you shouldn't be surprised when you receive follow-up comments asking for clarification, which was what I was doing. The most charitable interpretation, as another commenter noted, was that you were essentially saying "both sides bad".
> Even if you're inclined to believe the conclusions, this should recognizably be a silly rant ... If it triggers your defenses to the point where you can't see that this is a poor rant, it could be instructive to copy/paste it into an LLM and ask for an analysis or some counterarguments.
It seems to be triggering your defenses as well, to be frank. The primary claim:
> "A big reason that Republican voters were able to justify voting for Trump and open corruption was that they were bombarded with claims that there was a "Biden crime family" in office for four years."
Is essentially how I'm keeping my sanity living amongst people who voted for Trump. The only way I could find it justifiable is that somehow people believed that corruption wouldn't be this bad, or it was just as bad under Biden. I also know that there's a large contingent of nihilistic, psychopathic, "libertarian", chauvinistic technocrats that probably had no problem voting for Trump because they genuinely believed they would be able to make more money under a Trump presidency rather than a Harris presidency - but I choose to believe there are more people who were misled about relative corruption levels rather than pure psychopaths.
There are immigrants who commit crimes. Sure, it's not _every_ Mexican is a rapist and we're probably talking about basis points of basis points here. But it's a foundation.
Hunter Biden did get money from people who wanted access to Joe Biden. Sure, Joe didn't actually help them out. But it's a foundation.
The problem isn't the unfoundedness it's that it's extrapolated beyond what the foundation supports.
What I'm wondering these last few years is whether American "politics" has anything actually political to discuss like ensuring the pension system is still intact in 30 years, improving access to a solid education (and even more so: what does that mean?), drug prevention, transparent election processes, tax and debt management... Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI ... stuff that you could bicker over after all the actual politics were decided upon.
Is there actual politics? Or is it all for show?
(This is relevant to corruption because I think a populace is a lot more receptive to ignoring corruption if the politics is emotionalised and people are entrenched and you don't talk about stuff that actually would benefit you but you have to decide on how to act on it)
It doesn't event attempt to address any of those issues or anything real. American politics is all about keeping the working class distracted and pointing fingers at each other while the ownership class rapes (literally) and pillages.
Yes, there is a lot of "actual politics". For instance, the Protect College Sports Act is currently being intensely debated. It centers on the idea of amateurism in college athletics and what that means for things like college football and the Olympic sports. Americans love dominating the world at the Olympics every few years and that's because of the NCAA and college athletes, so people care about it.
> Over here in Europe you only hear about "US politics" like guns and cars or DEI
This is because Europe, and everyone else in the western world, is obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.
Protect College Sports Act not even on the radar for most people.
It's wild that a law that is more or less transparently about limiting player pay for their participation in a blatantly commercial activity gets cheered on by "fans".
It's clear that you don't even know what the act is about since it has very little to do with paying players. That has already been explicitly allowed.
It's about the prevention of forming mega conferences and funneling all the money and talent to the top.
Judging from your response, if you actually knew what the PCSA was you would probably support it.
Why should the money get spread around? It's a business, pay the people that earn it.
I understand what is in it and wouldn't take any of it as long as it is combined with caps on player pay. Where's the cap on media revenues or stadium ticket prices?
There is an antitrust exemption and a direct cap on school to athlete payments. Sure, third parties that aren't associated entities can still make payments to players, but its transparently the intent to lower the share of revenue going to the players.
There arent any real politics by design. Most people in this country agree on most issues, those issues are the things that you will never hear or see mentioned by any party politician.
The parties only maintain their power by making you vote against your own interests they do this by playing parties off each other. They pick the most divisive topics they can and they run on that. They will run polls to learn what people disagree about the most, like abortion. Then they will run the entire election on abortion. So the democratic candidate says you get abortion up until the week after birth which is literal baby murder which no sane democrat actually supports but it enrages republicans and makes them want to vote against the dems so the reps run someone the exact opposite and run on banning abortion entirely which is mostly supported by the extremely religious. So now instead of voting on numbers and plans and policy your voting entirely on emotion and fear and you have to choose between killing babies and the handmaids tale.
Party politics is designed to force every election into these awful games of would you rather instead of thinking about options and then choosing the best one.
All we have to do is put country above political party but thats asking way too much of your average american who actually believes in all the silly scripted political theater nonsense. If your an american and you only blame one party then your not just part of the problem but the whole entire problem. Your the girl who always cries about her abusive ex but absolutely refuses to leave them.
And i get it i totally do, your party is very good at saying exactly what you want to hear and when they tell you next time will be different you really want to believe. When they blame the other party you really want to believe and give them another chance.
Maybe your party actually does some things that you like. I just dont think its worth selling out the entire country for the crumbs they toss out.
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
> The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
The US’s democracy has been under fire from foreign nations and corporations for years. It has slowly degraded because of it. What we’re seeing now is the “all at once” portion.
Depending on how you reckon, you could argue it started much earlier than that. Some people say the downhill decline started with JFK, others say it started with Reagan.
They got it when the PATRIOT ACT was passed. That was the proof that all our rights and liberties are conditional, and Trump uses the revelation of that back then to pull off everything he is doing now
Even before this new record high, in the previous ~15 years the average seemed to be around 75% (±), which seems… high? I would perhaps understand the US public thinking that (some levels of) government being "incompetent", but not corrupt.
By some measure the US does seem to have 'decent' scores for perception of corruption:
Meta: in some ways it seems that the public's perception of government is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the US there is a large vein of "government is bad/incompetent/corrupt" and that's apparently what the US often gets. While in (e.g.) Scandinavian countries there appears to be a higher level of trust in government, and the people there tend to elect more competent politicians (?).
I'd guess it comes down to what counts as "the government."
Millions of people work for the federal government, and millions more for state and local governments. Is there widespread corruption among them? I don't think so. And I don't think my countrymen think so either.
But "the government" is often meant as just the very top. The President is corrupt. Big swathes of Congress are corrupt. We have a Supreme Court justice more or less openly accepting bribes. Among that small group, I would be comfortable saying that corruption is widespread.
I (and I'm sure others) would obviously agree. just a smattering of the obvious cases
* for years people have noticed that many members of congress use privileged information to pick stocks.
* lobbying post-Citizen's United has a very decidedly "buying politicians" aspect to it
* a congressman (Menendez) was literally arrested while holding gold bars from a foreign government. he went to prison, but is the only person on this list who has iirc.
* the former mayor of new york (a long-time police offer) was embroiled in a Very Funny, very obviously true corruption scandal for turkish airline tickets. the prosecution against him was dropped for no good reason.
I think there's probably plenty of minor corruption around. A lot of it takes the form of "I have control over funds and I am going to award contracts to people I'm close to"
Or maybe soft bribery, like government officials being wined and dined by lobbyists. I'm sure that isn't "supposed" to happen, but I'm also pretty sure it happens a lot.
This sort of corruption exists a ton at corporations for sure, so I am hard pressed to think it doesn't happen in government
Identifying as independents means nothing. 67% of independents in 2018 viewed one party more favorable and were unfavorable to other. In other words, the independents have a partisan lean towards one party and are more likely to vote that way.
That only matters of you actually do make different choices. But of course in turn even trying to control for that depends on their being meaningful changes in party platforms between elections.
So I'm pretty content calling it a meaningless measure.
Democrats lost to a gameshow host. Twice. They just had to be better than that, and they couldn't manage. Pathetic. They also created the conditions for his rise. Twice. The bar is so amazingly low, and yet you can't comprehend how they keep fumbling this. Maybe, just maybe, it's a good cop / bad cop arrangement where only capital interests win, and it's a race to the bottom for everybody else. Or maybe that's just a childish, stupid opinion. Who knows!
So you're capable of identifying that how people vote does matter, that the electorate actually did determine the outcome, you are not alleging that the election was actually rigged, but you think not voting in a first past the post electoral system - while expressing dissatisfaction with the outcome as decided by the voters - will achieve something?
You're ignoring the important fact that Dem primaries are rigged, or like last time, simply non-existent. Their agents of capital are preselected from the start.
Feel free to pretend you have a voice in the ballot box, but you don't in any significant way. You get to decide the color scheme and decide between decorum or crude, but it's the same pile of self-serving shit behind the scenes.
This is correct. That is why I changed from independent to an actual political party. There is no point, it is highly improbable that I would ever vote for the party that is against my values. The two main US political parties are diametrically opposed.
No, they each manufacture consent for capital interests in a race to the bottom for everybody else, using time-tested good cop / bad cop, revolving door corruption, etc.
I've never understood why I should join a political party. I mean, yes, I lean pretty heavily toward one of the two major parties in my voting, but what advantage does it get me to declare loyalty? Perhaps if I lived in a state without open primaries, but as it is I gain nothing by putting an R or a D in front of my name.
No, you are cutting off the nose to spite the face. Clearly if you lean heavily toward one of the two major parties, you should want to influence the party you lean to in some way.
The parties arent actually opposed its just that democrats want to change everything and republicans dont. Dems propose something and reps oppose it. Thats generally how its supposed to work but usually there is a debate that should accompany the proposals.
The general difference between a liberal mindset and a conservative mindset is the difficulty in making things work. Liberals believe that things usually work and the hard part is getting them to work exactly how you want them too. The conservatives think that things usually dont work and the difficult part is getting them to actually work.
This actually really matters when your talking about renovations whether its a building or a government you have to choose between the new fancy shiny thing will all the options and the old beaten up reliable thing that only does one thing and does it really well.
When dems propose something new, all the reps see is every way that it could go wrong or even be worse than the last thing.
When reps oppose something new all dems see is stupid old people afraid of progress.
And thats assuming that everyone actually has good intentions before we get into partisan bs and outright corruption.
The dem-rep balance would actually be really great in the politicians gave half a fuck about the country but they arent trying to make the country better in good faith they are trying to win politics which isnt even possible, a win for one party means the end of the country no matter which party the country needs the balance i just laid out above. You need long term trusted institutions and you also need to change and update things over time. Both perspectives are necessary if you want a functional government this petty infighting serves no purpose besides allowing politicians and their corrupt friends to loot and pillage the country from the inside while the stupid population argues over men in womens sports or when child sacrifice is okay.
So, vote for a third party. If you don't actually like the candidate you vote for, you're engaging in political negligence. When I vote, I almost never vote for a Republican or Democrat candidate because they are, by and large, not people I want representing me. So I vote for someone I do want representing me.
Voting 3rd party is throwing away your vote in the US electoral system. The reason is structural. Currently, I believe there are two independent senators and one independent representative. Independents are not another party they are just unenrolled and they all caucus with one of the two major parties. There is no third party representation in congress.
Less than one third of eligible voters vote. Your espousing a self fulfilling prophecy.
The only reason party politics exists is because of you and people like you who keep spouting this lie that keeps them in power.
So instead of lying just say that you fully agree with everything both parties do and thats why you keep them in power and refuse to vote for someone rather than against.
I understand this logic, but voting third-party should be reserved for democracies that are healthier than the US’s. When the only choice is a flawed but sane person or an extremist, a third-party vote is effectively a vote for the extremist. Your conscience is not as clean as you think it is, because you had the option to stop an extremist and didn’t take it.
That can work, if you are strategic about it. If your candidate is polling at 5%, you might as well have not voted at all.
Something I read once, probably 50 years ago now: you may not see a candidate you want to vote for, but you will probably see a candidate you want to vote against.
An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.
> An "independent" in America is a person who greatly desires everything Trump is doing but realizes that makes them a bad person and therefore refuses to admit it.
There's some truth to what you're saying, particularly a few years ago... but a rapidly increasing number of "independents" in America are strongly left leaning but feel that the Democratic party has abandoned them.
And they'll continue to vote Democrat, if they vote at all, for the purposes of harm reduction, but have renounced their official party affiliation.
>but a rapidly increasing number of "independents" in America are strongly left leaning but feel that the Democratic party has abandoned them.
Then they are listening to the Right. Biden did what he could to help unions and eliminate student debt.
The truth is those "left" leaning want socialism, but only for them, and not brown people. Socialism but only for their in-group. (That's also what you see with recent immigrants voting for Trump against even more recent immigrants. "Leopards eating faces party won't eat my face, etc.)
I know you’re going to get downvoted to hell, but you’re pretty much spot on. There’s something strangely desirable about being seen as the edgy contrarian “not left, not right” person. But 9 times out of 10, that person has approximately the same incoherent worldview most Trumpists have.
He's not spot on at all, and that's why he's being downvoted. He's examining the world through a false dichotomy of "if you aren't on my side, you support my enemies". But the reality is that most people who consider themselves independent are actually independent and vote for whomever they consider to be the best candidate.
We are seeing the decline and fall of an empire in realtime, it's just the cycle of life, nothing lasts forever. It's one of the reasons why I decided to do my own thing and build my own small bootstrapped startup outside of the West, and am much happier than being a part of something much bigger which is clearly in decline.
Lots of people here are focused on one guy. But the the article says "widespread". In my experience, much of the corruption is at a local or state level. At the federal level it seems the corruption is mostly related to agencies (GAO reports) and lobbying.
It doesn't seem like they asked about specific levels or branches of government, so presumably the respondents were giving a general impression. And in that case, it's hard to believe that a corrupt President wouldn't strongly influence the response.
That doesn't mean anything. All those countries are quite small compared to US in every aspect. If you want to compare then pick a country as big as size and population like US.
Unfortunately, decades of media conditioning and extreme polarization has led to a situation in which the normal checks and balances have been severely degraded or are non functional.
A significant fraction of the population is happy to overlook excesses from 'their' side. Combine that with extreme gerrymandering and you have the recipe for a situation where a majority of elected lawmakers have no real fear of an election loss.
We have a situation where the same people who were apoplectic about Hunter Biden's laptop are whistling past things like the pardon of George Santos and the Binance founder(with Trump admitting he didn't who CZ was).
There is no easy path back from this situation. Democracies that have reached this stage of late have struggled to come back.
This has to stop. Ask candidates how tough they're willing to get on corruption.
A good starting point for the next administration is to offer an amnesty on criminal prosecution to government employees who report anything of value they received outside their employment during the previous administration. If it's reported, they're safe from criminal prosecution. Anything that's not reported that surfaces later, bribery charges.
Then they have to pay it back to the government. Tangible objects (watches, jewelry) have to be turned in to a forfeiture office. Travel and entertainment are charged at a fixed rate (probably the max value the Government will pay for meals and travel to senior executives, so a trip on a private jet only means a first class fare). Allow easy repayments, with interest at the IRS late payment rate.
My impression is that americans got only those types of corruption most people can't benefit from personally (like skipping fines, getting some minor government benefits, local permits, getting legal work processed faster, etc). For most of them it's just on the TV and on the social media.
> Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S
The important keyword is "perception". It's not a measure or backed by any facts. People can have various opinions and due to the extreme polarized influence by the media democrats might think that Trump's government is the most corrupt ever and republicans believe otherwise.
The headline might as well be Record-High 89% in U.S says Santa Clause is not real.
Unfortunately if one asks "who is the cause of the corruption" you'd see two very strong modes in the data, and therein lies the issue regarding fixing things.
This is a measure of perceptions of corruption. Among regular Americans who have little to no first-hand information about it. While there may be some correlation between this measure and corruption, Gallup doesn't show that. It's mostly a measure of what's in the news cycle.
> Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
How is corruption defined for the purposes of this survey?
If there is none (I assume there is not), then it is only natural this number go up as the media highlights and propagandizes and highlights all actions taken by all government officials.
Is corruption widespread throughout the government in this country, or not?
Then that's very open to interpretation. Even if I thought the federal government was not corrupt, but I did think the local or state government was corrupt (or many local governments were, not just my own), I'd answer yes to this question.
Think about it as 25% who disagree to only 11. Less than half of the people who thought corruption is not widespread still think so. Further, the US is now the #1 ranked country in corruption.
I think it's more useful to think about the closed operations on the 0% to 100% range. A change of ~75% to 89% does not seem like much, but "only an 18% increase" is not a closed operation, so it's not so meaningful. You'll see this in machine learning, e.g. 70% accuracy to 75% accuracy is not as impressive as 98% to 99%, despite having a larger change.
Its not only the us people. It also change the pro-us or pro-west people's view from countries like china.
Before Trump, people still believe USA is a great country even with so many flaws. Its still has a good reputation.Trump changed everything. He is not a bad leader, he has thoughts, but he cannot implement them with caution. And he destroyed USA's reputation, maybe forever.
Its hard to imaginy the greatest democracy' country, the president is manipulate the stock market, publicly, humiliating his friends country, or vaseel state. When the pro-USA people in china talks how great the USA is and China shoud learn from it, the comments is no longer agree anymore, most of them are mocking.and thats what the younger generation will grow up with, the mindset is: yes china is not perfect, but its way better than the shit countries like USA.
You can see the change in the numbers of graduates return to china after college, its used to be low, not its near or >90%.
Citizens United is widely considered the event that would cause US corruption to spiral out of control, but there was always the hope that a constitutional amendment could get us out of this.
Neither side ever even attempted it. Every once in a while you get some lip service about small money donations but nobody ever tried to go after the problem at the root in all this time. Think about what that means.
Some local governments are fully designed to be perfect vehicles for corruption by this point. The incentives just lead to it over time as one corrupt prick makes things a little easier for themselves and their ilk to operate without oversight. Things compound over the decades of people drawn to the graft opportunities in local government with their campaigns funded by the beneficiaries of the graft, against little to no opposition.
The corruption is bad enough at the local level. I can’t even fathom how much theft is going on at the state and federal level. It’s one of the more frustrating things to see how much money you are paying into the system for such meager benefits. We can’t even get sidewalks installed in my area, but the township can certainly give a sweetheart tax break to one of their buddies to build a new gas station.
What I find fascinating about this is how the American commenters are eating their own, Democrats blaming Republicans, Republicans blaming Democrats, both spinning conspiracy yarns about "the other side" as well as independents ("the other side in disguise"), and generally treating each other like "the enemy".
Some other interesting tidbits:
- In America, perception of government corruption has consistently held about 11% higher than the perception of corruption in business. Even with the massive uptick of both since 2024, they've remained a similar relative distance apart.
- Since 2023, only four countries out of the 132 in which Gallup has posed this question annually have scored nominally above the 89% recorded in the U.S. this year: Lebanon in 2024 (92%), Peru in 2025 (92%), and Ghana and Nigeria in 2024 (both 90%).
It's also worth noting that one specific party and their very special media has been trumpeting Fraud Abuse Waste as if it's a real thing, on and on. There is a deliberate propaganda campaign that has been going on to convince people that there always has been rank corruption problems festering away, doing incredible harm.
DOGE was going to save us billions, perhaps even 0.2-0.4% of the 7T budget. Incredible! It was of course a sham, has found incredibly little, and was just a political chainsaw The Purge night. But that vocabulary is back again, has been faking the rounds once again, with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson using it quite a lot again.
A huge part is that this is projection, sure. That these corrupt people are doing the time honored tactic: accuse the other guy of exactly what you are doing. But also, we should take seriously the other upside for them/downside for the world: that terrormongering, telling us we are under attack, making us believe in a callous entropic world of horrors where everything is out to get us just makes us spiritually weak. That having no belief in anything, that undermining our spirit: that makes it much easier to loot and plunder the nation, and to keep quietly lobbying to bend all the rules to suit their amassed wealth.
Reminder again: in Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century he doesn't argue we should tax rich people through the nose to raise revenue. He says it's vital because otherwise unchecked wealth translates itself to media power, political power, that it becomes an ever larger ever more lopsided threat against democracy, and that we must take the rich to keep a democracy. The story telling here, that corruption is rank, often comes from the most corrupt, and weirdly, if delivered broadly, the risk is it yet again helps them, creates a disbelief in governance broadly, that prevents people from striving and hoping for better.
I wouldn't call it corruption when the richest man decides how the government's money should be spent. He is not an official, after all. I would call it a dead democratic system. EOL.
The disparity between Trump and previous presidents on income earned while president is so vast, you need a log scale graph to make it meaningful. Your favorite LLM can generate it for you (except maybe grok, I presume)
Wanna talk about the enrichment of US politicans? Not just the Trump and the Pelosi but also a serious discussion about the net worth of, say, the Obama, Ilhan Omar and Kamala Harris, etc.?
And the argument: "But they only made millions, while Trump made billions" ain't a valid one. It's not "better" if you only manage to steal less: you're still a thief. A less successful thief, but still just a petty thief.
Interesting that so far I don't see any comments about the epstein files and half of them not being released even under congressional order, let alone congress now being recessed for two weeks to avoid another vote for a second eptein transparency act.
I'm curious how these polls are conducted. These polls are at least already biased since people self-select. If they're online only, even moreso. If they're only advertised to echo chambers, even moreso.
Anyway, the result may be that the polls are only measuring younger people with nothing better to do. That's interesting but only a record high amongst that subpopulation. I'm fairly certain this is business as usual.
I wasn't surveyed but I would be part of that group. I believe the government has been corrupt for as long as I've been alive, if not longer. I also believe that it is not actually worse now than in the past. And contrary to what many uncharitable people in this thread claim, I am equally unhappy no matter which party backs the crooks in power. I just want a government that serves me, and I haven't had that in my 41 years on this earth.
In many countries around the world, corruption is a huge problem. But pretty much everywhere it happens there's a surface-level denial or attempt to hide it. If you're Putin or Erdogan, for example, you'll have children who get beneficial contracts and there's layers of obfuscation.
So there are three things that are scary about Trump's corruption:
1. It's so brazen and on a scale rarely seen. Apparently he's made $2 billion since coming back into office and he does so openly. Pardons are for sale. Truth Social has a feature to pay to get early access to posts to trade on, basically. There are crypto rug pulls. The list goes on;
2. A third of the population simply doesn't care and will defend it no matter what; and
3. He'll never be held accountable by any future administration. This is the worst part. If this happened in China, he'd go to prison and his assets would be seized. This would extend to his family and their assets. Just look at Hui Ya Kan [1].
The US just does not punish the wealthy. Look at the Sacklers and Purdue. There's clear evidence they hid the fact that Oxycontin was addictive despite their public claims and they have a large amount of responsibility for the opioid crisis. In a just world, they would all die penniless in 6x8 foot grey prison cells. And who went to prison for the 2008 subprime crisis? Oh, that's right. Nobody.
This also extends to the powerful. George W. Bush had an illegal torture program. Who went to prison for it? Only 1 guy: the whistleblower John Kiriakou for talking about it.
The Supreme Court is utterly corrupt. Anthony Kennedy allegedly traded his retirement for a job for his son. John Roberts's wife makes tens of millions in headhunting fees for finding lawyers to argue before teh Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas is just one bribe after another.
The entire government is captured by people who want to get rich by betraying their country to the ultra-wealthy.
I don’t know why this should be surprising since it’s all out in the open now.
They made Carter give up his family peanut farm to be President.
Trump and his family are selling stock every week, running crypto currency rug pulls, accepting gifts ostensibly for the country that they say will be donated to Trump at the end of his term(the Qatar plane).
It’s all out in the open under Trump term 2.
At this point if you think there isn’t corruption I assume you also think RFK has the right idea about health care and vaccinations.
The far right won office and made it manifest. Just like they complain on government inefficiency and that it can never accomplish anything while explicitly making those things worse while in power to prove their point.
Yes possibly so I'd have to see the evidence for that, but my point is it's great that such a large majority of people are now well aware of the horrific and disgusting corruption, inefficiency, and incompetence in governments.
For some quick and easy evidence, you could look at the history of the Post Office.
USPS has always been the poster child for efficient and effective government agencies. Despite claims otherwise, the agency still manages to deliver letters and other postage to areas private industry like FedEx, UPS, et. al. would never touch.
Unfortunately, over the years, Republican Congresses and Presidents have repeatedly attempted to sabotage the agency. Some recent(-ish) examples:
* The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, which required USPS to create a fund to pay the cost of post-retirement health care costs 75 years into the future.
* The Republican-appointed postmaster general Louis DeJoy overseeing the removal of 711 sorting machines as well as a number of public mailboxes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, which, due to Covid, was expected to have larger-than-normal use of mail-in ballots. Not only did it cause significant concern regarding mail-in ballots, but it also resulted in significant delays and backlogs in general mail delivery.
I’m not an American. Those not American are frankly gobsmacked that U.S. citizens voted the current President in a second time. You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
> You all literally saw what he did in his first term!
False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.
I live in California and even though Trump lost here he still got 1/4 to 1/2 the vote even in the coastal areas so a lot of people one might work with support Trump - there’s always an undercurrent of racist dog whistles in GOP campaigns that with Trump became daily broadcasts on social media and conservative news sources - these MAGA hear it and believe in that and the ones I’ve talked to are like cultists - they won’t believe any other evidence to the contrary and they like the simple message and the messenger - others are to blame and he can fix it.
I thought electing an outsider with theretofore no experience nor interest in governing was supposed to break the system in a good way so as to erase the incumbent problems and rebuild with common sense and integrity.
The problem with government was that wealthy charlatans were rigging the system in their own favor. Naturally, the solution was to put a wealthy charlatan in charge of the whole thing and eliminate the middle man.
Nah. At the end of the day it’s candidate A vs. B. Once they’re all corrupt you still have to decide between them and pick the lesser evil as you see it. They’re creatures of ambition and incentives, and the corruption is a feature of the system. It sucks but what can you do but vote for the corrupt dems or the corrupt republicans?
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