This is well-argued and persuasive. It confirms my long-standing intuitions (so it must be right) about the role money plays in political decision-making in normal times (putting aside abnormal times, like now, where corruption of a more obvious and venal sort runs rampant).
At the same time, ceding "low-salience" issues to the lobbyist's legislative pen is a really big concession. Much of what government does is both complicated and low-salience. If a species of corruption is confined to just these quiet corridors, that would still mean that most of it is corrupt.
Pachipala might bristle at the c-word in this context and point out that such corridors, while quiet, are open to all, at least all well-financed lobbying operations. And yet, this is a lousy way to make the sausage. Whenever laws are written by lobbyists, as apparently happens with regularity, we should regard the output as presumptive shit. What such law -- on any side of any issue -- could possibly be expected to reflect a well-considered balancing of interests for the public good?
There is an alternative model. It is that of the much-maligned administrative state. In this model, Congress grants broad but bounded authority to an agency staffed by professionals charged with a particular mission, say, keeping the air and water clean or whatever it might be, to make rules with the force of law. Congress is always free to overrule an agency rule, so it does not represent a usurpation of congressional prerogatives. But it falls on the agency to investigate the issue and formulate and propose the rule in the first instance. This is typically done by means of rigorous research, beyond the means of any office of congressional staffers, and cost-benefit analysis with an ethos of objectivity in pursuit of the congressional mandate. In this model, there is give-and-take with interested parties, but it is regulated by formal and transparent notice and comment procedures. The more such "low-salience" issues can be channeled toward such procedures, the more we can expect higher-quality sausage, less influenced by well-funded interests.
This is one of the sharpest pieces I've read on political dysfunction, and I think it identifies something even more fundamental than the corruption narrative's empirical weakness. What you're really describing is a mental structure — a perceptual filter that determines what people see before they evaluate evidence.
The "corruption explains everything" frame functions as what I'd call a victim identity strategy. If the system is rigged by powerful interests, then ordinary citizens are passive victims of forces beyond their control, and the only moral response is to seize control through regulation, taxation, and redistribution. You don't need to persuade opponents because they aren't sincere — they're bought. This is psychologically satisfying and politically convenient, but as your evidence shows, empirically weak.
Your alternative — that politics involves sincere disagreement requiring difficult persuasion — is an architect identity strategy, though you don't use that term. It requires treating opponents as rational agents with genuine convictions rather than puppets dancing on purse strings. That's harder. It demands engaging with tradeoffs rather than denouncing villains. But as you demonstrate, it's closer to how the system actually works.
What strikes me most is how the data you cite keeps confirming this pattern. The finding that money flows toward candidates who already share donors' views rather than flipping preferences means we're watching identity alignment, not corruption. The $14.8 billion in political spending against $1 trillion in holiday shopping is a masterful proportionality test — the kind of "compared to what?" thinking that shatters lazy narratives. And the fact that incumbent re-election rates are lower post-Citizens United than at any time since 1974 is the sort of counterintuitive finding that forces people to update their mental models rather than defend them.
Your Medicare-for-All example perfectly illustrates how mental structures distort interpretation. Sixty percent favor the abstract concept. Eighty-two percent are satisfied with their current coverage. These aren't contradictory — they reveal that people hold general preferences that collapse under specific scrutiny. The American system's requirement for sustained persuasion across multiple election cycles and individual states isn't a bug corrupted by money. It's a feature that stress-tests abstract preferences against concrete tradeoffs. The founders designed it this way precisely because they assumed sincere disagreement, not corruption, as the baseline condition of democratic life.
Where I'd push further: the victim-corruption frame doesn't just distort analysis of opponents. It produces systematically worse policy. If you believe the pharmaceutical industry is the sole reason we don't have single-payer, you'll never grapple with the genuine complexity of transitioning 180 million people off employer-sponsored insurance. If fossil fuel money is the only obstacle to green energy, you'll never address the real dislocation in refinery communities. The frame doesn't just flatter our worst instincts, as you put it — it actively prevents the diagnostic work that good policy requires.
Your closing argument is exactly right. The danger isn't that corruption narratives are false. It's that they become a substitute for the difficult, unglamorous, essential work of persuading people who disagree with us — which is the only thing that has ever actually changed a democracy.
A very impressive piece. It actually helped clarify my own thinking about the Trump presidency. I am deeply opposed to many of Trump's policies, particularly on the domestic front. It is important, however, to distinguish between issues on which there are differing conceptions of what the "common good" requires and certain aspects of Trump's actions which are sui generis: rhetoric which seeks to to portray anyone who opposes him as being an enemy of the republic, the "other"; unprecedented attacks on civil institutions; a constant stream of falsehoods that lead one to question the veracity of anything he says; intimidation through lawsuits; the use of the Justice Department to pursue his own personal agenda; and the effort to use every lever of power to for partisan and personal advantage, including the pardon power and the denial of federal funds to blue but not red states.
Making this distinction, I think, will be helpful in talking with my more conservative friends. We can disagree about tariffs, tax policy, Ukraine, Middle East policy, Venezuela, educational choice, healthcare, even immigration because we may have very different conceptions of what the common good requires. But there are some things, I would ask them to concede, that are simply unprecedented and indefensible.
Come on man. Those money flow explanations include all the indirect cash going to the Democrat electorate that vote for those Democrat politicians. There is a huge US government taxpayer money and debt proceeds funneling, skimming, frauding and payola industry. It is international. It is a key motivation for Democrats wanting to nationalize healthcare, the airlines, energy, all education, etc. They are the same looting and mooching demographic that wants more income and wealth opportunity that they don't have to work too hard for.
Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually - just CLICK into EthicalGovtNow.org. Dems may win the midterms, but our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities, while supporting all liberal Democrats now. One more time: please CLICK to visit and delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org or, what we are experiencing now our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.
This is well-argued and persuasive. It confirms my long-standing intuitions (so it must be right) about the role money plays in political decision-making in normal times (putting aside abnormal times, like now, where corruption of a more obvious and venal sort runs rampant).
At the same time, ceding "low-salience" issues to the lobbyist's legislative pen is a really big concession. Much of what government does is both complicated and low-salience. If a species of corruption is confined to just these quiet corridors, that would still mean that most of it is corrupt.
Pachipala might bristle at the c-word in this context and point out that such corridors, while quiet, are open to all, at least all well-financed lobbying operations. And yet, this is a lousy way to make the sausage. Whenever laws are written by lobbyists, as apparently happens with regularity, we should regard the output as presumptive shit. What such law -- on any side of any issue -- could possibly be expected to reflect a well-considered balancing of interests for the public good?
There is an alternative model. It is that of the much-maligned administrative state. In this model, Congress grants broad but bounded authority to an agency staffed by professionals charged with a particular mission, say, keeping the air and water clean or whatever it might be, to make rules with the force of law. Congress is always free to overrule an agency rule, so it does not represent a usurpation of congressional prerogatives. But it falls on the agency to investigate the issue and formulate and propose the rule in the first instance. This is typically done by means of rigorous research, beyond the means of any office of congressional staffers, and cost-benefit analysis with an ethos of objectivity in pursuit of the congressional mandate. In this model, there is give-and-take with interested parties, but it is regulated by formal and transparent notice and comment procedures. The more such "low-salience" issues can be channeled toward such procedures, the more we can expect higher-quality sausage, less influenced by well-funded interests.
This is one of the sharpest pieces I've read on political dysfunction, and I think it identifies something even more fundamental than the corruption narrative's empirical weakness. What you're really describing is a mental structure — a perceptual filter that determines what people see before they evaluate evidence.
The "corruption explains everything" frame functions as what I'd call a victim identity strategy. If the system is rigged by powerful interests, then ordinary citizens are passive victims of forces beyond their control, and the only moral response is to seize control through regulation, taxation, and redistribution. You don't need to persuade opponents because they aren't sincere — they're bought. This is psychologically satisfying and politically convenient, but as your evidence shows, empirically weak.
Your alternative — that politics involves sincere disagreement requiring difficult persuasion — is an architect identity strategy, though you don't use that term. It requires treating opponents as rational agents with genuine convictions rather than puppets dancing on purse strings. That's harder. It demands engaging with tradeoffs rather than denouncing villains. But as you demonstrate, it's closer to how the system actually works.
What strikes me most is how the data you cite keeps confirming this pattern. The finding that money flows toward candidates who already share donors' views rather than flipping preferences means we're watching identity alignment, not corruption. The $14.8 billion in political spending against $1 trillion in holiday shopping is a masterful proportionality test — the kind of "compared to what?" thinking that shatters lazy narratives. And the fact that incumbent re-election rates are lower post-Citizens United than at any time since 1974 is the sort of counterintuitive finding that forces people to update their mental models rather than defend them.
Your Medicare-for-All example perfectly illustrates how mental structures distort interpretation. Sixty percent favor the abstract concept. Eighty-two percent are satisfied with their current coverage. These aren't contradictory — they reveal that people hold general preferences that collapse under specific scrutiny. The American system's requirement for sustained persuasion across multiple election cycles and individual states isn't a bug corrupted by money. It's a feature that stress-tests abstract preferences against concrete tradeoffs. The founders designed it this way precisely because they assumed sincere disagreement, not corruption, as the baseline condition of democratic life.
Where I'd push further: the victim-corruption frame doesn't just distort analysis of opponents. It produces systematically worse policy. If you believe the pharmaceutical industry is the sole reason we don't have single-payer, you'll never grapple with the genuine complexity of transitioning 180 million people off employer-sponsored insurance. If fossil fuel money is the only obstacle to green energy, you'll never address the real dislocation in refinery communities. The frame doesn't just flatter our worst instincts, as you put it — it actively prevents the diagnostic work that good policy requires.
Your closing argument is exactly right. The danger isn't that corruption narratives are false. It's that they become a substitute for the difficult, unglamorous, essential work of persuading people who disagree with us — which is the only thing that has ever actually changed a democracy.
That was refreshingly different.
A very impressive piece. It actually helped clarify my own thinking about the Trump presidency. I am deeply opposed to many of Trump's policies, particularly on the domestic front. It is important, however, to distinguish between issues on which there are differing conceptions of what the "common good" requires and certain aspects of Trump's actions which are sui generis: rhetoric which seeks to to portray anyone who opposes him as being an enemy of the republic, the "other"; unprecedented attacks on civil institutions; a constant stream of falsehoods that lead one to question the veracity of anything he says; intimidation through lawsuits; the use of the Justice Department to pursue his own personal agenda; and the effort to use every lever of power to for partisan and personal advantage, including the pardon power and the denial of federal funds to blue but not red states.
Making this distinction, I think, will be helpful in talking with my more conservative friends. We can disagree about tariffs, tax policy, Ukraine, Middle East policy, Venezuela, educational choice, healthcare, even immigration because we may have very different conceptions of what the common good requires. But there are some things, I would ask them to concede, that are simply unprecedented and indefensible.
Worth noting that it's the "oligarchs" who have bent the knee to Trump, not the other way around.
Come on man. Those money flow explanations include all the indirect cash going to the Democrat electorate that vote for those Democrat politicians. There is a huge US government taxpayer money and debt proceeds funneling, skimming, frauding and payola industry. It is international. It is a key motivation for Democrats wanting to nationalize healthcare, the airlines, energy, all education, etc. They are the same looting and mooching demographic that wants more income and wealth opportunity that they don't have to work too hard for.
There's a reason that you are a "social misfit", Frank.
Given what you feminized dolts attempt to mainstream as social norms these days, that is a fantastic complement.
And of course, you don't have any argument against what I wrote. You know it is true and so you do the common lefty thing to hurl insults.
Everyone has a responsibility to do something to better our future. May I guide you to “a third way” path? Please, join me at EthicalGovtNow.org. Only $12 annually - just CLICK into EthicalGovtNow.org. Dems may win the midterms, but our Republic is in a much more complicated place than most of us think. We need a longer view of solutions to our inherited societal and political complexities and need to look for them with priorities, while supporting all liberal Democrats now. One more time: please CLICK to visit and delve into: EthicalGovtNow.org or, what we are experiencing now our grandchildren are very likely to inherit.
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