Brian Beutler takes up an important issue that I wish more Democrats would focus on. He cites the otherwise excellent Jon Ossof speech for an error too many of them make:
“This is the most corrupt administration of all time. And everybody knows it. Everybody knows it.”
I say the error is surprising not because I’m surprised it slipped past the people on Team Ossoff, but because it will strike most readers of this newsletter as counterintuitive.
In our world, in the world of high-information voters, the statement is true. Indeed, it is a statement of the obvious. Democrats know it. Republicans know it. Democrats know that Republicans know it, and Republicans know that Democrats know that their apologetics for Trump’s corruption are delivered in bad faith. If you watch a cable-news panel featuring a Republican plant like Scott Jennings trying to muddy corruption questions, or lash out angrily at supposed corruption on the left, that person knows they’re lying, and any co-panelists who engage as if it’s a good-faith debate are also playing a kind of make believe.Because in this echelon, this is the most corrupt administration of all time, and everybody knows it.
But if you pick a person at random in the country and ask him or her, which of the two major parties is most corrupt—a question that’s easily answerable if you already know that “this is the most corrupt administration of all time”—he or she will likely as not say “Democrats.” Or at least say both parties are similarly corrupt.
That is a (to me) infuriating but consistent finding in the data: Trump has at least fought the corruption issue to a draw—and may actually be winning it.
Grrrr!
Yes, all of politics is corrupt to some degree. Wealthy people have an outsized influence, politicians spend too much time listening to lobbyists and there’s always been self-dealing. There are an awful lot of rich people in office. But as Beutler writes:
Let’s allow that this phenomenon at least contributes to the problem. But does it explain the whole thing?
I don’t believe it can. Or if it does, it reflects a significant failure of imagination on the part of Democrats and liberals. The extraordinariness of Trump’s corruption is a fact. Quantifiable. Empirical. A simple truth, and a simple binary. There’s Trump, who is the most corrupt, and there’s every president who came before him, who was less so. In a world of perfect information, pollsters would ask which party is more corrupt, and Republicans would “win” 100-0. The median voter may have this other view, that corruption is simply endemic in all politics, but then that person is misinformed. And the misinformation persists for a reason.
If politicians never pointed fingers at their opponents’ corruption, you might imagine this misperception persisting as a kind of folk wisdom. Another way for regular people to signal independent thinking. Like “throw the bums out.”
But we live today in an unusually bleak epistemic moment. In a world of spin and lies, of casting blame and claiming credit, and all the things that make politics icky, magnified tremendously by artificial intelligence and algorithmic social media.
This information environment is teeming with accusations of corruption, but the simple truth is not getting through. Republicans have evidently done at least as good of a job blurring what’s obvious as Democrats have driving it home.
As he says, Democrats convinced themselves that Trump’s corruption didn’t matter in the first term so they haven’t really bothered with it in the 2nd. But, as Trump himself would say, there’s never been anything like it. The corruption in this term in epic and should be a massive scandal every single day. Between the Trump family, the cronies, the crypto, the selling of the presidency to the highest bidder (as often a foreigner as an American) we are watching presidential graft on an unprecedented scale. And yet the right continues to vomit up the name of poor, fucked-up “Hunter Biden” as if he was the one literally stealing billions. It’s intensely frustrating. Think “Crooked Hillary” and you can see how much more Trump and his henchmen have succeeded in tarring Democrats as the corrupt party than vice versa.
Brian points out:
Democrats not only fail to match this energy, they treat the whole sphere of public integrity as politically inert. As if there’s nothing to be gained from an opponent’s immorality or hypocrisy or shadiness, and there’s no cost to being accused of wrongdoing. As if every politician in the world wouldn’t much rather run against a corrupt opponent than an ethical one. As if corruption scandals didn’t end political careers all the time.
If you came to this question blind, with no prior knowledge of our two parties, and formed your opinion based only on the sum total of claims and counterclaims made by political actors, you’d have to conclude Democrats were more corrupt, because they are subject to the most high profile accusations of corruption.
Read the whole thing. He’s right on.
I would just add a couple of points. First, there are many lefty types who also insist that Democrats are just as corrupt as Republicans, often even more so. It’s a reflexive hatred of the party establishment that literally makes no sense in this environment. Yes, the whole system is corrupt but here is only one party filled with people literally lining their personal pockets with billions of dollars right out in the open.
The other thing is Epstein. We are in the midst of a massive scandal that implicates powerful, wealthy (mostly) white men in a secretive, elite cabal of immoral and corrupt behavior. Donald Trump is actively trying to cover it up and everyone does know it. (The polls are lethal on this point.) We are at a moment of high interest in corruption and Democrats can place Trump right in the middle of it. Using the term “the Epstein class” is a good start.