This is going to be an unusual Outside the Box. I’ve been part of the political process, both as a practitioner and an observer, for some 40 years. I cast my first vote in the presidential election for George McGovern but by the 1980s had made a hard right turn. Over the last decade I’ve been far less involved but no less interested.
I’ve been struck during the past month by the continued popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. A recent Michigan Republican primary poll had 55% of the top candidates as clear nonpolitical, non-insider choices. And that doesn’t even include those who would have chosen Rand Paul and other such clearly non-establishment figures. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, an unrepentant socialist, is close to leading in certain states. As somebody who has viewed the process for so long, I find these choices to be both disturbing (for a variety of reasons) and a provocation to my intuitive curiosity. As the Crosby, Stills & Nash tune of my youth intoned, “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.”
I had a conversation with my friend Newt Gingrich last week. I know many of my readers will not be fans of Newt, but I think any reasonable person would agree that he is one of the more astute observers of the political scene. In his opinion, there is a bubbling evolutionary change that has spread through a significant portion of the electorate. He relates that to a recent Gallup poll:
The fact that 75% of the American people believe that corruption is widespread in our government may be the most important single indicator in the US presidential race. The rise of so many outsider candidates is a signal the American people are tired of words and want decisive change.
Perhaps this is a continuation of 2008, when so many voted for what they thought was “change you can believe in.” Perhaps it is just early in the process, and people are frustrated, but I’ve been talking to a number of longtime political observers, and they too are echoing the thought that there is something decidedly different going on. Perhaps I’m running in the wrong crowd, but I find the current direction surprising. This is something new.
Today’s Outside the Box is a short piece by Newt from the Washington Times. It is on the traditional concept of corruption in politics. By that I mean what our founding fathers and their intellectual equals in Britain understood the word corruption to mean.
I try to steer away from political memes in my writings, as I know my readers are truly all over the board; but I think this is a piece that can speak to us all and help to inform us as we try to make sense of an unsettling political season. When more Americans see widespread corruption in the US than Brazilians do in Brazil, where there are massive demonstrations against corruption in government, there is something profoundly wrong. We may not see massive demonstrations here … except at the polls. This is something we all need to factor into our calculations as we think about the future.
I write this from an extraordinarily pleasant venue on Boston Harbor at the home of my friend Steve Cucchiaro. We’ll all go out to dinner later somewhere on the bay and then hit the sack so we can both get up early and spend a day working before we take off for the weekend down to Newport to go sailing in Steve’s new catamaran. While I cannot personally imagine what it would take to get me to ever buy a boat, as they essentially seem to be a hole in the water that you pour money and time into, I find it altogether pleasant and enjoyable to have friends willing to make such an investment who will invite me to partake in their enjoyment.
Sunday we fly back to Dallas for the start of a very busy writing and research month. This has been a very relaxing week, and I do find it helpful to kick back a little every now and then. I know I’m going to be sore on Tuesday after I get back into my training routine, but that’s the price you pay for goofing off. Have a great week as we come to the end of summer. For my non-US friends, those of us here in the States get an extra week of summer because the “official” end of the season does not come until the day after Labor Day, which this year is on September 7. Even though most of us will be working, there does seem to be a little bit of summer lingering on our minds.
Your really confused about the political process analyst,
John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Boxsubscribers@mauldineconomics.com
The Corruption of American Freedom
By Newt Gingrich
Originally published at the Washington Times
This is my third column in a row on corruption.
In the first, I suggested that 75% may be the most important figure in American politics. It is the percentage of Americans who say in the Gallup World Poll that corruption is widespread in government. Given this extraordinary level of contempt for American political and administrative elites, it is no wonder that non-establishment figures like Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Bernie Sanders are gaining such traction in the presidential nominating contests.
In the second, I compared the American view of widespread governmental corruption with the view in other countries. It turns out that 82 countries have a better view of their government, although many of them not by much. For example, at 74%, Brazilians’ dissatisfaction with corruption in their government has led to nationwide protests. But there are many countries where the view of government corruption is far less: Germany (38%), Canada (44%), Australia (41%), and Denmark (19%).
Today I want to offer some historical context for America’s understanding of corruption.
America’s Founding Fathers had a very precise understanding of corruption. As I describe in my book A Nation Like No Other, the Founders used that word less to describe outright criminal behavior than to refer to political acts that corrupt a constitutional system of checks and balances and corrode representative government. They frequently accused the British Parliament of corruption, citing practices such as the crown’s use of “placemen”—members of Parliament who were also granted royal appointments or lucrative pensions by the crown, in exchange for supporting the king’s agenda.
In The Creation of the American Republic, Gordon Wood, a scholar of the American Revolution, explains the Founders’ idea of corruption:
When the American Whigs described the English nation and government as eaten away by “corruption,” they were in fact using a technical term of political science, rooted in the writings of classical antiquity, made famous by Machiavelli, developed by the classical republicans of seventeenth-century England, and carried into the eighteenth century by nearly everyone who laid claim to knowing anything about politics. And for England it was a pervasive corruption, not only dissolving the original political principles by which the constitution was balanced, but, more alarming, sapping the very spirit of the people by which the constitution was ultimately sustained.
The growing sentiment in colonial America was that its mother country was corrupt. Despite the reforms of the Glorious Revolution [of 1688], the crown had still found a way to “corrupt” the supposedly balanced English government. Wood sums it up:
England, the Americans said over and over again, “once the land of liberty – the school of patriots – the nurse of heroes, has become the land of slavery – the school of parricides and the nurse of tyrants.” By the 1770’s the metaphors describing England’s course were all despairing: the nation was fast streaming toward a cataract, hanging on the edge of a precipice; the brightest lamp of liberty in all the world was dimming. Internal decay was the most common image. A poison had entered the nation and was turning the people and the government into “one mass of corruption.” On the eve of the Revolution the belief that England was “sunk in corruption” and “tottering on the brink of destruction” had become entrenched in the minds of disaffected Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic.
If the Gallup World Poll had been around in the early 1770s, one wonders what percentage of colonial Americans would have said they believed there was widespread corruption in government. Whatever the percentage might have been, we know where colonial America’s disgust with British corruption led: a revolution that replaced a monarchy with a Republic.
The American Founders were determined to create a Republican form of government that would pit special interests against each other so that constitutional outcomes would represent the common good. As Weekly Standard writer Jay Cost writes in his new book, A Republic No More: Big Government and the Rise of American Political Corruption, “[p]olitical corruption is incompatible with a republican form of government. A republic strives above all else to govern for the public interest; corruption, on the other hand, occurs when government agents sacrifice the interests of everybody for the sake of a few.”
Cost is so good at describing the problem of corruption that I wish to quote him at length below. Read his explanation and ask yourself whether Cost is describing your views about corruption and government.
And so we return to one of the earliest metaphors we used to define corruption: it is like cancer or wood rot. It does not stay in one place in the government; it spreads throughout the system. When a faction succeeds in getting what it wants at the expense of the public good, it is only encouraged to push its advantage. By the same token, politicians who aid them and reap rewards for it have an incentive to do it some more, and to improve their methods to maximize their payoffs. Moreover, these successes inspire other politicians and factions to try their hands at raiding the treasury to see if they can do it, too. Thus, a vicious cycle is created that erodes public faith in government, which further contributes to the cycle. When people stop believing that anything can be done to keep the government in line, they stop paying attention carefully or maybe cease participating altogether.
Ultimately, the public is supposed to be the steward of the government, but how well can it perform that task when it no longer believes doing so is worth its while? How does a democratic government prosper over the long term if the citizenry does not trust the government to represent its interests? How will that not result in anything but the triumph of factionalism over the common good?
The legitimacy of our government is supposed to derive from the people, and the people alone, who consent to the government because, they believe, it represents their interests. In its ultimate form, corruption eviscerates that sacred notion. The people stop believing that the government represents their interests, and the government in turn begins to operate based upon something other than consent. Put simply, corruption strikes at the heart of our most cherished beliefs and assumptions about republican government. That makes it extremely dangerous to the body politic, regardless of what the Bureau of Economic Analysis says about the rate of GDP growth.
What Jay Cost describes so well about the erosion of the common good is the underlying explanation of why 75% of Americans say that corruption is widespread in government. It also may explain why voters have elected so many governors recently who had no previous experience in government and why voters are seriously looking at presidential candidates with the same outsider status. Perhaps they hope these outsiders can rid us of corruption by being from outside the system.
Our form of government today allows revolution through the ballot box rather than on the battlefield. But nonetheless, the message for our political elites today is much the same as it was in 1776: they ignore the people's contempt at their own risk.
Your Friend,
Newt
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