Good post, and the pat response is "vote them out". The problem with this is that the neither party really thinks this kind of corruption is a problem, and the individual pols that do can't get elected on that issue alone. That is, there's a critical "bundling" problem with modern politics: you have to accept a bundle of 100 positions, and "integrity issues" are usually pretty low. Even worse, a cynical body politic begins to perceive "integrity" as a liability, that someone with conscience and self-restraint is actually LESS capable of "winning" within a corrupt system. You've now allowed your short-term need to win to further degrade the system, which of course becomes a positive feedback loop.
(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)
I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.
> I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols.
It still matters if you’re a Democrat. Hillary Clinton was crucified for keeping her official emails on a private server.
We have an unequal system, where one party is held to a high standard, and the standard for the other party is always low enough for them to slither over.
I find your take partisan. During primaries her competition tried to use it as leverage against her which is a completely normal thing to do in politics. It basically went away when Bernie, in one of the debates, decided he was tired of hearing about her emails, establishing that this is something we're just not going to talk about anymore because it's too damaging to our top candidate.
Trump harped on it with the whole "lock her up" stuff, again because it's politically advantageous. He reneged on it once in office, admitting he wasn't going to pursue any charges against her. It was probably calculated that doing so would be bad optics as using the justice system to go after the top candidate of the competing party would be considered divisive. It was also potentially unproductive as she had already lost. There's also the element of personal connection, Trump was an NY Democrat for decades and had known the Clintons personally. Their daughters had a friendship in the past.
Also see George Santos as a counterpoint. Fellow NY Republican congressmen went after him knowing that their party would likely lose his seat. Again, I interpret their actions as self serving, they wanted to distance themselves from his shenanigans to their own constituents and appear to be acting objectively rather than in the interest of their party but the right result was achieved regardless.
Sadly no. Bernie Sanders explicitly put Citizens United at the top of his legislative priority list. Clinton used her pull with the DNC to undermine his nomination, and the rest is history. This was a triumph of the corrupt status quo over a high integrity pol, and it happened within the DNC.
Citizens united was literally a judicial coup against constitutional rule. We went from flawed democracy to literal plutocracy the day citizens united was ruled on.
Politicians must fund raise before their primaries and we see many fundraising efforts throughout their tenure too.
To get elected a candidate must:
Fundraise -> win a primary -> win a general election.
Therefore fundraising is structurally an election and money is structurally votes. Since money gets to vote on candidates before people do, we end up with a "democracy" that responds to money and not votes, which is pretty blatantly obvious. It's also why many people feel that both parties are basically the same. It's not that they're the same, it's just people with money get to filter candidates first and therefore both parties are the same in that they have to appease their funders first and can't threaten corporations or rich people because then their funding goes down and their opponents goes up.
Biden is just another example of this (as was Hillary). Biden 2024 is made possible because the democratic party doesn't have to answer to their voters. The democratic party has a symbiotic relationship with republicans where neither has to rule effectively or hold themselves to any standards which allows both to profiteer and trade stocks while the country slowly becomes oligarchic/fascist.
(This bundling problem affects all kinds of products. When you're shopping, you pay attention to price, and everything else is secondary. In a perfect market, you'd price in the forced arbitration clause, or you'd price in the social cost of anti-competitive business practices of the vendor. But it just doesn't happen because the cognitive load is too high.)
I really miss the days when we at least paid lip-service to the idea that character and integrity mattered most in our pols. Even that system was gamed, its still better than overtly, cynically abandoning society's most laudable values.