If you were to ask an American to name a corrupt country, he would most likely pick one from what we used to call the third world. To a great degree, this is how we now define the term “third world”. It simply means corrupt. First world countries have transparency and the rule of law, while third world countries are opaque, and the rules are not always clear to the citizens of those countries. These days it is not unusual to hear Russia or China called third world, for example.
This is one of those legacy ideas from the 20th century that evolved with the times rather than following the Cold War into the history books. As a result, our rulers tend not to think much about the corruption in American society. It is just assumed, as it was in the Cold War, that Western countries are largely free of corruption, mostly due to the honesty of Americans, while the rest of the world is riddled with corruption. It is a form of the old good guy – bad guy view of the world.
The thing is you can quite easily make the case that America is one of the most corrupt countries in the world now. Today is election day and most Americans assume the vote counts will be corrupted with fake votes generated by the people who support things like mail in voting, drop boxes and ballot harvesting. In popular government, voting is the key to its integrity, but in the world’s greatest democracy, most people assume the vote is as corrupt as anything that happens in the third world.
The countries that holds elections, even the ones we still call third world, require voters to cast their vote in person and show that they are a citizen. The burden of proof is on the voter to show they are entitled to vote. In America, this basic safeguard has been corrupted through many schemes like mail-in voting, drop boxes and bans on voters showing their government identification. Anyone who questions the integrity of the vote must prove their case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Of course, the reason for that is the court system is now stuffed with judges who make up the rules based on their ideological whims. A judge in Virginia tried to stop the state government from purging foreigners from the voter rolls. The state had to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. It was not a unanimous decision in their favor, because the three progressive fanatics sided with the foreigners. Courtrooms are now lotteries due to ideology, which is the definition of corruption.
It is fair to say that two pillars of “good government” in the liberal sense of the concept are free and fair elections and the rule of law. In present day America, we have thoroughly corrupt elections, and the rule of law exists only for the rich and those lucky enough to get a judge who is not driven mad with ideology. If what we see in present day America was happening in a South American country, the media reports would make corruption a center piece of their coverage.
That brings up a third part of the good government concept, a free press. The media in America is entirely controlled by the ruling class. Access journalism has been the norm for decades now. On top of that the media is staffed by people who are animated by ideological fervor. The result is a mass media that is so thoroughly dishonest it would have made the Bolsheviks wince. If you want to know what is not happening in the world, trust American media.
It is not that they are mere propagandists. The American media actively conspires with shadowy figures to deceive the public. The last decade should probably be called the age of media hoaxes. Many of them are so outlandish that it suggests we are living in a computer simulation run by drug takers. The mass media spent years covering a claim that Vladimir Putin used mind control to elect Trump in 2016. If Trump wins today, it will be more years of this insane conspiracy theory.
It is not just soft corruption, the stuff driven by ideological fervor, that has become normalized in America. Good old-fashioned bribery is the norm now. Look at the elected leaders of the two parties and what you see is they entered politics penniless and will exit as multi-millionaires. The reason for this is the elected officials who play ball get insider access to sure thing investments. The reason they are a sure thing is those same elected officials make sure of it.
In fact, it is fair to say that the American economy as a whole is as corrupt as the post-Soviet Russian economy controlled by oligarchs. Silicon Valley has been abusing the basic rights of American for years, with the full support of the state. The banking industry is nothing more than an industrial scale skimming operation. We used to put gangsters in jail for doing this with casinos. Now the gangsters have the state try to put you in jail if you question the ethics of our economic model.
It is hard to find anything in America that is on the level. Even benign stuff like social science data is corrupt. The government had to admit this year that they had been faking employment numbers. The FBI finally confessed that they had been faking crime figures, even the murder stats. Homicide numbers used to be the gold standard of crime data because it was assumed you could not fake them. Turns out in highly corrupt societies, you can fake anything.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, it was assumed it would take a few generations for the culture of distrust to subside. It did not take quite that long, but thirty years on and social trust remains low in modern Russia. It is rising quickly, but people still remember when you could not trust anything from the state or its supporters. Trust is one of those things that is easily squandered, but difficult to establish. Russia may never be a high trust society due its history.
This may be the fate of America. The average American, especially older Americans, still trust the system, even if they no longer trust the people running it. At some point, practical necessity forces people to stop thinking this way. You see this in the younger generations who are comfortable in a scamocracy. Add in demographic replacement and the ingredients are all in place for America to descend into the depths of kleptocracy and corruption associated with low-trust societies.
This is not to say we have decades more of this until the break. Historical analogies are not about stuffing the present into our model of the past. The point is to use a model of the past to gain insights into the present. In this case, the end was near for the Soviets when no one, not even government officials believed the official lies. By the 1970’s cynicism was the defining feature of the culture. The state lied, the people pretended to believe the lie and the state pretended the lie worked.
We may be reaching such a point. Today’s election is about a man who has been vilified, physically attacked and prosecuted by the state and their media agents for close to a decade. It is not about Harris. She is simply the face of a regime that people increasingly find odious and corrupt. Trump may be our Boris Yeltsin, a flawed but essential figure to facilitate the transition from the low-trust ideological regime of the past into something human and honest.
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