Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Make America Corrupt Again

The paramount era of corruption in American history is the Gilded Age.  Corruption took on many different forms.  There was the outright taking of bribes and gifts by governmental officials, but there was also something that history textbooks call "patronage."  What "patronage" is was really "clientelism."  Patronage is simply personal relations where someone higher up the food chain nurtures and supports people below him or her and the underlings return that with loyalty.  Patronage can be corrupt, but it isn't corrupt per se.

Clientelism is something different.  I'm currently reading volume 2 of Francis Fukayama's book on political order and politial decay.  He is analyzing why some countries have good government and others don't.  In the Gilded Age, America did not have good government.  His theory is that America always had a weak state - it's part of our political culture to distrust governmental power.  Since America pioneered mass democracy, we developed electoral institutions before we developed a professional civil service.  This allowed for the creation of the "spoils system," whereby victors in elections staffed the civil service with their political supporters, who in return kicked back money and political support to the men at the top of the ticket.  The political machines in various cities were the most efficient and corrupt of these clientelist networks.

The advantage of clientelism is that it allows you to reward your political followers, and it encourges their loyalty to you.  You aren't just voting for your party, you're voting for your job.  You also do it at no "cost" to the party, since you are looting the government rather than your own pockets - what is called "rent seeking."  In the end, you are left with high levels of party loyalty and a terrible, inefficient and corrupt civil service.

The Progressive reforms very often revolved around improving the quality of governance in America.  Even Prohibition was an attempt to kill the central role the "saloon" played in nurturing the machines and their client networks.  Over time, especially after the New Deal, America evolved a professional civil service somewhat similar to those in similarly advanced European states.  (Fukayama notes that the profound dysfunction in Southern Italy and Greece is because they modernized their government without modernizing their social structures, keeping those clientelist networks in place.  The result is inefficent and corrupt governance, which is why tax avoidance is so high in those areas.)

The idea of enriching your supporters with government funds comes to mind when we read of the mind-boggling payment of $12 billion to American farmers potentially hurt by Trump's self-destructive tariff wars.  Trump is looting a program designed to ameliorate droughts or floods to compensate for his terrible, regressive and retrograde tariff policy.  Because rural areas are central to Republican electoral chances, unhappy farmers is not a winning strategy for November.  Therefore, Trump will simply pay off his Corn Belt supporters.  In return, presumably, they will vote for Republicans. 

This is the Gilded Age clientelism grafted onto a modern welfare state.  Trump has managed to embrace a 19th century economic policy - tariffs - and 19th century political corruption - clientelism - with 20th century federal power - New Deal economic stabilizers.  Again, this is not the way these things should happen.  Again, in any other administration, this would be scandalous.  Again, Trump simply washes one scandal away by starting another.

Having just read a massive book on the Gilded Age, it is tough to fully appreciate how awful things were for average Americans in that time period.  Enviromental catastrophes, urban poverty of a kind you can't imagine, racial demagoguery, wholesale corruption, terrible policy making, ethnic cleansing...the Gilded Age was a wretched time, even if it did produce remarkable economic growth. 

The modern Republican party is endeavoring to return us to the Gilded Age.  They began this clientelist corruption with their massive tax cuts for the wealthy, their deregulation of the economy and their revanchist positions on race.  Trump, once again, is simply saying the bad parts out loud.

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