Americans Think Everyone is Corrupt Because it Can't Be Their Own Fault

Matt Yglesias has a good piece today on why so many Americans think all politicians are "corrupt." For one thing, Americans have a very broad view of "corruption":

Searchlight did not make a chart out of these results, but they also asked respondents whether various actions constituted corruption. Voters of course view things like taking bribes or handing out jobs to unqualified friends as corrupt. But they also, by overwhelming margins, say that “government officials voting the way elites in their social group want instead of what most people in their district want” is a form of corruption.

So if a Democrat running in Iowa or Ohio has an unpopular view on affirmative action in college admissions or transgender athletes on school sports teams or late-term abortions, that’s not a consideration to weigh against outrage at Republicans’ covering for Trump’s corruption. It’s corruption on its own terms.

My views are obviously correct, so everyone who disagrees with me is corrupt!

You see this all over the discourse. E.g., people pushing for more housing construction instead of rent control must be taking money from billionaire developers. (People say this on Twitter/X a thousand times a day.) Or doctors pushing vaccines must be on the take for Big Pharma. To some people the idea that, no, other people actually disagree with you is beyond conception.

The basic shape of this is that just holding an unpopular view is corrupt. I suppose you could try to plead to the voters that your support of Policy X has nothing to do with donor influence or social elites. But if you support Policy X, then of course economic and social elites who agree with you about X will contribute money to your campaign and say nice things about you. There’s no way that you’re ever going to be able to prove that your support for a ban on single-use plastic straws reflects a sincere assessment of the public interest rather than the influence of climate donors and green-minded cultural elites.

To get to one of my own themes, people often blame politicians for not solving problems because they think our problems would not be hard to solve:

Most people believe that public policy problems are not actually difficult, and that if people of goodwill sat around the table and cooperated, they could be solved. Think about the scene in the movie “Dave” where, through a weird series of events, a non-politician ends up serving as president. He brings in his friend — a skilled and experienced accountant — to audit the books and finds that he can easily balance the budget without making any painful tradeoffs.

I once had an extended argument with an engineer who insisted that we know how to fix American education and the only reason we haven't is the power of teachers' unions. Even Elon Musk seemed to think for while that we could balance our budget by eliminating "fraud and corruption" from Social Security.

But I would take this even deeper. I think many people see the world as cleanly divided into US the THEM, and since WE are good, all our problems must be caused by THEM.

For a while we were supposed to tell kids about "stranger danger," as if wandering psychos were the biggest threat to their well-being. Actually most children who are sexually abused are abused by people very close to them – parents, step-parents, coaches, teachers – and most children who are murdered are killed by their parents.

Millions of Americans seem to believe that immigrants commit most of our crimes; two white Americans have flat out denied to me that a majority of American felons are white. Many Republicans believe that felons vote for Democrats, but so far as we can tell felons vote just like everyone else of their own sex and race, so a group that is majority white men of course votes for Republicans.

So if our budget is out of balance, it can't be because of good hard-working heritage Americans. It must be because of corrupt Somali refugees or Mexican cartels or so-called allies who won't pay their share or sinister billionaires just back from Epstein Island. The solution is to punish the villains and put good, honest people in charge.

In our time this might be the most dangerous fantasy in the world.