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You can make this same, tired, ultimately invalid argument about anything you look to improve.
You can't prevent the spread of all communicable disease, so why bother taking any precautions?
Someone could build their own gun, so why bother preventing a convicted felon from buying an oozie?
Someone could evade a line item tax by hiring a fancy lawyer and setting up bespoke legal structures around themselves as an entity, so why bother looking at closing any of the existing tax loopholes?
The answer is that because it's not fucking all or nothing. Sure, someone could hypothetically do lots of things to evade any precaution that you put in place around dangerous or bad things, but that doesn't mean it's completely ineffective. If it's too much of a hassle, some people won't bother. Some people will actually get caught. Hell, with the existing lax corruption laws and lazy ass enforcement in the US people are still sometimes found in violation of them.
It isn't a "if you ain't first you're last" situation. Reasonable safeguards, laws, standards, practices, and the like save and improve lives.
This isn't about arguing. The arguments we make don't impact public policy.
Agreed, so why squabble with people pointing out that the US is more corrupt than other countries? It is.
And it's more corrupt because not only are we more accepting of corruption, but "we" (like you) largely don't believe in incremental change or taking small measures to problem reduction...we largely believe in our version of "superman" arriving...I dunno what your thoughts actually are...maybe some gay space communism revolution that'll never occur?
I gotta tell ya at this point we're much more likely to get full, mask-off fascism complete with gas chambers than we are to get any kind of communist revolution in the US.
I started out illustrating instances in which politicians could end-run a simple bribery ban and it got dismissed as a uniquely American problem.
I don't think the US voter base is any more accepting of corruption than any other constituency. The courts are more accepting of corruption, but that's largely because they are insulated from any kind of oversight or accountability.
We've had periods of mask-off fascism in the US going back centuries. From Indian Reservations to Jim Crow to Japanese Internment to Gitmo detention to kids stuffed into concentration camps on the US/Mexico border. But there are plenty of Americans who have lived through these periods and never really acknowledged it. That's what allows fascism in the US to infest the body politic and to endure from generation to generation.
Meanwhile, we've inoculated ourselves against any kind of mass labor movement with the most hysterical media and legal response to organized workers. Every AES state is a deplorable hell-hole, because some industry unionized or popular local leader took the reins from a failing foreign corporate interest. Every domestic labor movement is simultaneously described as a bunch of entitled greedy idiot teenagers, a gaggle of uppity minorities with drug problems, and a fifth column of foreign infiltrators trying to bring down the American economy.
So I don't doubt the next step will be towards another round of brutal, blood-drenched fascism. But the end result will be the further deterioration of the American project and the ultimate crack up of our unified economy. The only thing that can save America from itself is a new socialist turn. Without that, we're headed for balkanization, further deindustrialization, and ultimate colonization from abroad.
Counterpoints: the US voter base re-elected Nixon (and largely wanted him to stay in office)...elected and then re-elected Reagan (despite him openly admitting to lying to the American public and exchanging guns for hostages)...elected Trump in the first place, cast more votes for Trump in 2020 than they had in 2016, and now look like they might just go ahead and put the corrupt gasbag right back in there despite the fact that he's openly corrupt, brags about it, and will likely get more corrupt in any second term.
So there's your version of superman. Within the current political environment, I just don't see this happening without another depression or similar (so perhaps even decades more of what we currently got). I also am decidedly not someone in favor of eliminating democracy in favor of purportedly "temporary" one-party rule (that never fucking ends).
Nixon was able to capitalize on the sharp George Wallace split in the Democratic Party over the Civil Rights Act. The Nixonian attack on liberals boiled down to the claim that black people were naturally inferior, and any effort at repairing the damage inflicted by Jim Crow amounted to pro-black corrupt patronage.
Reagan wasn't hit by Iran Contra until '87, and it nearly sank the Bush '88 campaign for President. Prior to that, he successfully campaigned as an anti-corruption tough-on-crime President, particularly in his prosecution of ABSCAM and other sting operations aimed at liberal politicians with big business ties.
The idea of a single all-power ~~Ubermensch~~ Superman isn't a socialist view. Time and again, large cooperative campaigns of mutual aid provide better outcomes than the public putting all our hopes on a handful of aristocratic elites.
Socialism or Barbarism. We either hang together or we hang separately.
My apologies for getting the timelines slightly mixed up. In my defense I was 4 at the time. However, Bush winning in '88 despite being neck deep in an administration full of openly admitted liars doesn't exactly bode well for your argument that US voters aren't pretty A-OK with corruption.
Nah, it's a human one, and one that's extremely common in the US despite our governmental structure all but guaranteeing that one guy alone can't fix things.
We love simple power structures, because we're simple beings. It's also why I think there is more to horseshoe theory than people want to admit. Communists claim to want gay space communism but seem A-OK with some stupid asshole being basically a dictator as long as its their type of stupid asshole.
Once we formed up larger civilized order, it took us millennia to conceive of a different type of governance aside from "what one stupid asshole says goes".
I somewhat agree? I think? But I'm not sure it has much to do with anything we're discussing.
Bush Sr's claim to fame before joining the Reagan team was as the guy who cleaned up the CIA after Ford replaced Nixon. He successfully distanced himself from Reagan, while tarring Mondale with a number of Massachusetts scandals.
It's a media-based one. Mass media has been pivotal in expanding and inflating the reputations of larger-than-life individuals (real and imagined). Without mass media, "Superman" is just another pagan icon of a neighboring tribe.
Its strange to see the American right champion Europeans like Macron and Merkel or literal Monarchies in the UK, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. They'll endorse coups such Anez's failed takeover of Bolivia or Park's military junta in Korea or The Jakarta Method in Indonesia or Juan Guaido and Fulgencio Batista looting the Venezuelan and Cuban treasuries. They'll shrug their shoulders at the electoral college, the corrupt SCOTUS, and the blatant disenfranchisement of any number of their states.
But when a popular President wins a landslide in a free and fair democratic election, they suddenly start to see the Tyranny of the Masses. Whether you're a South African post-Apartheid Congress or a Mexican President who wins with over 60% of the vote, you're constantly under the microscope, under the theory that you can't win a legitimate election unless your population loves American more than the Americans love themselves.
Go figure.
I mean people belong to cults. I don't think they joined because of the news (which doesn't even cover them). People are idiots.
I'd agree full stop right there. They're a strange beast. In a way it's possible (though not something I'd bother with) to feel somewhat sorry for them...what with them being so anti-immigration in a country teeming with nothing but immigrants.
I put myself as a top plop on the pile, friendo.
I'm convinced I'm pretty immune to being sucked into a cult, but aside from that I consider myself about as stupid as your average people.
EDIT: I also don't think of us as "sheep" or "glassy-eyed automatons". I think we, as a species, are a different type of stupid. We spend most of our lives deluding ourselves into thinking that we're somehow above (or the winners of) the natural order. We spend enough time in denial to buy a second home there. Our true nature isn't all that much different from a monkey picking flies off of its shoulders in the jungle....just with more zoom calls.
That's the joke, yes.
The top plop of shit is just as indistinguishable from the rest of the shit, it was just plopped more recently.