James Madison was 5 feet, 4 inches and slightly built. There’s little evidence to suggest that he was especially preoccupied with his own physical stature, but as “the father of the U.S. Constitution,” Madison was an intellectual giant who thought a great deal about size. In fact, Madison’s reflections on size can help explain why Americans today tend to be so disgusted with their political system but often seem at a total loss to know what to do about it.

Bear with me on this.

In 1787, Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers proposed to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new Constitution featuring a relatively powerful central government. Anti-federalist critics were aghast. They said it would never work because—as anyone who had studied history knew—republics had to be small, like Greek city-states. The republic proposed by Madison and his fellow federalists, stretching from New Hampshire to Georgia, would be enormous by comparison and was clearly destined to grow still larger. The anti-federalists dismissed Madison as a would-be power-centralizing aristocrat, and short too.

But Madison was thorough and persistent with his argument. The biggest problem faced by all republics was their tendency to split into narrow, self-serving, special interests, which Madison called “factions.” These self-serving interests can have a variety of natures. They can be political, religious, ideological, or commercial, the last being especially common. Such narrow selfish interests are normal in a free society, and can only be quashed through oppression—which in theory, at least, everyone’s against.

Madison turned on its head the conventional wisdom about the proper size of a republic. He argued that small republics easily became corrupt or tyrannical because it was relatively easy for one group or interest to form a majority, capture the government and oppress a minority. In a vast continental republic like the Unites States, however, there would be so many competing interests that none were likely to become powerful enough to take control of the government. Instead, those many interests would check each other.

Madison’s concept of interests checking and balancing each other, therefore, was not only applied to the various branches of government, as we are taught in school, but was considered a constitutional design feature that would be found within American society itself. Our large American republic, Madison concluded, had a good chance of being just, stable, and durable.

Madison was so enamored of his theory about the relative safety of a large republic that he obsessively argued it again and again, to anyone who would listen. The argument appears in Madison’s notes he kept while serving in the Continental Congress, in personal correspondence, in the records from the floor of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and most famously, in “Federalist No. 10.”

Madison’s theory held up reasonably well for the first 60 years of the American republic, until an extremely powerful faction—the slave-labor-based economy of the Southern states—rose up in rebellion, resulting in the American Civil War, which is to this day both the nation’s bloodiest war and its most epic contest with a special interest.

After the Civil War, the power of the federal government began to grow. Progressives demanded government oversight to combat various social problems. The New Deal and Great Society expanded the government’s role in the economy and created large entitlement programs. The Cold War birthed the military industrial complex.

For good or ill, depending on one’s politics, today the federal government is many orders of magnitude larger and more powerful than the one imagined by Madison and his fellow founders. And that reality throws a big monkey wrench into Madison’s scheme for a government capable of resisting selfish interests. It is no longer necessary for a self-serving interest to gain majority support to corrupt the government, and thereby subvert the common good, because when government is immensely powerful it can serve innumerable selfish interests simultaneously.

Today, a voracious hoard of selfish corporate and political interests gorges itself at the trough of power at the public’s expense. The common and long-term well-being of the American people is an afterthought, at best. The public understands this quite well. When asked in an NBC/Wall Street Journal Survey, over 80 percent of respondents agreed with the following unattributed statement:

A small group in the nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost.

The quote, by the way, is from Donald Trump’s inaugural address. Would 80 percent still agree if they knew it was Trump who said it?

Probably not. Which points to another problem associated with size. In our time, it’s not only government that has become corrupted by interests. Large institutions that produce the knowledge, information, and ideas that a republic depends upon are also compromised. Media, which once at least went through the motions of taking journalistic standards seriously, now nakedly behave like other corporations; non-stop sensationalism and partisan narratives drive a views-and-clicks business model that sows division, and even hatred, among citizens. Tidal waves of corporate and politically-driven government money have corrupted universities, funding narrowly confined agendas. Independent scientific research is increasingly rare, particularly when it is costly.

The United States’ free market economy has always been a paradise for loosely bridled interests to run wild. Economically, the formula for channeling selfishness has been wonderfully productive. But when corporate interests capture the government, the free market is no longer free or safe for consumers. When politicians collude with corporate and other professional interests to form an entrenched political class, then the government no longer represents the people.

This should terrify everyone who is not part of the system and shame anyone with a conscience who is.

Our diminutive “Father of the Constitution” James Madison would have something big to say about all of this. In fact, he did say it. Again, Madison feared what selfish interests could do to his beloved American republic. He reasoned that in a large republic interests would check each other, and none become powerful enough to capture the government. It was a point that he reiterated so much that he must have been a bore at parties.

But Madison once revealed a dark fear he never expressed in public, because it would have undermined his signature argument about the relative safety of a large republic. To his friend, Thomas Jefferson, Madison wrote:

As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may too easily be formed against  the weaker party, so in too an extensive one, a defensive concert [author’s emphasis] may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those trusted with administration.

By “defensive concert,” Madison is not referring to oboes and violins. What he means is that in a large and diverse society, people are easily splintered into squabbling factions when, instead, unity is needed to resist corruption, or worse. Madison’s prescience is astounding since this is exactly where “we the people” find ourselves today—in need of concerted action against public institutions captured by special interests.

Would-be citizen leaders need to step back and see what is really happening.

Ralph Nader, the famous consumer advocate, channeled his inner Madison when in 2014 he said, “It was quite clear to me many years ago, that power structures believe in dividing and ruling by distracting attention from areas where different groups agree to where they disagree.” At the time, Nader was promoting a new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left–Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. The subtitle was sadly premature.

Today, whenever an isolated leader stands up to truly challenge the system, he or she is likely to be demonized and demonetized. Platforms are withdrawn, public personalities smeared, reputations attacked, voices censored, private lives harassed, and employment terminated. For real leaders whose only desire is to serve the public, the public square has become an increasingly dangerous and authoritarian place.

We need, in Madison’s words, “a defensive concert.”

The first step to ending this endemic corruption and rising authoritarianism should be obvious: unified opposition balanced by authentic leaders on the left and right. Real leaders need to find each other in our large and cacophonous nation. Currently, dissenting voices are hunkered down in their silos, building their own brands when they should be uniting to build a movement together. Each voice alone is too puny to make a real difference but uniting and organizing could change everything. And it must.

Madison would argue that such a movement should have a clear overarching mission: to remove from the political system every incentive that favors service to selfish interests, or factions, over the common and long-term good of the American people. For starters, that means terminating political careerism and making it impossible for elected officials to take money, or otherwise benefit, from the various corporate and other selfish interests they are supposed to regulate.

It’s an enormous and complicated task, but it must begin somewhere. The people are ready. It’s leadership we need for the concerted action that James Madison, the tiny founder with his big ideas, begs us to take.

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Video of the takeover—which transpired right across from the Ministry of Justice—was captured on security cameras. I watched the footage slack-jawed from the comfort of my home in Washington, D.C.; I was a member of the Sofiyskiy, having joined in 2015 while in Kyiv on a Fulbright fellowship. I’m a social anthropologist who has focused on political change and governance for nearly four decades on both sides of the Atlantic, including Eastern Europe. Following the fortunes of the club has become a case study on what happens when government and law are weaponized, quite literally, by politicians conflating politics and business.

The practice of organized property theft, “predatory raiding,” has become common in Ukraine, Russia, and other post-Soviet countries. “Dirty togetherness”—tightknit networks whose members snake through business, politics, and government to achieve their underhanded agendas—mushroomed across Ukraine and its neighbors after the Soviet’s Union’s collapse. As oligarch-kleptocrats “grabitized” the state resources of post-Soviet countries, legions of Western lawyers, bankers, and PR enablers arose to abet them.

In time, the oligarchs and their enablers’ ethically questionable doings spilled to the West, infecting signature institutions from Harvard University to the Council on Foreign Relations, and becoming business as usual.

While all this predates the rise of Donald Trump, the excesses of Trump-affiliated players like Paul Manafort—who helped elect Ukraine’s Putin-sponsored president Viktor Yanukovich from an office near the Sofiyskiy—have brought dirty togetherness in America to a much more public light. Consider Rick Perry. He resigned last fall as Secretary of Energy after emerging at the epicenter of Congress’s impeachment probe. As Secretary, Perry merged his agency’s energy policy with promoting his political allies’ business in Ukraine, while at the same time waging political war on behalf of Trump against Joe Biden and his son Hunter. (Hunter’s service on the board of Ukraine’s biggest natural gas producer is ethically challenging, but certainly not equivalent to subverting U.S. government policy toward a crucial ally in search of a partisan smoking gun.)

This booming state capture—the backdoor privatization by industry of government policies—increasingly entangles state and private interests in arenas from energy, education, and environment to finance and foreign policy. Jay Clayton, who runs the Securities and Exchange Commission, spent much of his law career defending the Wall Street firms he now polices. Many of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s top advisors come from the for-profit college industry in which she has investments.

But before President Trump further poisoned the polluted governance ecosystem, it had already been decades in the despoiling. Republicans and Democrats alike have long been advancing state capture and the contracting out of government functions to the private sector. Since at least the mid-2000s, private contractors have been running intelligence operations, most government information technology work, and databases tracking foreigners as they entered and exited the United States. Even regulation is sometimes outsourced to private companies. Certain consulting firms, in sectors like finance, have been tasked by the government to financially oversee private banks at the same time that these same banks were their clients, a state of affairs that has led to big lapses, including accusations of whitewashing the records and reputations of troubled banks. In 2015, there were 2.6 contract workers (bound by fewer rules than their government counterparts) for each government employee. Contractor companies have long driven public priorities, with elected and appointed officials only signing on the dotted line.

The civil service, too, has been undermined. While Trump’s sweeping executive order in October would eliminate job protections for many civil servants and ease politicization of policy decisions, previous administrations have also attempted to make government workers more partisan-friendly.

Naming “acting” and “temporary” cabinet officials and employees is yet another means to do so. Trump’s slew of often conflict-of-interest-ridden “temporary” agency heads, most recently in the Pentagon, has circumvented the confirmation process and sideswiped the Senate’s role in checking presidential appointment power. He also exploded the number of so-called special-government consultants, a status that enables individuals to (legally) “consult” on policy while still keeping a private sector job.

Trump has specialized in these improvisational practices, but they, too, are not new to him. During the Obama administration, top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin famously performed “representational juggling.” While working at the State Department, she also played roles in the Clinton Foundation and the consulting firm Teneo that was tied to it. When it is unclear when one role ends and the other begins, players cannot be held to account, and corruption is, if not inevitable, eminently more possible.

Such overlapping roles lend actors the ability to deny responsibility. A retired general who serves on a government advisory board shaping policy or procurement decisions can gain access to proprietary information that is invaluable to his corporate clients. He can plausibly deny that the client advice he offers is influenced by the information he gleans in his government role. The difficulty of establishing whether he is acting in the interest of national defense or a private entity challenges accountability.

While government impartiality was eroding well before Trump took office, what is substantially new is straight from the dirty togetherness playbook: installing senior aides in agencies to monitor loyalty; dismissing officials who resist corruption while promoting loyalists who foster it; firing inspectors general in retaliation for unwelcome investigations; fudging the guidelines of public health agencies that don’t square with Trump’s political ends; using chief law enforcement officer William Barr as if he were the president’s personal attorney; and weaponizing the police and security forces for partisan ends. In Washington this summer, it seemed to me like Kyiv redux when armed, badge-less troops marched through Lafayette Square at Trump’s behest to clear peaceful protesters so he could brandish a Bible.

A key component of the Trump legacy doubtless will be a government more poised than ever to serve politicians, not the public.

Can civic institutions provide a counterweight? Many of them are similarly beholden to private interests. For well over a decade, I have charted how bedrock institutions of American democracy, from think tanks and academic institutions to philanthropies and political parties, have become strikingly porous and open to serving unaccountable agendas. Both the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute have, in recent years, without disclosing their sources, accepted money from foreign governments on which they also commentate.

Through these institutions and other means, our national policies are progressively being hijacked by forces that are difficult to see or trace. “Consultants,” “government relations specialists,” and “public relations” experts have become a major force in persuading legislators, relevant government officials, and even the public to support policies that will benefit a particular industry, group, or even foreign government. Whereas several decades ago former high-ranking officials might have sought the title “lobbyist” to display their influence, today they take a role with a corporation or law and lobbying firm, frequently in the “public sector” or “government affairs” group. Such shadow lobbyists sway policy on issues from health care to mortgage lending to telecommunications to finance and foreign policy. In some cases, they work on behalf of (often unsavory) foreign powers—without disclosing and sometimes even obscuring the identities of their sponsors.

The post-retirement careers of recent former presidents exemplify how quickly such unaccountable behavior has become acceptable. A generation ago, U.S. presidents left office and became known essentially for one pursuit: President Gerald Ford served on corporate boards; President Jimmy Carter took up philanthropy. But former President Bill Clinton has crafted overlapping roles that cross all these pursuits. He consulted for Teneo, among other business ventures, whose operations sometimes overlapped with his Clinton Foundation and its nonprofit Global Initiative, blurring boundaries between business and charity. The many roles Obama has assumed since leaving office appear more bounded than Clinton’s. Yet for these two former presidents and many top officials, high office has become a stepping stone to raking in tens of millions of dollars though speaking fees, book deals, and consulting.

National security, too, is often sold to the highest bidder. Scores of A-list former politicians work on behalf of foreign regimes without recording that fact with the U.S. Justice Department, as the law requires. That’s a key reason why rogue dictators and oligarch-kleptocrats are so successful in laundering their images. Len Blavatnik, a Soviet-born American who partnered with oligarchs and organized crime icons doing Putin’s bidding, and whom the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned for employing its assets to further “worldwide malign activity,” including intrusion in the 2016 elections. Blavatnik has donated millions to august institutions including Harvard and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Today few seem to blink when respected leaders and former top officials use their good reputations for profit, even working for criminal operatives who pose foundational threats to Western democracy. Former U.S. homeland security chief Michael Chertoff, for instance, serves on the legal team of former Manafort business partner Dmytro Firtash. Firtash is an organized crime figure and oligarch so embedded in Russian politics that he fled Ukraine with Yanukovich in the 2014 revolution and faces extradition to the United States on corruption charges. Chertoff, while representing Firtash, also chairs the board of Freedom House, an NGO that purports to defend democracy around the world.

It’s no wonder, then, that like Ukrainians, whose confidence in their government is at a world low, Americans’ trust in public institutions and leaders has plummeted in recent years.

If our leaders decline to defend our democracy, it makes it all the more imperative that we as citizens do so. Might we have something to learn from the Sofiyskiy experience?

A few months after the raid, manager Iryna Ryabchenko, one of the fitness center’s family owners, explained to me what happened over coffee. “The guy who wanted to raid our property goes to his best friend, a member of Parliament and head of the Committee on Economic Policy Issues. He’s also the right-hand man of the country’s prime minister,” she said. “They get the Minister of Justice to arrange the [bogus] registration and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to supply security. Then an aide of the member of Parliament becomes director of the company that acquires our property.”

Despite wealth and standing, the family found themselves powerless to stop the takeover of their prime property. Even the famed Klitschko, a gym regular who bantered with me during workouts, could not help save it. Rather than give up the fight, though, the Sofiyskiy’s confiscation spurred Ryabchenko to political action. She has since banded together with hundreds of others as an activist in Financial Maidan, an NGO working for change and government reform.

In the United States, it is tempting to anticipate a Biden presidency with the expectation of relief: once again, a sane leader who follows scientific advice and doesn’t fire people via Twitter, flout time-honored norms, or tell more lies than truths. But our new normal of rogue government did not appear from the ether, and a Biden-Harris administration cannot magically reverse this predicament, any more than Americans will rush to their offices when the first COVID-19 vaccine is approved.

Instead, we must take robust action to reclaim our institutions, beginning with government, a pillar of democracy. Rebuilding government that serves the public, starting with restoring the civil service and insourcing government functions, is imperative. We will need a groundswell of grassroots pressure to accomplish this, mobilizing everyday citizens and the elite and the monied class, who also must grasp that in the long run, systemic ethical compromises will defeat everyone, including themselves. Because without the reforms necessary to reverse decades of damage to our democracy, in the not-too-distant-future, you, too, may wake up one day to find your neighborhood gym has been raided.

The post It’s 2020. Do You Know Who Your Government Is Serving? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For weeks, all our friends have thought I’m over worrying, overreacting. We pack our things. On the way out of town, we pass the park, where many people are wearing white-and-blue face masks and gloves, armed with bottles of hand sanitizer. J. goes to buy bus tickets, and I take an okada to the nearest pharmacy, all the while worried that being on a motorcycle, my face exposed to the air, is a screaming risk.

“No,” the sales girl tells me, “our own has finished. It’s only in the market that they are selling masks and gloves and sanitizers.” I don’t trust the quality of the health kits in the markets, though, so I return to the park and tell J. that we have to ration the hand sanitizer we had bought before coming, that we have to make it last until we get back to Big City.

We are rattled, when we get to Big City, to find people moving freely, buying, selling, pushing in crowds, as if unconcerned that an airborne disease is ravaging the world and has entered our country. We enter a keke, I start a conversation with the driver and tell him he needs hand sanitizer, J. is irritated that I’m talking to strangers again, and we get to ShopRite. No masks, no gloves; hand sanitizer prices have jumped nearly 300 percent compared to in the Small Town, and we laugh. We check the other big mall. Nothing. And the third big mall. Nothing.

Finally, we give up and go to J.’s apartment. We clean up and debate how much cash to withdraw, because if there is a financial crash, there will be a public rush, and ATMs will be overcrowded. The following day we are in the market, stocking up as if we are preparing for a military siege.

For 17 days, I stay indoors. A third of the population of Big City seems to be moving about freely, and from the balcony I watch with longing. J. steps out occasionally to buy food and supplies. Each time he returns, I greet him at the door with two different hand sanitizers. I worry ceaselessly that we will get sick.

For the next week we are safe, physically. But I am thinking of my father, who has been hospitalized for a different illness. Because of the lockdown, interstate borders are closed; no crossing is allowed except for medical or essential resources. I am unable to see my father. J. keeps me from descending. It will take two dreary weeks, but my father will get better and I will vomit 300,000 Naira—still not the biggest contribution to the bill.

My friend, E., invites me to his radio show. I go to the studio and talk about the step-by-step failure of our federal and state governments in combating the pandemic. I keep myself from expressing too much anger that security operatives and hunger are now bigger threats to ordinary Nigerians than an airborne virus. The public is pressing the national and state governments to do something, take responsibility, to actually lead, and soon we have a buzzword: palliatives. But instead of the governments bringing palliatives, security operatives bring bullets and people are shot, killed, for flouting lockdown rules. Why? When the palliatives begin to come, there is a collective sigh of shameful disappointment at what some governments offer: cups of rice, an onion, tomato paste. We are seeing decades-old corruption manifesting.

On social media, a few people suggest that this could be the keg that finally blows Nigeria into a revolution. But most of us understand better: No matter how bad it gets, Nigerians will adapt. It is as the legendary Fela sang: shuffering and shmiling. Because we have been here before, here several times. Every time things go bad, we shout and say they are going bad, and then we grumble and adapt, and whichever new dysfunction it is becomes our new normal.

Nigerian Twitter, that singularly combustible space, buzzes with new trends every few hours. We are debating the announcement of curfews, the military’s harassment of health workers and journalists, the fresh wave of armed robberies in Lagos, the usefulness/uselessness of celebrities. One night, a Nollywood Superstar is seen on video partying in a hall full of people. The backlash is swift and brutal, damning and extensive. The police arrest her. She makes another video explaining: All those people in the first video have been together, safely sheltering in place since before the lockdown. Days later, #TwitterNG is burning again because many government officials gathered to attend a funeral, flouting social distancing rules. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.

Meanwhile I return to my novel. Now that I know I will finish it in months, I am excited, a contained cyclone, and wary, reminding myself to focus and do the work first, sentence by sentence, feeling by feeling. I revive my reading: several books at once, a section of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life followed by a few chapters of Sally Rooney’s Normal People followed by parts of Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King followed by a portion, because I am throwing back more often, of V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State. I add Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, although I have no intention of finishing it anytime soon.

I’m also spending more and more time on YouTube, looking for songs. A few Afropop songs come on my radar and I am intensely grateful: DopeNation’s “Zanku,” Mayorkun’s “Of Lagos,” AdekunleGold and Kizz Daniel’s “Jore,” Joeboy’s “Call,” Tekno’s “Kata,” Naira Marley’s “Puta Pxta,” R2Bees’ “Sunshine,” and from across the Atlantic, G Herbo’s “PTSD.” The beats transport me.

May comes and J. travels, and I am alone in the apartment, fielding phone calls, surprised at my energy levels. I go on Instagram Live for a literary chat. I resume my morning and evening walks. A few states relax their lockdowns. Everyone knows that infection rates will climb. My worry is having only two medical face masks, which cannot be reused. In a Twitter video, I see that the market closest to me is open and that people without face masks are being turned away. In just ten days, from May 1 to May 10, the country went from 1,000 confirmed cases to more than 4,000.

The next morning, I put on my blue-and-white mask and get to the market only to find all the entrances closed, people gathered at a few, a police van parked at the biggest one. From a vendor, I buy five face masks of different designs and colors. Because most of the material is Ankara, many Nigerians have elevated face-masking into fashion, matching each day’s mask with their clothes. By the time I turn back, some people begin to run. A convoy has parked, big SUVs with glinting black windows, and out steps the Governor. It is a measure of the social climate of our country that these people are running when they see their governor. I walk past, acutely aware that I could be humiliated by the police just for not being rattled. Nothing happens.

That evening, I get in a keke and go to the park. Afterward, I drop off something for a friend in the Small Town and decide to walk home. It is getting darker, the sky a glowing brown. On the road where I saw the Governor earlier, young men are running around bare-bodied, playing football.

I stay indoors for the next two days and step out on the third night to buy food. At a traffic-less junction, boys are playing football, the yellow road lights their mini stadium light. Only a few people are walking; most are seated in front of houses. Something must be wrong. I go to Google. A curfew has been in place for two days, 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., and in my hibernation, I am only just finding out.

I turn back. Near the apartment, I hear sirens. I see a police van racing from where the road bends, and people walking on the street scatter, and I run, flying up the stairs and into the apartment.

The post A Letter From Nigeria, Where Coping With COVID-19 Entails Twitterstorms, Bullets, and Corruption appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

While we sipped coffee at a roadside cafe in southern India, about 1,500 miles from the private military compound that supplied fuel to U.S. bases in Southern Afghanistan, Raj explained how his boss made it clear that the missing items were to be labeled “lost” or “stolen,” in order to keep the books balanced.

For six years, Raj was one of over 100,000 non-American contract employees working for the Department of Defense in Afghanistan. For most of this conflict there have been more contractors working on U.S. contracts than there have been U.S. military personnel in the country. Through no fault of their own, the shift from American soldiers to contractors like Raj has made the war more expensive, less democratic, and more dangerous.

Contractors come from countries including Bosnia, Bangladesh, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and Nepal, to name a few—and do much of the day-to-day work of the war. But unlike soldiers deployed to these war zones, they have fewer rights and fewer protections. Most can be fired at a moment’s notice. If injured, some receive compensation, but others I interviewed did not. Many had borrowed significant amounts from brokers to get their initial contracts, meaning they lived in fear of termination. With constant anxiety over deportation, such an environment is ideal for both corruption and rights abuses.

In Raj’s case, being a vulnerable low-level administrator gave him a perfect view of the corruption and mismanagement of the war in Afghanistan, but no ability to do anything about it. As a manager, he oversaw the work of the mostly South Asian laborers on the base and could watch various scams in progress. He knew that his American and European bosses did little to hide these operations, since they did not fear being reported by those below them. By contrast, if Raj complained, he could be fired and sent out of the country on the next flight.

Like many of his colleagues in low-level management, he was from Kerala and had struggled to find work in India. “There are no jobs here,” he said. So he stayed quiet. So did thousands of other contractors who felt they had no other means to support their families, inadvertently becoming a part of a corrupt war economy.

Raj’s story explains some of the corruption and high cost of the war in Afghanistan, but it also helps explain why U.S. voters have lost interest in America’s ongoing wars. With the bulk of the work being done by contractors rather than their children and neighbors, Americans have stopped watching the war. In the process, they’ve given up much of the democratic oversight that is meant to help shape American foreign policy.

Part of the lack of opposition to ongoing U.S. wars is that Americans have become less involved in both policymaking and policy implementation. Without conscription, participation in war is perceived as voluntary. And while numbers of American dead in wars formerly affected public opinion about continuing to fight those wars, with fewer deaths of American soldiers, the public has become disengaged—and so have its elected representatives.

U.S. voters have long been more interested in domestic issues than in international affairs, but the organization of America’s recent wars has made civilian oversight more and more difficult. The shift to contracting means that military strategies are less likely to be discussed in public forums and more likely to be simply embedded in contracting or budget agreements out of the public eye. When things go wrong on a contract, companies have significant incentives to cover up their shortcomings, while lower-ranking workers like Raj are pressured to remain silent. Further, as the work has shifted to international contractors, the result is that wars are increasingly shaped not by generals and soldiers, but by companies and the businessmen who run them and who are primarily driven by profit.

In part, these wars also remain out of the news because of a deliberate strategy by the U.S. military to limit access to information about the war. The majority of international reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan embed with U.S. troops and report primarily through the lens of the experience of an American soldier. They do not visit bases like the one that Raj worked on.

Little reporting is done on contract workers. In fact, the total number of these workers is impossible to track because some U.S. government agencies outside the Department of Defense—including USAID—didn’t even record the number of contract workers they were employing until recently. Other agencies still don’t.

While many of the popular narratives about private contractors suggest that this work is not as dangerous as soldiering, it is not clear if this is true. Department of Labor statistics suggest that almost 4,000 contractors have been killed while working to support the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and this number includes only those working directly for the Department of Defense. More importantly, contractors have self-reported these numbers to the U.S. government, so the real number of those killed is no doubt higher.

Contractors also face dangers through exploitation that soldiers may avoid. One of Raj’s colleagues, for example, explained to me how his boss instructed him to climb into an empty fuel truck to inspect a rocket that had been fired at it, even though he was not hired to do security work. Other employees I interviewed described being trafficked to Afghanistan, having their passports confiscated and being forced to work long hours for less pay than they had initially been promised.

Contracting in conflict zones is organized by nationality. At Raj’s base, the security guards were Nepali, the engineers were Turkish, and the cooks and cleaners were Filipino. Generally, it is those from the poorest countries who face the most danger and get paid the least. The outer guards at the U.S. embassy in Kabul, like at many international bases and installations, are all Afghan, while the next layer is Nepali, and only far inside do you encounter American or European contractors.

This economic angle brings up another undiscussed aspect of outsourcing wars: For the majority of the international contracts actually involved, the war is not about service or patriotism, as with soldiers. It is about a paycheck. And a paycheck that their extended family might be relying on to repay high interest rate loans to brokers that trafficked them to the war zone. Contractors find themselves in compromised situations, with complex loyalties, which may affect the conduct of the war itself. Raj was doing nothing to actively try to extend the war in Afghanistan, yet it was also clear that he did not want it to end—because that would mean termination. The majority of those that the U.S. is employing to fight its wars have a vested interest in seeing those wars continue despite their dangers.

While Raj returned home fine, other colleagues were not so lucky. More than one I spoke with had been kidnapped—a difficult situation for someone from a country like Nepal, which had no diplomatic presence in the country. In cases like these, workers become pawns that brokers trade and companies use or simply discard. Another Nepali I interviewed spent three years in an Afghan prison after sitting through a trial he could not understand, with the Nepali government only learning of his fate much later through a reporter.

The economic costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are staggering and should not be dismissed. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, when taking into account debt incurred and long term costs, like benefits to veterans, America’s post-9/11 wars will cost the U.S. $5.6 trillion dollars.

But critiques of the war done by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction and other overseers focus almost exclusively on financial audits and mismanagement of funds. Unfortunately, less work has been done on how contracting has made the management of the war itself even more difficult to monitor. Few are interested in the corruption happening on small contracting bases, and fewer still are tracking human rights abuses that occur as workers make their way toward these war zones.

With the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan, some might hope that democratic control over U.S. foreign policy will improve, but exactly the opposite is happening. While the number of contractors the U.S. is employing in Afghanistan has decreased, it has not decreased as quickly as the number of troops. This means that while in 2011 there were approximately 1.5 contractors for every U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, there are now three contractors for every soldier, making contractors increasingly the face of the U.S. presence. Furthermore, as the war wanes, contractors like Raj are looking for work elsewhere: Syria, Yemen, Russia and the Central African Republic. Some of Raj’s coworkers are now providing security for oil-rich countries in the Gulf, like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

This suggests that we are not far from a world where wars between rich nations could be fought entirely by contractors. Already, proposals to privatize the war in Afghanistan, allegedly to save tax dollars have gained political traction in Washington. But really, as Raj knows, such strategies will further move war away from transparency and democratic oversight and into the shadowy world of corruption.

The post Why Using Foreign Contractors Helps Prolong Foreign Wars appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Grab a glass of champagne. Then bend your mind around this New Year’s resolution for Californians: In 2017, let’s become more tolerant of political corruption.

Yes, bigotry against political skullduggery is just about the last socially acceptable prejudice in our state. And while the idea of tolerating dirty deal-making may sound perverse or strange, so are the ways we make decisions in California. We rarely consider how all of our rules curtailing the power and discretion of elected officials—rules approved in the name of preventing corruption—have made it so difficult to respond to large scale problems in our state that we no longer try.

Our state’s governance system has long been premised on the notion that our chosen representatives must be extremely naughty people. And so we’ve designed a highly complex government over the last century with the primary goal of preventing corruption, by limiting the power and discretion of elected and appointed officials to make dirty deals—or just about any other deals. That is the channel connecting our state’s rivers of regulations, oceans of laws, and tsunamis of formulas for budgets and taxes that defy human navigation.

All these obstacles have worked to a point: We’re a pretty clean state by American standards, with a relatively low rate of public corruption convictions. And the corruption cases you see here typically involve very small stakes for a big state—minor embezzlements, small-time cover-ups, and politicians who violate tricky campaign finance laws or (heaven forbid) live outside their districts.

The perverse result of our clean but hampered government is that we’ve opted to embrace large-scale, incapacitating societal wrongs, instead of accepting even the smallest rule-bending in the legislature or city hall (what other jurisdictions might still consider part of the cost of getting stuff done). In California, among the richest places on earth, thousands of homeless people are on the streets, and we tolerate the highest poverty rate in the United States. We have done little to respond to a huge and expanding shortage of housing for working and middle-class people. Our roads, bridges and waterworks are in dangerous disrepair. Our health system makes it hard to get health care, our schools offer too little education, and our tax system, by bipartisan acknowledgment, doesn’t tax us efficiently or fairly.

In hamstringing our politicians, we’ve frustrated ourselves.

And yet, attacking such big problems is considered wildly unrealistic. There are too many rules and regulations standing in the way of large-scale action. And if we got rid of those rules, we fear we would be abetting corruption.

Which is why we so desperately need to adopt a new attitude toward corruption.

A famous observation of Samuel Huntington, one of the 20th century’s greatest political scientists, applies now in California.

“In terms of economic growth, the only thing worse than a society with a rigid, over centralized, dishonest bureaucracy is one with a rigid, over centralized, honest bureaucracy,” Huntington wrote. ““A society which is relatively uncorrupt … may find a certain amount of corruption a welcome lubricant easing the path to modernization.”

California needs lubrication—and a little more corruption that allows us to advance larger public goals.

California must expedite the building of affordable housing, homeless housing, housing near transit, and housing on lots already zoned for housing—even if it means paying off certain interests to prevent their opposition and handing out exemptions to planning requirements and zoning and environmental laws like party favors. The alternative is to let the scandalous housing shortage grow, while we cross all the regulatory t’s and let NIMBYs tie us in knots. L.A. voters, for example, just approved money for homeless housing we need now—but it likely will take at least five years to have the housing in place if we follow the usual procedures. And it could be even worse if anti-growth activists, posing as warriors against corruption, succeed in passing a moratorium on certain developments on L.A.’s March ballot.

The poor state of California’s roads also cries out for some big corrupt deals, damn the environmental reviews. For years, the state has failed to address a $130-billion-plus backlog in state and local road repairs. A legislative report found that more than two-thirds of roads are in poor or mediocre condition, one of the worst records of any state in the country.

But California’s mix of limitations on infrastructure and taxes mean we’ll keep falling behind—as long as we play by the rules. Raising taxes to cover repairs requires a two-thirds vote of both houses of the state legislature and getting to two-thirds in cases like this requires buying votes with spending. But our abstemious governor hasn’t been willing to do the buying. He should resolve to be less righteous and more road-friendly in 2017. (And how fast can we get some contracts out the door and get construction crews on the highways?)

Roads and housing aren’t the only contexts where we prioritize following all the rules over meeting the needs of Californians. In education, state leaders make a fetish of meeting the very low requirement of the constitutional funding formula for schools—instead of finding ways, kosher or not, to lengthen our short school year (just 180 days) and offer students the math, science, arts and foreign language they need, but aren’t getting.

Our aqueducts and water mains so badly need updates and repairs that politicians should be raiding other government accounts to secure the necessary funds. But moving money around brings lawsuits and scrutiny. So no one dares resolve the problem, not even in a time of drought. Now is the moment to break rules and accelerate water infrastructure. Find ways to bully or buy off anyone who objects.

The stakes of our anti-corruption fixation may get higher in 2017. California finds itself in a confrontation with President-elect Donald Trump. Politicians are talking about how they are ready to fight Trump if he attacks California policies or threatens vulnerable people, like immigrants and Muslims.

Fighting may be necessary, but California and its governments are at a decided disadvantage in a battle with the richer and more powerful federal government. Dealmaking might be the better strategy, at least at first. On recent trips to Sacramento, lobbyists and other behind-the-scenes players argued to me that California should find some way to buy off Trump—either personally or in his presidential role—given the president-elect’s love of negotiations and his lack of interest in ethics or legal niceties. Of course, such creative dealmaking runs up against Californian rules and sensibilities.

That’s why the change we need is not legal—it’s cultural. We need to be more politically mature and realize that big progress in governance almost always involves actions that are not entirely forthright. Indeed, some of our country’s most effective officials—like the Daleys in Chicago, or even a California character like Willie Brown, the former Assembly speaker and San Francisco mayor—were effective precisely because they didn’t always color inside the lines.

So as we greet 2017, let’s raise a toast to dealmaking that brings real progress, even when it’s dirty.

The post Should California Corruption Be Forgot, and Never Thought Upon? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet Chiaromonte’s 3,400 residents were anything but content. They were crushingly poor and simmered with resentment. Why? In great part, as the Americans learned during their stay, because they were too family-focused.

Political scientist Edward C. Banfield went to Italy in 1954 to better understand poverty. Researchers then tended to assume people were poor due to lack of education or because they were victimized by the government or capitalism. Banfield himself had been a reporter and had traveled across the United States during the Great Depression, so he knew the reality was more complex. In order to understand why people are as they are and do what they do, Banfield believed one needed to learn how they viewed the world and their place within it.

This may sound self-evident, but it cut against the academic grain of the day. The University of Chicago, where Banfield earned his doctorate and had a teaching appointment, was known for its shoe-leather sociological research. Its Prof. William Foote Whyte, for example, wrote Street Corner Society in 1943 after four years studying a slum in Boston’s North End.

In 1956, Banfield and his wife Laura (who spoke Italian) spent nine months in Chiaromonte and interviewed dozens of residents. They pored over census data and official records, enlisted some residents to keep diaries, and conducted psychological surveys on others. Two years later, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society described what they had found and concluded that Chiaromonte’s poverty and grim melancholia (la miseria) were rooted in its people’s “amoral familism.”

The adults’ core attitude was that one must “maximize the short-run advantage of the nuclear family,” and “assume that all others will do likewise.” This might not seem like a bad thing—doing good for one’s own family is universally lauded as moral behavior. But taken to an extreme, a focus on the family can be destructive. Socioeconomic progress demands that individuals cooperate with one another, and work for the common good.

There was very little of that in Chiaromonte. Banfield found no organized voluntary charities, just an order of nuns—brought in from outside the town—struggling “to maintain an orphanage for little girls in the remains of an ancient monastery.” The townsfolk, he found, “contribute nothing to the support of it, although the children come from local families. The monastery is crumbling, but none of the many half-employed stonemasons has ever given a day’s work to its repair. There is not enough food for the children, but no peasant or landed proprietor has ever given a young pig to the orphanage.”

The priests in the town’s two churches feuded, and Sunday worshippers seldom contributed to the collection plate. The town’s doctor didn’t modernize his medical equipment because he saw no personal advantage in it. Patients could take it or leave it. Italian law required all towns to provide schooling to at least age 14. Chiaromonte’s school stopped at fifth grade, and the teachers’ attendance was erratic, their attitude toward their pupils defined by indifference.

Amoral familism bedeviled local politics. Residents assumed anyone engaged in civic life was secretly out for personal gain. Few residents participated in politics or public affairs, and most dismissed government as hopelessly corrupt. When a citizen attempted to organize a political party, the townspeople balked at paying even paltry membership dues. The town’s council was riven by factions, and seldom able to work with the mayor (who was unpaid) to get anything done. Those who participated in politics frequently switched their party identification based on opportunism, not ideology. The secretary of the monarchist party became a communist, then declared himself a monarchist again. Seeing why was not difficult: voters believed politicians were cheating them and thus voted against whomever was in power.

Amoral familism also impoverished families. By tradition, a son was entitled to inherit a portion of land from his father upon marriage. The obvious result was smaller and smaller parcels of land, which were increasingly impossible to farm for profit. The son of an artisan was expected to be an artisan—never mind whether the town economy demanded a cobbler or blacksmith. From the cradle, the family socialized children—not infrequently through beatings—to follow the old ways, stay close to home, and distrust others.

Chiaromonte in 1954-1955.

Collectively, Chiaromonte’s residents all wanted more money, and each was jealous of any other who had more lire or nicer stuff. But they rarely sought to earn more by producing more or better. Banfield’s research revealed astonishingly low levels of individual agency. Unlike the family-focused southern Italian mafia (Ndrangheta), Chiaromontians were too cynical to form criminal enterprises. Crime was rare and usually petty in the town. Material success was attributed to personal corruption or luck, which might be reversed by bad luck. With everyone out for his own and on the take, the system by definition was rigged. Why try?

The Moral Basis of a Backward Society was a watershed in poverty studies, one still read in college classes today. It showed the importance of culture to socioeconomic flourishing. “People live and think in very different ways,” Banfield wrote, “And some of these ways are radically inconsistent with the requirements of formal organization.”

This was not “blaming the victim.” In the case of Chiaromonte, Banfield hypothesized amoral familism was exacerbated by factors outside the average citizen’s control. The town’s physical isolation, to cite just one factor, meant that citizens could little imagine their living other than as they did.

Some scholars criticized Banfield for overstating the power of values on behavior. They pointed to root causes. Material scarcity tends make individuals more anxious and distrustful of others’ intentions. And the larger provincial government had significant authority over Chiaromonte’s affairs, which exacerbated the political haplessness.

Banfield died in 1999, but the book continues to attract readers because its portrait of poverty is heart-aching and—to this day—recognizable. Like J.D. Vance’s recent bestselling memoir of Appalachian life, Hillbilly Elegy, Banfield’s Moral Basis shows that families can be a wellspring for poverty and misery, and that the root causes are a complicated blend that can be difficult to overcome.

The post How an Idyllic Italian Village Was Crippled by Family-Centrism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In France, at the Euro Cup, the violence of Russian hooligans almost got the national team banned before a humiliating loss to Wales took care of that, sending the Russians home doubly embarrassed. Days later, the International Olympic Committee upheld a ban on Russian track and field athletes at the forthcoming Rio Summer Olympics in response to evidence of a widespread, state-sponsored doping project. Seeing as the legitimacy of the Putin system comes less from the ballot box than from the deliverance of national pride and success, it was likely not the most upbeat of weeks inside the Kremlin.

Dating back to the Cold War, Soviet rulers embraced sports as a vehicle to prove communism’s superiority at whatever the cost. International sporting events are a way of forcing the West’s acceptance—as Putin achieved in hosting the Sochi Winter Olympics two years ago—and of delivering a sense of national pride by winning. The Russians were so desperate to win, we now know they resorted to extensive doping.

These days, it seems like international sports deepen Russians’ sense of grievance and isolation from the world. Sports have become a microcosm of Russians’ conflicted desire to gain the respect and validation of an international world order whose legitimacy they question as well as seek to undermine.

Vladimir Putin attends the celebration marking the one-year countdown to the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics.

Successive generations of Kremlin rulers have tried to project the image of the country as a besieged fortress, alone in the world and surrounded by enemies. For Putin and those around him, Russia’s latest tribulations in the world of global sport seem to bear out that worldview. First came the clashes in Marseille, in which Russian soccer fans fought with England supporters during the Euro Cup. Some Russian fans shot flare guns towards the English section of the stands and burst into the section as the match ended. Fights spilled out in the streets as well. More than 30 people were hospitalized, including several with critical brain injuries.

Russian soccer fans are late to international hooliganism, but the Western press and French law enforcement still managed to make it sound like there was something novel and sinister about the Russian version of the problem, calling Russia’s violent fans “well-trained” and organized. Russians, in turn, pointed to the bad press as yet another example of Western institutions’ inherently anti-Russian ideology.

Similar to how Russian officials have responded to, for example, Western sanctions over Ukraine, they hit back on criticism over fan violence, conceding nothing and instead raising the rhetorical temperature. Vladimir Markin, a top Russian law-enforcement official, suggested that Europeans couldn’t handle Russia’s soccer fans because they are more accustomed to gay pride parades than dealing with “real men.” Igor Lebedev, a deputy in Russian parliament and a member of Russia’s football union, said, “Nothing wrong with fighting. Keep it up boys!”

With time, however, the tone changed. The Russian team was fined 150,000 euros and given a suspended disqualification from the tournament—one that proved superfluous after the disastrous 0-3 loss to Wales—which appeared to convince Russian officials that the matter was serious enough not to be laughed away. The ugliness of the violence immediately raised questions about Russia’s ability to host the 2018 World Cup, which will be held in 11 cities across the country. Even before the brutal scenes in France, Russia’s World Cup was already tarnished, marred by the specter of corruption and vote buying. Putin has been a lonely defender of ousted FIFA president Sepp Blatter, the man who presided over the selection of Russia to host in 2018 and who has since been brought down by allegations of corruption. With an event of such national prestige at stake, Russian officials began to display uncharacteristic contrition. The country’s sports minister, Vitaliy Mutko, said that violent fans in masks “brought shame on their country.” For his part, Putin condemned the attacks in Marseille, calling them a “disgrace.” But Putin couldn’t help himself, adding, “I truly don’t understand how 200 of our fans could beat up several thousand English.”

Although some anonymous British officials theorized the Russian hooligans were part of the Kremlin’s strategy of “hybrid war”—using a patchwork of covert, deniable means to undermine the Western security order—that seems an unfounded and paranoid exaggeration. Over the years, nationalists and football hooligans have periodically been convenient allies of the Kremlin, but ultimately the Putin state is wary of uncontrolled violence, which could one day threaten its own power. The young men who came to France from Russia may have been well prepared for a fight—armed with metal bars and fingerless gloves—but in many respects, their inspiration comes more from the English football hooligans of the 1970s and 80s than anything homegrown.

Just days after the soccer hooligan controversy, on June 17, the International Association of Athletics Federations, the governing body for track and field competitions, banned Russian athletes from the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics for sustained and wide-reaching doping violations. The decision was historic, as individual athletes have been barred from international competition for doping but never entire national teams. Investigations into Russian doping suggested an illicit program with alleged support of the country’s security services. To date, Russia’s response to the allegations, which have gathered in strength and damning detail in recent months, has been to try and cauterize the wound, admitting to a certain degree of malfeasance while denying a deeply rooted culture of doping condoned at the top. After the ban was announced, Putin tried this tactic anew, suggesting doping violations were limited to a few individuals, and that banning the whole track and field team amounted to “collective punishment,” saying it was akin to a prison sentence for “an entire family” if one relative committed a crime.

The International Olympic Committee upheld that ban, while keeping open the possibility that individual Russian athletes who go to extraordinary efforts to prove they are clean could be allowed to compete. Either way, the whole affair casts a far more humiliating note on Russian sporting exploits. It’s possible Russia may turn its back on Rio in a huff. A widely circulated tabloid with Kremlin ties asked the question, “Is it worth Russia going to Rio?” After all, the editorial posited, “They want us to crawl to them on our knees, ask forgiveness, and beg to be let in.”

For Putin and those close to him, efforts to exclude or punish Russia, whether for its annexation of Crimea or support for state-sponsored doping programs, are seen sees as pieces of a larger conspiracy. Today’s Russian elite sees plots against its power and authority everywhere it turns. Some of those visions are grounded in actual Western policy, if a distorted understanding of it; others are nothing more than baseless, paranoid fantasy. And, like its poorly performing soccer team or apparently state-run doping program, no small number are problems of Russia’s own making.

After the loss to Wales, a fitting joke started to make the rounds, playing Russia’s sporting woes off the geopolitical tensions it has encountered over the years. Echoing a comment that Putin made in 2014, when he said that unidentified soldiers in Crimea weren’t Russian troops but had purchased their military gear in a shop, the joke has Putin saying, “Those aren’t our soccer players on the field, they just bought their uniforms in a shop.”

The post Russia Goes for Gold in Hooliganism appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A forgotten moment in our history suggests that the way out of a bad political mood is not more rage, but a new political perspective. Around 1900, after years of anger at “vulgar” politicians, a young journalist pushed voters to resist the easy impulse “to go out with the crowd and ‘smash something.’” It was too easy, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens began to argue, to believe that bad politicians were just immoral people. Instead he asked his massive readership to look at the structure rather than the individual, to think about the warped systems that enabled political corruption, and to consider the ways angry voters inadvertently encouraged behavior they condemned.

Lincoln Steffens was the perfect man for the job. The young writer had bounced from California to Europe to Manhattan, driven by wanderlust, contrarianism, and a preference for the sleazy over the respectable. He honed his scorching prose, and learned about New York’s “low-life,” as a crime reporter in rough-and-tumble Manhattan in the 1890s. There was something feisty about Steffens. Over his long career, he was often wrong, sometimes a sucker, but rarely a coward. One politico called him “a born crook that’s gone straight.”

Like many Americans, Steffens grew up cursing his leaders. Between 1865 and 1900, frustrated citizens pointed to the never-ending string of political scandals and stolen elections, as leaders failed to address the massive traumas of the Gilded Age. Citizens often looked down on the parties, like the wealthy young man who wrote that all politicians were a “shifty-eyed lot, dribbling tobacco juice, badly dressed, never prosperous and self-respecting … a degraded caste.”

Attacking leaders was an easy route to becoming one. Self-impressed tycoons, high-toned editors, and rising politicians “greedy for power” all insisted that they knew how to clean up politics. Replace bad, immoral men with “the best men”—wealthy, God-fearing, respectable—and the democracy would fix itself. And by “the best men,” they meant themselves.

Again and again, angry voters tried this approach, throwing the bums out in election after election. In major cities, “reformers” applied the same formula, winning the mayor’s office periodically, but falling out of power just as quickly. And control of Congress changed hands with dizzying speed in the 1880s and 1890s, yet politics only grew more corrupt.

But as a crime reporter who befriended crooked cops and scheming politicos, Steffens stumbled onto a new approach to journalism. Instead of moralizing, he listened. People would talk, he found, if you let them. Steffens hung around police stations and pool halls, absorbing everything he could. He even tolerated the ceaseless lectures of a young police commissioner named Roosevelt (though Steffens devised ways to shut his new friend Teddy up). And he refused to sit, isolated, in New York, setting out across the country to study dirty tricks from Boston to San Francisco.

Steffens introduced American readers to corrupt bosses who make today’s most obnoxious candidates look timid. He befriended characters with nicknames like “Hinky Dink” and “Bathhouse John.” Taciturn party thugs opened up to Steffens, analyzing their best tricks like fans of the same sport. By humanizing election-buyers, union-busters, accused murderers, and confirmed murderers, he helped explain why America’s leadership problem persisted.

Steffens came away with two major insights. Bad politicians were not necessarily bad people, and society, as a whole, encouraged their sins.

He learned the most from Israel Durham, boss of the Philadelphia political machine, an organization so rotten that Ben Franklin and George Washington’s names often showed up on voting rolls. (People in Philly joked: “The founders voted here once, and they vote here yet.”) But Steffens liked Iz’ Durham. He concluded that Durham was not a bad man, but merely a successful man, trapped at the head of a system beyond his control. Durham was certainly guilty of tremendous crimes, but society kept rewarding him for them. Among other things, Durham explained that regular campaign donations, coming from upstanding citizens, did more to buy influence than any illegal kickback. Such contributions, the boss shouted, were “worse than bribes!”

Conversations with Durham and other bosses led Steffens to conclude that the angry public was focused on the wrong problem. Political dirty tricks were not “exceptional, local, and criminal … not an accidental consequence of the wickedness of bad men, but the impersonal effect of natural causes.” Americans—obsessed with individualism—liked to rage against immoral men, but really it was big, impersonal structures—like the steady drip of campaign contributions—that did more to buy power and harm the democracy.

Steffens began to write, furiously, publishing his “dawning theory” in his famous “Shame of the Cities” series in McClure’s Magazine between 1901 and 1904. Politicians were not a special caste of wicked men; they were no more immoral than bribing businessmen or lazy cops or short-sighted voters. Often, angry middle-class citizens, looking for someone to blame, perpetuated the pointless cycle of reform and relapse, throwing out individuals but failing to make real change.

Illustration from Puck, November 16, 1881, “American Invention for Blowing Up Bosses.”

Their outrage at the “bad men” in government was really just a “thought-saver of the educated who think that they think,” Steffens declared, a way to avoid considering the deeper problems with their political system.

Steffens was the most articulate voice of the new burst of reform remaking American democracy after 1900. American voters began to see that the country’s political problems were, really, social problems. Instead of hollering about immoral bosses, reformers simply went around them, introducing primary elections, ballot initiatives, recall votes, and eventually the direct election of senators. Progressive activists focused on improving political structures, not what they labeled electoral “lynchings” of the bad guys.

Some clever bosses jumped on the bandwagon. Tammany Hall cleverly recast itself as a reform organization. But this was fine; it meant that voters were rewarding reform over corruption. By 1910, journalist William Allen White imagined the sleaziest bosses of the 19th century observing the new, cleaner elections, “cackling in derision until they were black in the face” at neutered politicians forced to play by the fairer rules. These changes marked the greatest moment of political reform, not sparked by a major crisis like a war or depression, in American history.

In our own era of intense skepticism towards the media, it’s important to remember how much we owe muckrakers like Steffens. And in our time of anger at politicians, it’s important to consider where bad leaders come from. Those today who call politicians “losers” are no better than phony Gilded Age moralists, who condemned the “bad men” in Washington while trying to join them. Their rhetoric turns every campaign into a contest that rewards anger, providing a smokescreen behind which elites masquerade as outsiders.

And it confuses the issue: politicians are, as a group, no better or worse than the rest of us. If they stink, something’s rotten with the system that feeds them.

Yet anger at our leaders is the political cliché of our day. As long as we see politics as a war between good and bad individuals, ignoring the structures that reward or punish them, this will continue. America’s stalled democracy is not our leaders’ fault alone, but ours as well, for treating all political problems as personnel problems.

The post Why Early 20th-Century Muckraker Lincoln Steffens Is a Man For Our Times appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

There is no greater symbol of local California corruption than Bell, a city of 35,000 people, 2 1/2 square miles, and many gas stations in southeast L.A. County. For years, Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo and his minions exploited every dark corner of California’s convoluted systems of local governance and finance. They paid each other scandalously high salaries (Rizzo’s package of wages and benefits was worth $1.5 million annually), used the city’s redevelopment agency like a piggybank, borrowed improperly, squirreled away money in illegal retirement accounts, purchased property off the books, approved illegal fees and taxes, and used a sham charter election to exempt themselves from state laws.

Today, five years after this malfeasance was exposed, a new narrative of Bell has emerged. That narrative is one of triumph, best exemplified by a conference on the corruption scandal organized by Chapman University last month. The tale’s heroes were all assembled: journalists who broke the story, a police whistleblower, citizens who challenged corrupt officials, prosecutors who won convictions of those officials, and state officials who put through new laws in response. They were joined by the administrators and lawyers who painstakingly put the city of Bell back together. Among their many successes is a $22 million reserve in the city’s coffers.

All this should be cause for celebration. The Bell case—and the response to it—provided a new roadmap for how California communities can respond after they are victimized by city hall. Future municipal corruption cleanup crews will have new laws and two new state appeals courts rulings to aid them in removing and obtaining restitution from corrupt officials.

But when it comes to the question of prevention—of how to make sure that California doesn’t see more Bells—there is less reason to party. That’s because Californians have failed to learn the central lesson of our long history of municipal corruption: The new rules that are a response to such scandals often enable future scandals.

To put it another way: The sense of triumph we feel after getting past a scandal is part of our problem.

Bell, while spectacular in its particulars, is really part of a larger wave of never-ending local corruption cases that goes back 50 years. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, county tax assessors from San Francisco to San Diego put their discretion up for sale—offering businesses lower property tax assessments in exchange for power, cash, and votes.

The predictable response was to limit the discretion of local officials over property—first with state laws, and later with Proposition 13, which effectively took away the power of local officials to set tax rates. This set the pattern for responding to local California scandals. When cities or school districts find some way to cheat, the state puts new limits on their discretion. This limits the power of local communities and their appointed leaders. But it hasn’t stopped scandals.

Why not? Because the weight of all these new limits on the locals has made community governance in California incredibly complex. So complex that it’s nearly impossible for citizens to understand what local representatives are up to—and thus provide a check on their actions. In fact, it’s so hard for local elected officials to understand their own actions that most cities must hire expensive administrators and consultants to navigate through the sea of rules.

Effectively, all these limits have left local governments with two options if they want to obtain revenues and improve their communities. The first is to beg the state for money; this has been such a popular option that local governments represent by far the biggest lobby in Sacramento.

The second option is to cheat. Or, to put it less judgmentally: to peer into the dark corners of the complicated system and invent new ways to get around the rules to govern and raise revenues. It’s worth remembering that while the Bell officials were corrupt and flouted laws, they didn’t steal and they didn’t embezzle, at least not in the traditional sense. They were just unusually brazen in exploiting the dark corners of California municipal finance.

So to truly reform local governance, Californians must first recognize a paradox: Preventing local officials from behaving like those in Bell requires giving more discretion and freedom to local officials.

Instead of using limits and restrictions to force city officials into dark corners, let’s lift limits and give officials more discretion to operate more easily in the daylight. The best, most direct reform would be to give California’s local governments more power to raise taxes and other revenues themselves.

The power of taxation is itself a tool of accountability. When cities can tax, the citizens and businesspeople who might see their taxes raised have a strong incentive to watch what’s happening in city hall. And when taxpayers are watching, it’s much more difficult to give your city manager an $800,000 salary.

If local control means anything, it means letting local elected leaders make their own choices about how much revenue they must raise to meet their local needs. But for 50 years, California leaders and voters have moved in the very opposite direction.
Doug Willmore, the city manager who is now leaving Bell after having dug it out of its hole, noted in his presentation at the Chapman conference that the city’s finances remain very complex. Revenues and expenditures are accounted for in 36 different funds. The city’s chief objective must be “normalizing” finances, his presentation said.

But California’s rule-heavy system doesn’t allow for normal. And so here’s the bad news about the good news in Bell: The city’s recovery may delay our reckoning with our own role in municipal scandals.

Until we understand the paradox of Bell, there will be more Bells.

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I grew up watching Chespirito’s shows in the 1970s (my father played a minor role in launching him as an executive at fledgling Channel 8, the first station to carry him, which explains the 8 in el Chavo’s name). My friends and I quoted the shows incessantly and turned to their archetypal characters for nicknames to bestow upon our classmates. El Chapulín and El Chavo also provided us with laughs, a moral compass, and quintessential “everyman” Mexican cultural heroes to offset gringo influences.

I am not surprised at the extent of the mourning for Roberto Gómez Bolaños, aka Chespirito, whose shows still air throughout Latin America more than 20 years after he ceased taping new ones, despite their primitive production values. If Latin American intellectual elites lost their most vaunted storyteller earlier this year with the passing of Gabriel García Marquez, everyone lost their most ubiquitous storyteller with the passing of Chespirito. There were no educational, class, ideological, or generational distinctions when it came to adoring Chespirito.

The timing of Chespirito’s passing seems especially cruel to a Mexican society reeling from this fall’s state-sanctioned killing of 43 teachers’ college students in the state of Guerrero, and from constant revelations of corruption and impunity among the powers that be. Chespirito’s characters oozed decency, and decency is what appears to be in short supply these days in Mexican public life.

Every episode of Chapulín Colorado started with a moment of peril in which the victim would exclaim, “O, y ahora, quién podrá ayudarnos?”(“Oh, and now, who can help us?”). Mexicans are asking themselves that very question right now, and there does not appear to be a ready answer. Certainly no bumbling superhero in red tights is materializing to set things right, exhorting folks with his “Síganme los Buenos” (“Follow me, you good people”) call or his triumphant “No contaban con mi astucia” (“You didn’t count on my astuteness”).

My favorite Chapulinism–a quote that has never failed me when the going gets rough–is “Que no cunda el pánico.” It’s a humorously awkward phrasing of “let’s not panic,” though I am worried that this is what many Mexicans feel on the verge of doing. Watching news coverage of the tens of thousands bidding farewell to Chespirito in his characters’ costumes at Mexico’s largest soccer stadium, I couldn’t help but think there is no one from the country’s political world who could ever elicit such an outpouring.

It’s a close call, but El Chavo del Ocho may have been even more beloved than Chapulín. The kid with no name, played endearingly by Chespirito in his 40s and 50s, wore a dirty striped shirt, suspenders, and a trademark cap. He lived in a barrel in the middle of the courtyard in a classic “vecindad,” or neighborhood, that implausibly housed families of varying social classes. El Chavo was the happiest kid there, and the dignified moral center of the community, always trying to do right, but often falling short, misbehaving “sin querer queriendo” (without wanting to want to). Somehow the community cared for him, without ever really trying to alter his circumstances.

The wise authority figure of the ensemble, commanding unquestioned respect from everyone, was “el profesor Girafales.” A schoolteacher, Girafales can be seen as a stand-in for the state, then a fully owned subsidiary of the autocratic PRI political party. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, the powerful Televisa network that went on to air Chespirito’s shows at the height of their popularity was the chief propagandist for the PRI and the glories of the stable Mexico it had forged from revolutionary upheaval. The network’s newscasts were mocked and reviled almost as much as Chespirito was beloved. El Chavo and Chapulín, mainly aimed at kids but watched by everyone, did not engage in political commentary or satire. If anything, their anodyne themes of decency, harmony, and social cohesion among people of different backgrounds fit in well with the state’s heavy-handed paternalism. It’s a shame, though, that Chespirito’s inherent decency couldn’t have made more of an impression on Mexico’s corrupt political culture, as it did on his millions of viewers.

Gómez Bolaños was a prolific writer for other comedians in the 1960s (hence the nickname “little Shakespeare”) before he tried out for one of the roles he’d written. Just prior to creating El Chavo and Chapulín, he was determined to launch a show called “El Ciudadano Gómez” (“Citizen Gómez”), in which an ordinary citizen would take it upon himself to help people solve their problems and become more involved in their community. A few episodes were taped, but by all accounts they weren’t all that funny, certainly nothing like El Chavo or Chapulín.

That’s a shame, in a way. El Chavo and Chapulín have enriched generations of people in dozens of countries. But the role model Mexico could really use is of a decent, ordinary citizen who gets involved to change society for the better.

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