We’ve been here before. Two hundred and forty-one years ago. You might not think of “corruption” as the burning issue of the day in the American colonies in 1776. What about taxation without representation? Well, the tax in question was the price of today’s dinner date. What about restrictions on liberty? But Britain and its American colonies were the freest places on earth (if you didn’t count the slaves, of course). Ordinary Britons couldn’t understand these complaints, and they thought the American Patriots needed to chill. But what they missed was the colonists’ ire over corruption in the British government—the King’s Friends in Parliament, the showering of gifts on royal favorites, the patronage machines of prime ministers and of royal governors in the colonies.
The Patriots thought they could do better. They had studied John Locke and were steeped in theories of natural rights. But they had also read Livy and thought that monarchies were necessarily corrupt, whether in ancient Rome or contemporary Britain. Kingly rule would breed a race of tyrants who surrounded themselves with a swarm of courtiers, who in turn would milk the public purse. The Patriots said we needed a republic instead, one from which selfish dealings and corrupt bargains would be banished—a government founded on the rock of republican virtue, the virtue shown by citizens who champion the general welfare in a personally disinterested manner.19
What the Patriots were experiencing is what the historian J.G.A. Pocock called a “Machiavellian Moment.” Today, Niccolò Machiavelli is not well known as an exponent of republican virtue, but he was in fact a loyal servant of the Florentine Republic and the author of extended reflections on political morality. In his Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy, he praised the public-spirited Lucius Junius Brutus, who expelled the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud, and founded the Roman Republic. The American Patriots of the revolutionary period were also steeped in classical Roman history and celebrated the republican heroes of ancient Rome. They quoted Latin epigrams, sometimes accurately, while pamphleteers such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton adopted the names of Roman republicans as pseudonyms. Patrick Henry ominously warned that “Tarquin had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George III . . . may profit by their example.” The language of republican virtue provided the Patriots with a justification for breaking away from their corrupt British overlords.
But just how long did republican virtue persist in America? There wasn’t much left of it by 1829, when Andrew Jackson introduced the spoils system and gave plum government jobs to his supporters. As for today, the lobbyists of K Street, the hundreds of special-interest associations in Alexandria, and the dense network of political donors in America have created what Pocock characterized as “the greatest empire of patronage and influence the world has known.” Our government, he wrote, is “dedicated to the principle that politics cannot work unless politicians do things for their friends and their friends know where to find them.”20
The dream of a government free of corruption never dies, however, and in the passions excited by the 2016 electoral campaign we experienced another Machiavellian Moment. Voters noticed that government policies were tilted in favor of powerful interest groups and the wealthiest Americans, and they demanded a change. When Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page looked at survey evidence on voting preferences, they found that the wishes of the average voter don’t correlate with those of influential interest groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.21 Instead, there’s a negative correlation: what business groups want—subsidies for their industries, for example—is what the average voter doesn’t want. It’s the same for economic elites generally: their preferences diverge from those of the average voter. And they pay more attention to politics, are more likely to vote, and contribute more money to candidates.22 They’re also more likely to belong to the same social circle as the candidates they support financially. So they get the things they want—funding for National Public Radio, money for Planned Parenthood, favorable tax loopholes.
In the election, Clinton was the candidate of the status quo, of cozying up to Wall Street. In a speech to Goldman Sachs, as revealed by WikiLeaks, she told the bankers that she would let them write the banking regulations: “How do you get to the golden key, how do we figure out what works? And the people that know the industry better than anybody are the people who work in the industry.”23 She refused to release her speeches, and we now know why. As if to remove any doubt, she told another group that when it comes to policy questions “you need both a public and a private position.”24
On the other side, Trump was the candidate of change, a challenge to politics as usual, to the whole political culture that accepted Clintonian corruption. The Democratic campaign focused almost entirely on his ethical lapses. And his supporters knew he was human, all too human. What they didn’t understand was why Hillary Clinton’s supporters didn’t seem to care about her lapses. She had left a trail of public corruption in her wake, and the Trump supporters wondered why that didn’t seem to matter.
IN NEW YORK CIRCLES, it’s not hard to come across a Clinton Foundation donor. They’re honorable men, for the most part, and simply playing the game as it’s played in America. Unlike suspect donors such as Rajiv Fernando, they aren’t seeking personal favors for themselves, but they might at some point want to recommend a worthy friend or suggest a benign policy change. It’s rather like the old-boy network of days gone by, populated by members of the Cosmos or Harvard clubs. The difference is that today’s network has been monetized.
That wouldn’t have surprised Alexis de Tocqueville. His Democracy in America, according to Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop, “is at once the best book ever written on democracy and the best book ever written on America.”1 Reading it today, many Americans have been led to believe that Tocqueville actually liked America, but that’s because they weren’t paying attention. Tocqueville was astonished by what he saw here, bowled over, and while he was able to see positive features that had eluded other visitors such as Captain Marryat and Mrs. Trollope, what the unwary reader might take as praise was often meant as blame.2
Tocqueville preferred France’s family-centered aristocracy to what he saw as America’s selfish individualism. Say what you want about aristocracy, he thought, but it ties people to past and future generations and makes them more caring. In a democracy, by contrast, one generation is cut off from those that preceded it and those that will follow. What remains is a radical autonomy, with little connection even to one’s own generation. At first, individualism merely saps the virtues of public life, “but in the long run it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” It throws one “back toward himself alone and threatens finally to confine him wholly in the solitude of his own heart.”3
Tocqueville saw an answer to individualism, however, in America’s free institutions. With greater accuracy, he would have identified American politics as the remedy, for what he had in mind was how we have an incentive to join a political party. “When the public governs,” he said, “there is no man who does not feel the value of public benevolence and who does not seek to capture it by attracting the esteem and affection of those in the midst of whom he must live.”4 In short, politics will rescue us from individualism, and Americans have bought into politics with a vengeance. By one count, there are more than half a million elected officials in this country,5 from the president all the way down