We have 100 days to stop Donald Trump from systemically corrupting our institution

[DonViejo]

The transition period is our last best chance to save the republic

Updated by Matthew Yglesias@[e-mail] Nov 17, 2016, 8:30am EST

The country has entered a dangerous period. The president-elect is the least qualified man to ever hold high office. He also operated the least transparent campaign of the modern era. He gave succor and voice to bigoted elements on a scale not seen in two generations. He openly praised dictators — not as allies but as dictators — and threatened to use the powers of his office to discipline the media.

He also has a long history of corrupt behavior, and his business holdings pose staggering conflicts of interest that are exacerbated by his lack of financial disclosure. But while most journalists and members of the opposition party think they understand the threat of Trump-era corruption, they are in fact drastically underestimating it. When we talk about corruption in the modern United States, we have in mind what Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny define as “the sale by government officials of government property for personal gain.”

This is the classic worry about campaign contributions or revolving doors — the fear that wealthy interests can give money to public officials and in exchange receive favorable treatment from the political system. But in a classic essay on “The Concept of Systemic Corruption in American History,” the economist John Joseph Wallis reminds us that in the Revolutionary Era and during the founding of the republic, Americans worried about something different. Not the venal corruption we are accustomed to thinking about, but what he calls systemic corruption. He writes that 18th-century thinkers “worried much more that the king and his ministers were manipulating grants of economic privileges to secure political support for a corrupt and unconstitutional usurpation of government powers.”

We are used to corruption in which the rich buy political favor. What we need to learn to fear is corruption in which political favor becomes the primary driver of economic success.

more
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/17/13626514/trump-systemic-corruption

[HassleCat]

1. An imperial presidency

Trump already pretty much paraphrased Nixon, who said whatever the president decides to do is automatically legal. Trump will do what is good for Trump. Calls to "save our democracy" are kind of silly, really. We elected this guy because we're tired of democracy. We want a return to a previous time, a time when we made America great by concentrating wealth and power, by disenfranchising many groups within our society, when the privileged were entitled to enjoy themselves by denying things to others. There is wide support for this "return to greatness" and most opposition to it will be ignored.