A long-time friend and former co-worker, back in my aerospace days, once lamented the reality of office and career politics, that he simply wanted to come to work and do his job without having to worry about all that stuff. The apt response is encapsulated by Yakov Smirnoff in a Miller Lite commercial from that time:
In America, there is plenty of light beer and you can always find a party. In Russia, Party always finds you.
The sordidness of this presidential election and its never-ending stream of dirt have, I’m sure, driven many people to start tuning the whole thing out. Clinton’s supporters concoct fantastical rationalizations about how, if she hasn’t yet been convicted of anything despite the years of investigation and doggedness, she must be innocent. Her detractors lament that, despite the mountains of dirt and the ever-more-sordid revelations, there are millions who still support her and think she’s a good person. The constant buzz has deafened the former and beaten down the latter.
It is both a fact and a shame that, where there is politics, there is corruption. And it is also a fact that politics is everywhere. Fighting corruption, high and low, big and small, is an endless task. It’s also one bound to generate frustration, and it inevitably wears people down. The corrupt know this, and they leverage people’s finite capacity and finite energy to their advantage. The corrupt know that if they delay, stonewall, obfuscate, prevaricate and dissemble, they can outlast their detractors. The corrupt know that those inclined to side with them tend to forgive as time goes on, and that those inclined to oppose them tend to forget and lose their intensity of outrage as time goes on. The corrupt know that, given enough examples of corruption, people grow more likely to assume it’s the invariable and inevitable state of the world, and thus accept it.
Corruption is toxic to liberty and civilized society. It erodes our rights, diminishes our political voices, increases our distrust of our fellow citizens, and degrades our living standards. It’s why abolitionist and liberal (back when it actually meant “liberal”) Wendell Phillips observed:
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
Power and corruption go hand in hand. Power corrupts, the former causes the latter. Tolerance of corruption is not the fault of the corrupt – it is the fault of the people upon whom the corrupt prey.
Benjamin Franklin cautioned us about keeping the Republic the Founding Fathers built. Neither he nor anyone else said it would be easy, and the corruption fatigue we suffer further validates all the warnings.
Lord Acton, in a letter to Archbishop Mandell Creighton observed:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility [that is, the later judgment of historians] has to make up for the want of legal responsibility (that is, legal consequences during the rulers’ lifetimes). Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Yes, it’s easier to give in to, tolerate and dismiss Clinton’s corruption than to endlessly and fruitlessly rail against it. Nothing good can come from doing so. The corruption will not get better on its own, it will not cease with her elevation to the most powerful position in the world.
We’re all worn out by this election, we’re all frustrated by the seeming invincibility of the corrupt. We cannot, however, give up and hope that, somehow, things will get better. Should Clinton, as expected, win on Tuesday, we have to recognize that the fight mustn’t be deemed over. Corruption, unchecked, will inevitably find its way to each of us and do damage to our lives. It must be called out, challenged and resisted, eternally. That we have to do this is not fair, it’s not right, but it’s how life is.
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