In a culture of corruption, like the ones that infected companies like Enron and continue to infect much of Wall Street and the political class in places like Washington, D.C., nobody really believes corruption is wrong. It's accepted simply as how things work, and so if you work in places like that, and you haven't developed a strong, well-established moral grounding, which very few have, you go along with corrupt practices because everybody else does. Ambitious, success-oriented young people take jobs in such places, and that's how you succeed.
Within cultures of corruption comes a cynicism about there being no other possibility. For someone like Trump the idea of being anything but corrupt is moralistic nonsense and impossible to jibe with his idea of being a winner or to be the great success he imagines himself to be. And so his own corruption is for him and people around him simply normative, and anybody who tries to use corruption as a way of attacking him is not doing it because the attacker genuinely believes that corruption is wrong but because it’s an available weapon to be used for purely partisan purposes. I'm sure that he and hacks like Devin Nunes and Sean Hannity, et al., sincerely believe that. There is no right or wrong; there is only loyalty to the capo. It's called being a team player. We lose when they win, and vice versa, so winning is all that matters. It's that stupid, and it's that crude.
And so Trump's defenders argue that his corruption is not a big deal, just a technicality, something that no one would care about if he wasn’t president and his accusers had no political axe to grind. Corrupt practice is what rich, white people do everyday. Nothing to see here. Let's move on.
But the American people, particularly so many who voted for Trump, wanted to drain the swamp, and I believe that many Americans, disgusted by how extreme the problem had become were desperate for an extreme solution. And so they naively took Trump at his word that he understood the culture of corruption because he himself has bribed politicians and that because he's rich he isn't vulnerable to those who want to bribe him. That made him sound honest and down to earth. And many people sincerely believed he was a successful businessman and that business people are less corrupt than politicians, so it made sense to send one to clean up the mess in Washington. No matter that he was involved in the Casino business and New York real estate world that is notorious for money laundering and that he would not make his tax returns available for public scrutiny. What could go wrong?
So anybody who knew anything about Trump's career before his candidacy knows he's a media-savvy con man, and that to have elected him was essentially to elect the Fox campaigning to clean up the corrupt chicken house. As with all con men, the fundamental mistake was to believe anything at all about anything they say. I think that many (not most) Trump voters have since the election come to their senses, enough that if the 2020 election were held today, he would lose in a historic landslide. But it's not 2020, and we are likely to have him at least until then unless some kind of pressure can be brought upon him to resign office. (Perhaps with threats to indict his children in some non-federal jurisdiction, as for instance in proceedings brought against the Trump Organization by the New York State Attorney General.)
But even if Trump were to be pushed out somehow, the fundamental problem still remains, which is that both the political and economic spheres in this country are profoundly shaped by a culture of corruption, and while Trump's presidency might expose how egregious this corruption is by his unselfconscious acceptance of it as business as usual, its cultural infrastructure remains when he goes, whether sooner or later.
So the question is whether Trump, in exposing the bankruptcy of the current system, presents the political Left with an opportunity to change things. I think in theory it does, but in practical reality it won't because the Left does not have the moral resources to effect such a change. Obama had an opportunity to effect significant change in the wake of widespread revulsion with the corruption on Wall Street, but he had neither the will nor the capacity to do it. I doubt that whoever follows Trump will have more will or more capacity.
The solution lies at a deeper level, and that's what makes things intractably difficulty. We need a politics that transcends "interest" if by interest we mean it's in my 'interest' to have better health care or higher paying job or whatever. The American people want more than anything else a robust moral vision of future possibility for American society. Particular policies--regardless of their utility--have to be consistent with or embedded in a vision of an American future that is simply not within the capacity of Liberal political and cultural elites--not just to deliver, but even to imagine.
Why? Because their imaginations are completely circumscribed by an ethos of utility and an ontology of negative freedom, i.e., freedom from this or that lingering premodern vestige of oppression. This simply is not enough. There is no inspiring Yes that comes in response to the program of the cultural and political Left, and so it cannot be to be a true counterbalance to the deep Evil and collective delusion that has possessed the cultural Right in this country and abroad. And so we're likely to continue our slide toward where Russia, China, Poland, Turkey, etc. are now.
Corruption is our default condition, and there is no alternative to it unless there is a truly inspiring alternative vision of the Good Society, but to have such an alternative vision, you must have some sense that there is such a thing as T.H.E. Good. And the only way we develop such a sense of the Good is to have genuinely encountered it and to have been inspired by it.
Without that inspiration nothing much substantively good can happen. That inspiring vision of the Good is not going to come from the cultural Right, which, with the exception of some Never Trumpers, has delegitimated itself and despite its purported spiritual commitments has proved itself incapable of true moral discernment. And the Catholic Church's hierarchy (talk about a culture of corruption) continues its spiral into moral irrelevancy in the public imagination. Neither will it come from the Democratic Party or the broader cultural Left because, as suggested above, its ontological assumptions and so its imagination of future possibility exclude a vision of the Good or of any collective aspirations toward it.
Trump (or Pence) isn't the real threat; their incompetence disqualifies them in that regard. They are harbingers. I fear who comes ten years from now, if not sooner. So if things are truly to change, there has to be some profound shift in our collective moral imaginations. It's possible, but until it does, the bad guys win by default.