| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
|
|
Indeed, amid the surprise, mirth, and derision that were a part of the response, we might even see positive signs regarding the health of the American political system—the surprise suggests that Americans do not yet regard abuses of power as any sort of norm; the mirth reflects the clumsiness of the protagonist; and the derision is a welcome sign that we have little reluctance to condemn corrupt people in high places.
But another reading of the scandal—as opposed to the governor's actions themselves—points to deeper concerns. Blagojevich is easy to ridicule, but we might ask what really is funny about soliciting bids for a public office or about his other impeachable actions, particularly in a state that has seen far more than its share of high-level misconduct. Derision might indeed reflect a healthy willingness to stand up to the powerful, but might also show a lack of understanding of the deeper influences that produce such officials and make way for their conduct—in effect, mistaking the systemic for the personal. Surprise, too, is misplaced: I will suggest in this chapter that because Americans place such little value on politics and leadership they should not be surprised when a Blagojevich appears on the stage.
This chapter examines recent corruption and reform issues against the backdrop of the American political culture. I suggest that several types of ambivalence—toward self-interest, relationships between public and private concerns, and toward politics itself—have produced both a number of blind spots with respect to politics, leadership, and the significance of corruption and a naïve overreliance on rules and institutional remedies as means of reform. My concern is not to explain any one case of corruption, but rather to look more deeply at our attitudes toward it. Nor do I seek to propose ways of preventing further abuses of power; instead, the question is why our responses to them are so often ineffective. In the end, I suggest that by disregarding the value of politics and leadership as ways of sustaining democratic accountability we invite the “duplicitous violations of the democratic norm of inclusion”3 that lie at the heart of corruption in a democracy. Such attitudes both enable future corruption and encourage reform responses that raise expectations while repeatedly proving ineffective at sustaining democratic participation and