| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
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of corruption, and make it impossible to resolve the specifics of such definitions once and for all.
It was not always so. Classical thinkers saw corruption as a collective state of being—indeed, as a property of whole societies whose moral health was judged in terms of relationships between leaders and followers, the moral right of rulers to rule, and those leaders' ability to claim the loyalty of followers—or, of a people's “love of liberty,” “the quality of…political leadership [and] the viability of…political values or style.”16 A sound political order was an organic quality of good societies, transcending the agendas of specific groups. Its goodness was judged more by the ends and justifications of power than by the means and processes employed in its pursuit and use—ideas perhaps best captured in Dobel's classically informed argument that “[t]he privatization of moral concerns and the accompanying breakdown of civic loyalty and virtue are the cardinal attributes of a corrupt state.”17
Variations on these classical themes remain with us today, for contemporary definitions are not only vague and contested, they are also surprisingly incomplete. They overlook values such as leadership, citizenship, loyalty, representation, and deliberation while converting accountability and governance to technical concerns. Moreover, as popular disquiet over the role of quite legal contributions in politics reveals, legalistic and process-oriented conceptions of democratic politics, accountability, and corruption fail to address popular misgivings about the basic soundness and credibility of politics and leaders. In many respects citizens' complaints echo some important classical themes and, however diffuse they may be, are more advanced than our more precise but limited analytical definitions when it comes to a full understanding of corruption issues in contemporary America.
Values and Culture: Of Politics and Angels
What aspects of American political culture might underlie such expectations, discontents, and disillusionment? Consider the following: moralism, in an uneasy relationship with individualism, an institutional