| Chapter 1: | Democracy without Politics? Hidden Costs of Corruption and Reform in America |
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effect, creating little markets or market-like processes—but leaving the results to individual effort. So too with anticorruption reform: we tend to think of reforms primarily as mandating fairness in political and market processes—witness the enduring popularity of tired clichés about “level playing fields”—but do not often conceive of them in terms of their broader implications or unintended consequences. Reforms, instead, are envisioned as making government more neutral and “nonpolitical,” rather than depending upon our active engagement or empowering leaders able to make authoritative choices in our name.
The result is deep ambivalence about wealth and power and those who possess them: while we resist most forms of tinkering with individualistic processes, their specific outcomes can strain our views on morality, fairness, and our own egalitarian standing. Tocqueville observed that we fear:
Tocqueville's Americans had almost rather be governed by no one than place extensive trust in leaders.24 We seem reflexively to doubt their morality and that of the political processes that anoint them and enable them to govern. In that sense we misunderstand Madison: we like the balance, which we see as emerging directly from the choices of the many, but we are suspicious of the role of ambition in making the political process work. Moreover, and particularly important with respect to leadership, we oversimplify ambition itself, seeing it as inherently threatening