On the many layers of our corruption

yea, even worse than you thought

I was recently asked to address the Democratic Policy Conference of the Senate. I can’t help but think I failed in that task. The topic for our session was corruption, though for some reason I thought my brief was to describe our ongoing litigation to end super PACs. After I made my presentation, a panel of senators made theirs. Their presentations were much more interesting and urgent, as they framed more effectively what is the most urgent challenge in American politics today: corruption.

As penance (and therapy), I want to sketch what I wish I would have said, not imagining senators have the time for a Substack post. Instead, because I feel the issue is too simply understood. I’ve been focused for the last almost 20 years on this question of corruption. The critical point to see is how many layers to the problem there are. And how those layers have multiplied over those 20 years.

Those with deeper historical knowledge could point to parallels across history. I’m not interested in the history here. I’m interested in the present: in the urgent need to translate this understanding into action. In this post, I focus on that understanding, with a hint of the actions that should follow.

Layer 1: The Kleptocracy

Never before in the history of this nation has it been fair to describe the President as leading a kleptocracy. Yet that is the only true or fair description of the current president and his administration. No doubt there have been other administrations charged with corruption. The Grant administration was stained by major scandals, including Crédit Mobilier and the Whiskey Ring; but Grant didn’t gain anything from those scandals personally. The Harding administration birthed the Teapot Dome scandal, in which senior officials were found to have taken bribes; again, Harding was never shown to have been enriched from those scandals personally. The Nixon administration gathered extraordinary sums (at the time; today they seem modest) from businesses and regulated interests; that money was used for political, not personal, gain. Those cases stain the Office of the President. But they are nothing compared with the current regime.

The kleptocracy of the Trump administration is something totally different. Multiple investigations have established that Trump and his family have benefited by billions of dollars since he became president for the second time. Don Jr. brags that the family will become the richest in America by the end of the term. The family openly leverages its connection to the regulatory power of the federal government to drive benefit to itself. The President is literally shameless about his and his family’s behavior.

This corruption has been enabled by a bizarrely stupid, historically baseless theory of executive power. Somehow, the conservatives have convinced the Supreme Court that what it means to be a President is to have the power to remove literally anybody in the executive branch. Whether that person is charged with investigating corruption, or conflicts of interest, or applying the rule of law fairly doesn’t matter: under the extreme unitary executive theory that now occupies the brains of conservative legal culture, what the framers meant by vesting in one man “the executive power” was that that one man would have the power to remove anyone.

This view has no historical basis at all. It is a fabrication. It is completely made up. It is a simplification of a much more subtle and realistic understanding of executive power by our framers. And yet, because of this made-up theory of constitutional law, we are seeing in the current President its most extreme manifestation. Combined with the Supreme Court’s made-up theory of presidential immunity, the president gets away with anything. No one in the executive branch has the courage to stand up to this president because they know they will be fired. They have been fired. Independent inspectors general have been removed, preemptively, so that there would be no one who could check the president and his crimes—if, indeed, they are crimes under the Supreme Court’s theory of presidential immunity.

No doubt this is the most significant difference between the corruption I began studying twenty years ago and the corruption that is today. But except for the risk that it will encourage more like Trump to vie for the presidency, this corruption is not the most significant or consequential to the future of America. This corruption will pass on its own. The rest must be attacked directly.

Layer 2: Oligarchic Corruption

In March 2010, a federal court created the super PAC. Not the Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC, but a lower federal court in SpeechNow v. FEC three months after Citizens United. Before that decision, contributions to independent political action committees were limited to $5,000. That limit made them all but irrelevant. Why give $5,000 to an independent political action committee when you could give the same amount to a direct political action committee?

But once the limit on contributions was eliminated, a loophole the size of the integrity of the American political system was ripped into this corner of campaign finance jurisprudence. The consequence has been an explosion in super PAC contributions, going from $63M in 2010 to $2.6B in 2024.

The most significant effect of this transformation is in the character and concentration of donors. What super PACs have done is to wildly increase the power of billionaires to affect American politics. As the New York Times reported, in 2010, the percentage of outside money coming from billionaires was 0.3%. In 2024, it was 19%, a 63-fold increase. That rise signals a radical transformation in the character of the influences that drive politicians to act—or not to act.

Consider the crypto super PACs in 2024: In one election cycle, those PACs flipped crypto policy in America, as they targeted prominent opponents to the crypto industry, and subsidized up-and-coming supporters. And crucially, the PACs succeeded in flipping a President who had once characterized crypto as a scam but then was brought to recognize that it could be a vehicle for inflating his own personal wealth (e.g., a scam).

That same dynamic has been practiced by other super PACs in the past. It will be practiced by super PACs in the future. AIPAC has deployed this strategy brilliantly. AI super PACs are gearing up to deploy the strategy in 2026 and 2028.

The corrupting dynamic of this concentration is familiar across history and across the world: When the political system becomes dependent on the super wealthy, the super wealthy become the primary driver of policy change to benefit them and the primary block of policy change that threatens them.

The strategy is not new. Boss Tweed, the famous and criminal boss of the political machine Tammany Hall, famously said, “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I do the nominating.” In a world of super PAC-funded campaigns, it is the super PACs that “do the nominating.” Without super PAC support or protection, candidates at every level are vulnerable. We get to vote among the candidates that the super PACs have allowed. The candidates understand who they are dependent upon. The super PACs understand who depends upon them.

Call this “Tweedism.” Tweedism thrives in America today. It is a core corruption of our democracy.

Layer 3: Corrupting Dependencies

But the billionaires are not the only source of corruption. Much more fundamental is a form of corruption that has been with us for thirty years, at least. This is the corruption that follows inevitably from the systems we have developed for funding campaigns generally.

To see this corruption, we need to make a very safe assumption: That our leaders are only human, and that they, like the rest of us, respond in predictable ways to incentives and to threats.

Any candidate in American politics today has a single focus to enable them to succeed as a candidate: that focus is raising money. Members of Congress and candidates for Congress spend anywhere between 30 and 70% of their time raising money. Yet obviously, these candidates are not raising money from the average American. They are not calling randomly, reaching out to every demographic, every income group, every age group. They are instead calling a very select list of Americans who have been identified with very specific interests. The pattern of their engagement reveals their awareness of those interests. Aides sit with them as they make their calls, identifying the particular interest that the person at the other end of the phone has. As the candidate or incumbent aims to serve, aims to incentivize the target to give, the candidate or incumbent learns what they need to say. They become shapeshifters, constantly adjusting their views or representations of their views to raise money. As Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, once reported, “I was told by a colleague, ‘Always lean to the green.’” And then, to clarify, she went on, “He was not an environmentalist.”

These candidates are dependent upon this money. That dependence is a corruption. Not quid pro quo corruption, or at least not necessarily so. Instead, it is a corruption relative to the dependence that our representative democracy was meant to produce. Madison promised us a republic with representatives “dependent on the people alone.” In Federalist 57, he clarified what he meant by “the people”: “not the rich more than the poor.” Yet the system of private funding for public campaigns that we have evolved is a system that is precisely dependent on the rich more than the poor. It is the opposite of Madison’s design. It is a corruption of that design.

Now, of course, not all candidates need to bend to the rich. Some are prominent enough to raise most of their money from small-dollar donations. Many forgo PAC contributions completely, or even contributions from large funders generally. Some tell super PACs not to support them. And while many of these candidates are genuine in the positions they advance, what we know about small-dollar funding is that more are motivated the more extreme the candidate. On both the left and the right, extremes drive passion. Passion yields small-dollar donations.

Yet this is not corruption in the same sense that tweedism is corruption. But we should recognize the effect such a system produces. In a system of purely private funding, small-dollar funding pushes parties to the extremes. Or at least, more extreme than they otherwise would be were funding not purely private. If all voters, for example, were given vouchers that they in turn could give to political candidates to fund their campaigns, the candidates would not need to appeal to the extreme. Much more money could flow from the middle. Thus, to “lean to the green” in a purely privately funded system, candidates must lean to the extreme. But in a citizen-funded system, there’s more in the middle than in the extreme.

This is not the only feature (or bug) of our system that tilts our politics to the extreme. Closed party primaries, for example, do the same. What we know about party primaries is that the people who vote are the most extreme from either party. The choice of closed primaries is thus a choice for a more extreme politics.

Likewise with gerrymandering: Political parties, through gerrymandering, draw districts to protect their own. Many of those districts are effectively “safe seats,” meaning seats that are reliably Democratic or reliably Republican. The only threat that a candidate in a safe seat faces is a challenge in the primary from a more extreme candidate. Safe seats, with closed primaries, thus amplify the extremes in America, just as a system of private funding amplifies the extreme, either at the low-dollar or the high-dollar level.

These are distortions through design. They produce a more extreme politics than otherwise would be. We could call them corruptions if we believed there was a commitment in our Constitution to a dependence “on the people alone,” and where by “the people,” the Constitution meant “not the extremes, more than the moderates.” That’s my view of representative democracy. That’s what I believe the idea of equality demands in a representative democracy. But I’m not Madison, and I won’t extend his framework here. These are not corruptions in the sense we’ve traditionally thought of corruptions, even if we can see their distorting effects.

Instead, it is enough to recognize the obvious and overwhelming effects of the corruption produced by the way we fund campaigns—“corruption” because it makes our republic dependent upon “the rich more than the poor.” That corruption explains the many ways that our government is not responsive to us: It accounts for the rent-seeking of special interests; for the dysfunction of every agency charged with helping ordinary people—from OSHA to the CFPB; for the inability of the IRS to collect the taxes of the most wealthy; for the endless spending on weapons of war, far exceeding every other nation in the world. It is why we have no real plan for climate change; no strategy to supply the endless energy demand AI will create; no strategy for infrastructure renewal; no idea how to address health care costs; no plan to address toxins in our environment. Why is our food so unhealthy compared to the same food from Europe? Why do people their 80s need to work at Walmart?

He who pays the piper calls the tune. We don’t pay the piper. We don’t call the tune.

Layer 4: Constitutional Corruptions

The framers of our constitution thought in mechanical terms. They imagined they were building a republic on the model of a Swiss watch. They believed that if they had forces and counterforces, checks and balances, the system would protect itself from inevitable threats. They were wildly more informed and well-read than members of our Congress are today. They understood history. They understood, from across history, that every nation is vulnerable to tyrants and demagogues. But they believed they had built a system that would protect our nation from those tyrants. They believed that the mechanics of their machine would do that protecting.

Those mechanics built upon institutional loyalty. The Framers believed that members of our government would become loyal to the institutions they were members of. Senators would become loyal to the Senate. Representatives would become loyal to the House. Officers in an administration would become loyal to the administration. And judges would become loyal to the rule of law. These competing loyalties, the framers believed, would check the power of any one branch. They would block a tyrant, for example, from taking over the presidency because Congress would check his tyrannical power.

The Framers were smart men. But in this design, the Framers missed an obvious point. Because overlaying these different political institutions is an institution that many in the founding generation hoped would never become part of our republic: the political party. And over time, and especially recently, loyalty to party has outweighed loyalty to institution. Republican senators do not believe their primary loyalty is to the Senate, let alone the nation. They believe their primary loyalty is to a president. Likewise in the House: The primary loyalty of Republican members of Congress is to the president, not to the House. And of course, the primary loyalty of the President is to those who are loyal to him.

No doubt, this dynamic has existed in some form since the beginning of the republic. It was especially poisonous to good government during the era of patronage government. The 19th century is filled with the corruptions from the patronage system. It was the great reform of the late part of the 19th century to remove patronage from civil service and replace it with qualified civil servants, insulated from politics.

Yet as with the corruptions manifested in our kleptocracy, the loyalties of party are now more transparent and more extreme than at any other time in modern political history. The Trump administration openly discriminates—in both prosecutions and in benefits—against blue states. It openly excludes members of the Democratic Party from briefings and public events, including events with foreign dignitaries. The administration has defined itself as a party pursuing partisan ends, where “partisan” means politics benefiting the President.

The affection by the president for members of Congress loyal to him has been reciprocated by members of Congress. Though this is the most corrupt administration in American history, Republicans in Congress have done nothing to check that corruption. Though this President was elected promising not to get us involved in new wars, the administration has bombed more nations in the first year in office than any administration in the history of the republic, and has now effectively declared war on two nations, one of which will cause catastrophic harm to our economy. Though few in Congress support the idea of annexing Canada or Greenland or Cuba, the President continues to threaten military expansion. In each of these cases, the institution intended to check the President has failed to do its job. The design of checks and balances has been corrupted by the poison of partisan politics.

Again, if the policies of the President were in fact the policies supported by members of Congress, this would be no corruption. If, in fact, the President had been elected on a platform of self-enrichment and foreign wars, their support would be understandable, even expected. But the measure of the corruption of the design our Framers intended is that no one can honestly believe that the members of Congress who cowardly refuse to resist this President do so for any reason other than cowardice. The Framers expected them to lead. They gave them the responsibility to check such tyranny. That is their job. Yet the partisan frame that has fallen across our government has corrupted the Framers’ design. Their system of checks and balances is dead. At least the role to be played by Congress has been suffocated by pathetic loyalty to political party.

No doubt, Republicans would insist, if they stood up to the President, he would turn against them, and they would be thrown out of Congress. I’ve heard this statement uttered as if it really were an excuse. But could a soldier justify not rushing a hill by observing she might be shot? Or a fireman explain not fighting a fire because he was afraid of getting burned? Public service is the service of sacrifice. And if you’re not willing to lose, to stand up for what’s right, you need a different job.

Congress was thus the framers’ first line of defense; Congress has failed us. But the framers had a backup. Not the courts, but the people. Even if Congress has been corrupted, regular elections, the framers believed, would give us the chance to punish a corrupted Congress. For two years, tyranny might reign. But so long as the states preserved regular elections, we would have the power to resist tyranny. And throughout our history, that opportunity has never been denied us. Even in the middle of a civil war, the nation continued its practice of regular elections. Never have we deviated from this fundamental commitment.

And yet, even here, the check on tyranny has been compromised. In obvious ways, gerrymandering and partisan lock-in mute the public’s ability to express its opposition to the party in power: While the election of 1894 threw out 30% of Congress, there is no such landslide possible in 2026. The politicians have brilliantly protected themselves from the public’s wrath, through techniques that corrupt the very idea of representative democracy. The public may overwhelmingly oppose the policies of this president, and therefore, the policies of this Republican Congress. But the election of 2026 will not reflect the percentage who oppose this president and his policies. It will reflect instead the corrupted line-drawing that gerrymandering enables.

Thus, our framers thought they had erected a constitution to protect us from tyranny. A corruption of that design has defeated their purpose. The institutional check of Congress has been corrupted by political parties; the democratic check of we the people has been weakened by a system of entrenchment that blocks the will of the vast majority of Americans from being reflected in a vast majority controlling Congress. A constitution designed to protect representative democracy has failed, because the constitutional designs meant to protect representative democracy have been corrupted.

At each layer, the story is the same: A design meant to secure representative democracy as representative of the people—and not “the rich more than the poor”—has been defeated. The rule of law was to block kleptocracy; a bizarre and baseless interpretation of executive authority has defeated that design. An ideal of political equality was meant to create a republic dependent on the people; super PACs and the private funding of public campaigns have defeated that objective. And a system of checks and balances was meant to check the power of a lawless and tyrannical president; poisonous partisanship has destroyed Congress’s check, and partisan gerrymandering has destroyed the people’s check. Corruptions rage in each of these four layers. The consequence of these corruptions is the failed state we now occupy.

Layer 5: Corruptions of Culture

There is a fifth layer to our corruption. It is the corruption of culture. This corruption has two parts. The first is the corruption of media. Within the memory of at least a quarter of us is a media whose business model was focused on understanding. During the age of what Princeton Professor Markus Prior has called “broadcast democracy,” a relatively narrow range of sources aimed to help us understand what was going on. That media did not profit from turning us into ignorant people who hated each other. It profited from spreading understanding. And through its profit, it crafted a certain democratic coherence, a coherence among the people. We—all of us—understood something because all of us were watching the same story. No graph better captures this coherence than this picture of public support for Richard Nixon.

What’s striking about this graph is not that support for Nixon falls. It is that support for Nixon falls at the same rate among all three demographics. We all came to believe that our president was a crook at the same rate because we all were following the same story told to us by the same sources.

That world is no more. That business model is no more. Today, media profits through engagement. It profits more the more it can rent our attention to advertisers. Yet that engagement is not crafted through democratic coherence. The techniques that drive us to watch more are not the techniques that allow us to understand more. To the contrary, the techniques of engagement-based media leverage the worst of us, and place us into polarized and separate realities. We don’t understand what the other side believes. We instead become convinced that we are right and they are traitors.

This, of course, isn’t the first time in history when the media profited from a polarizing press. That was the model of the press for much of the nineteenth century, and it manifested most tragically in the mutual ignorance that led to the Civil War. But the difference between the 19th century and today is that in ordinary times, the public was invisible. Today, the public is perpetually legible. Polling is less than a century old, yet as it has grown in prevalence, it has become a perpetual presence in the context of policymaking and policy judgment.

Think about the dilemma that many Republicans faced after January 6. The assault on the Capitol shocked even the most loyal Trump Republicans. Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy were all initially explicit in their criticisms of the President for his role inciting an insurrection. As Graham said on the floor of the Senate, “All I can say is count me out. Enough is enough.”

But when polls revealed that the Republican base was still with the President, these “leaders” scuttled back from their brief moment of leadership. An ignorant public — literally “ignorant,” not stupid, not incapable of understanding, but a public fed the confirming facts that they wanted to believe—had overruled the sensible judgment of the politicians who had witnessed firsthand the greatest peacetime attack on our Capitol in our history. A legible public became an overwhelming political force, despite being untethered from reality.

This cultural corruption is devastating to the potential for democracy. If we cannot understand the facts, then we cannot decide as a people how to proceed. We’ve lost a media that profits from telling us the truth; we’ve replaced it with a media that aims simply to maximize its engagement, whether truth be told or not. And whether we can do democracy sensibly in such a world is not yet clear.

The second corruption of culture is harder to describe briefly. I blame Milton Friedman for it.

This corruption begins in an effort by Friedman to rationalize the purpose of corporations. In September 1970, Friedman published an article in the New York Times titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” In that article, and in the endless lectures that Friedman gave following that article, Friedman aimed to convince America that corporations should focus exclusively on how to maximize shareholder value over any other possible corporate objective. Anything else was simple corporate theft. An executive worked for the company’s shareholders. If he spent their money in ways not designed to increase shareholder value, he was taking their money for his own purposes.

Friedman’s account was normative, not descriptive. Because across the history of corporations, corporations have always had multiple purposes, and the job of managers was always to trade off among those different purposes. In simplifying corporate purpose to this single overriding goal, Friedman normalized, and then made normative, the idea of corporations as paperclip maximizers.

That allusion will be familiar to those focused on the fears about runaway AI. It was given to us by philosopher Nick Bostrom in the form of a thought experiment. Imagine a superintelligent AI being given the objective of maximizing paperclip production. Soon, Bostrom hypothesizes, the whole universe would be devoted to the job of paperclip production.

Paperclip maximizing is precisely what Friedman was committing corporations to. Brave and rational executives would have the courage to ignore competing objectives, like the health of a community or environment or workers, if those objectives did not advance the objective of maximizing shareholder value.

And then this mentality began to spread beyond for-profit public corporations. Soon many institutions within our society came to narrow their purpose to single definable goals—maximizing profits for partners in law firms, maximizing profits for the corporate owners of public media, maximizing endowments for major universities. Each context invited an MBA mentality to draw rationalizing efficiency plans for each of these institutions to achieve their single overriding purpose. Our culture has developed a sense of responsibility that measures each act against these narrow metrics. We ridicule people who would sacrifice for some other objective. Being responsible means sacrificing to make as many paperclips as possible.

I doubt anyone in the Friedman movement ever reckoned with how this mentality would render those who follow it vulnerable to extortion. If the only dimension of constraint is the objective to maximize, there is no space for right versus wrong. A clever extortionist then becomes skilled at understanding the price at which the maximizer will settle. “It’s just business” was a euphemism for the mafia. But when the whole world is simply maximizing, then the whole world is vulnerable to the mentality of the mafia.

And here we pivot back to our kleptocratic President. Because the most striking feature of the first year of his second term was his extraordinary deployment of extortionist techniques. In context after context, the President exercised power beyond his legal authority for the purpose of forcing independent institutions to bend the knee to him. Immediately after coming back into office, he threatened law firms that had supported causes that had opposed him. Those threats were legally baseless, and yet the general partner maximizers at nine of those firms quickly determined that it was more efficient to yield and give the President a billion dollars in free legal services than it was to stand up and fight. Likewise, corporate executives at ABC and CBS determined it was more profitable to yield to legally baseless lawsuits than to stand up for what was right. And then many universities across the country determined that it was cheaper to yield to the President’s lawless demands than it was to stand up and fight. In each of those contexts, the President leveraged his gift as an extortionist to force these institutions of independence to give in. And as they gave in, they told themselves they were doing the rational thing, the sensible thing, the responsible thing, because in each context they were only doing the thing that would ensure they could maximize their own return.

If all we care about is maximizing, we cannot see right versus wrong. And if we cannot see right versus wrong, if we somehow believe that right versus wrong collapses into more versus less, then we are vulnerable to those who don’t see right or wrong, to those who only see more profit for themselves.

On June 4, 1940, Winston Churchill stood before Parliament to account for a catastrophe. The British Expeditionary Force had just been abandoned on the continent. France was ten days from surrender. The outcome of the war was genuinely uncertain. And yet Churchill, rather than reaching for a cost-benefit analysis or a measured strategic assessment, reached for something else entirely.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

“We shall never surrender.” That phrase is worth sitting with. It is not an argument. It is not a claim that resistance would be more efficient than capitulation. It is a declaration that some things exist outside the maximizing ledger—that right and wrong don’t collapse into more or less. Churchill was invoking a different kind of reasoning, one that treated certain values as not for sale.

Our culture has lost that language. Sensible sorts never say never. Whether surrender is sensible depends on whether surrendering maximizes paperclip production. We’ll have to see.

This mentality didn’t create Donald Trump. But it made us vulnerable to Donald Trump. It is a corruption, too. But it is a deeper corruption than anything that could be fixed by fixing politics alone.

Remedies

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike is asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” He replies, “Slowly at first, and then all at once.”

When I began my work on corruption 20 years ago, the problem was profoundly important yet tiny compared with the problem today. Profoundly important because the core corruption then was the dependence corruption that we had allowed to weave into our democracy. That corruption produced a government that could not deliver to ordinary Americans. It produced a government that was inefficient and bloated and often self-defeating. It convinced Americans that Ronald Reagan was right: that “government is not the solution,” that “government is the problem.”

For 20 years, my belief has been that unless we can end that dependence corruption and thereby enable a government to deliver to ordinary Americans, ordinary Americans will become increasingly alienated from our democracy. That prediction, unfortunately, has proven true.

What I didn’t see then, and I think very few understood back then, was how that base corruption would metastasize across our politics and society. There were no super PACs in 2007 when I began this work, and so the concentrated power of billionaires was just not on the radar. Partisan politics was real, no doubt, but the extreme gerrymandering of 2010 was still in the future. And I doubt anyone in 2007 would have believed that an open and notorious kleptocrat would be immune from prosecution, not just because the Supreme Court had rendered his behavior effectively immune, but more importantly, because the political checks our framers envisioned no longer functioned.

In 2007, we had just begun to understand the difference between “reality-based” policymaking, as the Bush administration put it, and the policymaking of politics. We were just on the cusp of the relativism of truth. And finally, in 2007, though we had suffered presidents across our history who were less publicly spirited than others, never in our history had we elected a malignant narcissist whose narcissism would show no bounds. No president has ever forced his face on buildings across Washington, D.C., or on passports, or insisted that his signature be on dollar bills. Never in our history has a president overseen the naming of a public building or public monument in his own name. Donald Trump has overseen and demanded all of it.

It is true that very few nations or political systems deal with malignant narcissism well. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Hitler: those were radically different political systems, yet all were incapable of resisting the power of a malignant narcissist. So it may not be surprising that ours has failed as well. And as this particular pathology is relatively rare, at least rare among successful sorts (but see Elon Musk), maybe we don’t need to worry about its dangers in the future.

But even ignoring that kleptocratic corruption, what Democrats must recognize is the urgent need to address every other layer of corruption now. Not for prudishness, but for existential political prudence. The Democratic Party is the party that promises that government can make things better. But if the public has been convinced that government is the problem, then the plans and the promises of Democrats are just objects for ridicule. It is only by fixing this corrupt system that we could begin to imagine a government actually delivering to ordinary Americans. It is only by fixing this corrupt system that the abundance agenda has any hope. It is only by fixing this corrupt system that Americans could begin to believe there was a reason to trust that their government aimed to make life better for all of us, rather than for the few who happened to occupy political office.

In 1992, James Carville framed the Clinton campaign around a single slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.” It is time to remix that slogan and update it for our time. It’s not the economy, stupid.

It’s the corruption, stupid. It’s the corruption that has given us this stupid economy, stupid.

That slogan resonates with Americans today. In February 2025, Pew reported that for the first time in its history, Americans ranked money in politics as the top economic issue. No one today can deny that corruption is everywhere. And in this context, I believe that Democrats must credibly commit to addressing that corruption in a way that is believable.

That commitment is difficult for the party. I get that. The party is split between those who believe that they could leverage the power of big money to big victories and those who believe it is time to give up the power of big money, or to at least signal that all of politics should give up the power of big money. The first half believes that victory comes by articulating ever more clever Democratic programs that more Americans could sign up to. They envision success to be like a Clinton State of the Union address, endless as it touches on every issue that every single interest group might care about, knitting together a coalition of groups who believe that government could deliver to them what they themselves want.

I believe that approach is profoundly misguided. I believe that unless the party finds a way credibly to commit to ending a corruption that they must acknowledge infects the whole system, Democrats as well as Republicans, they will never trigger support among the broad range of Americans who have lost faith in government.

That commitment would come from a platform that, number one, promises to fight super PACs. As I explained in my intervention at the policy conference, that fight is already happening in the courts. The Supreme Court has never upheld the doctrine that gave us super PACs, and that doctrine is flatly inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence.

But beyond the courts, I believe the party must commit fundamentally to foregoing the power of big money in every context in which it strategically can. Every candidate should offer to the other candidate an agreement to forego super PAC spending in that race. I’m not arguing for unilateral disarmament. I am arguing for a credible commitment to ending what every American believes is the corruption of our political system.

Ending super PACs, however, won’t be enough. In addition, the party should commit to changing the way campaigns are funded. Senator Gillibrand introduced legislation to carry the Seattle model of democracy vouchers to the whole nation so that every voter received vouchers that they could use to help fund the federal campaigns in their district. That strategy is the most successful strategy for bringing every American into the project of funding campaigns and thereby changing the focus of candidates from the few to the many.

These two changes are the essential changes. They could be bundled with other changes that are universally supported. Democrats should leverage their principled support for gerrymandering reform and promise that if they were in power, they would abolish gerrymandering in Blue and Red states alike. And Democrats could commit to passing legislation that would impose on the Supreme Court the rules of ethics that we took for granted that they were following. These additions are icing on the cake. The core, however, must be to reform the corruption of money.

There are many in the Democratic Party who are now articulating a vision of politics beyond corruption. I have enormous respect for them and the work they are doing. But I would urge every Democrat to recognize the profound depth of loss that Americans feel about their government. That loss is rational. It’s not ignorant. That loss has been taught. Americans have learned it.

We will only fix government when the people’s representatives are free to lead. And that will only happen when representatives are liberated from the discipline of big money and allowed once again to listen to the desires and hopes of ordinary Americans.