The first law of politics: Corruption is persistent and inevitable

I remember back in my grade school civics class, being introduced to the idea of the separation of powers, the American system of government featured three separate branches; the legislative, the executive, and the judicial. I remember the teacher going on at length about the geniuses of the founding fathers in setting up this system. Because if one branch of government was ever to become corrupted or too powerful, the remaining two branches of government could unite and purge the corruption.

That was when I raised my hand and asked a question typical of a child. What would happen if two branches of government became corrupted? I never got an answer. I wasn’t even treated to some bullshit excuse to why this wasn’t even a problem; the teacher just ignored me and moved on to the next question. Much to the bemusement of my peers I might add.

I know the answer to that question. The two corrupted branches would unite to corrupt the third branch.

So when I came of age politically, one of the things I would spend hours doing was to try and come up with a system of government that couldn’t be corrupted. But no mater how clever I thought I was, there was always some means by which my incorruptible system could be corrupted.

Today, I now know that trying to concoct and incorruptible system is a fool’s errand. Such a system is fundamentally impossible. This may seem to be just me stating the obvious, but there are many liberals and progressives out there who toil in futility at this particular mill, including more than a handful of academics who call me to task for such a bold assertion. They note, and not incorrectly so, that I fail to prove this. Some even argue that this is an improvable claim.

The reason why I have confidence in stating there is no such thing as an incorruptible system has to do with real world observation. Even stainless steel will rust can corrode given time and environmental conditions; every machine breaks down, everyone makes mistakes, planes always crash, boats always sink, and rockets always blow-up on the launch pad, despite monumental efforts and astonishing technological progress to combat the inevitability of crashes and other disasters.

I can even point to biology. Life has been on this earth for billion years and still there are pathogens such as bacteria and virus. And if it’s true for biology and technology, is safe to say it’s also true for politics and governance.

So why are many Liberals so hostile to the notion that we can’t create perfect societies? Well, many Liberals tend to invasion utopian societies, and then ask the basic question of what changes are needed to realize at their utopian vision. To say that corruption is both persistent and inevitable is tantamount to saying that there vision is fundamentally impossible. Not all Liberals have this problem with many embracing the idea of a metaphorical utopia, an ideal to strive for, rather than some sort of grand ideological destiny.

The Destiny Liberals also try to make another argument. That if you can’t beat can’t beat corruption – that the whole point of self governance becomes futile. If you can’t win, why bother at all?

Again, look at technology and biology. Humans have always had to deal with viruses, so we have inherited and evolved formidable immune systems that give us a fighting chance. Safety and maintenance protocols in technology may not be able to prevent all disasters, but they do prevent many potential disasters. In the same way, we can never truly beat corruption, but there is any number of things we can do to combat it and minimize its effect.

This is something even the Founding Fathers understood when they came up with the separations of government. They didn’t create an incorruptible system, but a system that could be more effective in combating corruption, or at least as they knew it. The Founding Fathers also left in one more tool, the power to change the constitution. Thus as new challenges would arise, later generations had the power to update and modernize the constitution to contend with new realities, and more importantly answer new forms of corruption.

So what does this have to do with creating better politics?

Well for starters, we can stop pretending we can make an incorruptible system. We can also re-examine our current reforms strategies and see if they are properly hardened against corruption. I argue that the reason why the left has so little to show with grass roots organizing is because Liberals refuse to confront the reality of corruption compromising their own institutions or that the Democratic Party itself has become corrupted, even corrupted beyond the point of rescue.

But political laws like this also help in another way. To bridge what appears to be a vast gulf between the utopian Liberal ideologies we espouse too, and are worth perusing, to the other side involving the practical application of those ideologies in the real world.