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But in this crude form, in America at least, such crimes are rare. At the federal level, bribery is almost extinct. There are a handful of pathologically stupid souls bartering government favors for private kickbacks, but very few. And at both the federal and the state levels, the kind of Zimbabwean control over economic activity is just not within our DNA. So if only the criminal are corrupt, then ours is not a corrupt government.

The aim of this book, however, is to convince you that a much more virulent, if much less crude, corruption does indeed wreck our democracy. Not a corruption caused by a gaggle of evil souls. On the contrary, a corruption practiced by decent people, people we should respect, people working extremely hard to do what they believe is right, yet decent people working with a system that has evolved the most elaborate and costly bending of democratic government in our history. There are good people here, yet extraordinary bad gets done.

This corruption has two elements, each of which feeds the other. The first element is bad governance, which means simply that our government doesn’t track the expressed will of the people, whether on the Left or on the Right. Instead, the government tracks a different interest, one not directly affected by votes or voters. Democracy, on this account, seems a show or a ruse; power rests elsewhere.

The second element is lost trust: when democracy seems a charade, we lose faith in its process. That doesn’t matter to some of us—we will vote and participate regardless. But to more rational souls, the charade is a signal: spend your time elsewhere, because this game is not for real. Participation thus declines, especially among the sensible middle. Policy gets driven by the extremists at both ends.

In the first three parts of what follows, I show how these elements of corruption fit together. I want you to understand the way they connect, and how they feed on each other. In the book’s final part, I explore how we might do something about them.

The prognosis is not good. The disease we face is not one that nations cure, or, at least, cure easily. But we should understand the options. For few who work to understand what has gone wrong will be willing to accept defeat—without a fight.

PART I

THE NATURE OF THIS DISEASE

There are no vampires or dragons here. Our problems are much more pedestrian, much more common. Indeed, anything we could say about the perpetrator of the corruption that infects our government (Congress) we could likely say as well about ourselves. In this part, I frame this sense of corruption, to make that link clear, and to make its solution more obvious.

CHAPTER 1

Good Souls, Corrupted

In the summer of 1991, I spent a month alone on a beach in Costa Rica reading novels. I had just finished clerking at the Supreme Court. That experience had depressed me beyond measure. I had idolized the Court. It turns out humans work there. It would take me years to relearn just how amazing that institution actually is. Before that, I was to begin teaching at the University of Chicago Law School. I needed to clear my head.

I was staying at a small hotel near Jaco. In the center of the hotel was a large open-air restaurant. At one end hung a TV, running all the time. The programs were in Spanish and hence incomprehensible to me. The one bit someone did translate was a warning that flashed before the station aired The Simpsons, advising parents that the show was “antisocial,” not appropriate for kids.

Midway through that month, however, that television became the center of my life. On Monday, August 19, I watched with astonishment the coverage of Russia’s August Putsch, when hard-line Communists tried to wrest control of the nation from the reformer Mikhail Gorbachev. Tanks were in the streets. Two years after Tiananmen, it felt inevitable that something dramatic, and tragic, was going to happen. Again.

I sat staring at the TV for most of the day. I pestered people to interpret the commentary for me. I annoyed the bartender