In his essay, The New York Gold Conspiracy, about the exploits of those great American rogues, Jay Gould and Jim Fiske – the former likened to a spider, the latter a comic giant who never told the truth (so as to keep in practice with the lying), Adams has some Gibbonesque fun with the Erie Railroad, the corporate entity that those two swindlers controlled. It employed 15,000 people, and 773 miles of road in all. And it was bound to the direct control of its owners: “Over all this wealth and influence, greater than that directly swayed by any private citizen, greater than is absolutely and personally controlled by most kings, and far too great for the public safety either in a democracy or in any other form of society, the vicissitudes of a troubled time placed two men in irresponsible authority ; and both these men belonged to a low and degraded moral and social type. Such an elevation has been rarely seen in modem history. Even the most dramatic of modern authors, even Balzac himself, who so loved to deal with similar violent alternations of fortune, or Alexandre Dumas, with all his extravagance of imagination, never have reached a conception bolder or more melodramatic than this…”
Adams insight – that the extent of the control of wealth by private agents has a direct bearing on both public safety and democracy – has long been lost in the liberal logrolling that allows vast fortunes free range while extolling the republics in which these matters go down as “democratic.”
Yet the liberal is right in being, at least, relativistic – there are degrees of anti-democracy. Adams was describing the start of the Gilded Era – gilding being fake gold, a counterfeit value, Bling that is always too showy – hence, bling bling. As counterfeit value becomes the standard of value, corruption becomes less a marginal inroad on the law and more the structure around which law is built.
The American 21st century is an amazingly resplendent blingheap of corruption, from a Supreme Court in which justices plea that they are not bribed when they receive bribes from the rich because they are congenital prostitutes for the wealthy anyway to war profiteers who are never punished for their mercenary crimes and use the money they make to buy media and politicos to crypto currency (pseudo currency) frauds who purchase key members of both parties to ram through legislation to legalize their systematic thievery. I recommend highly the Washington Post’sexcerpt of a book by Ben Terris, which concentrates on an operative named SeanMcElwee – a man who went from libertarian right to progressive radical to reactionarycentrist, a panoply of causes he would discard at will, in service ultimatelyto the one thing he cared about, gambling. This kid, for he has still not breeched his twenties, became, briefly, a powerful wheeler dealer among Dems in Biden’s first two years. Lord knows, he was a tyro of bad takes, which is powerfully attractive to the centrist mindset – but what set him apart is that he would take polls for his Dem clients and used them to make bets about the outcomes of elections. The latter was his passion. Perhaps in order to have more to gamble, he secretly set up a polling outfit for Sam Bankmen-Fried – and briefly went into the effective altruism cult. The polling outfit worked for a retired Republican senator.
The fun and games and mocking of legality here is all Sean McElwee’s business, but the opportunities were provided by the culture. America has as bad a political culture as you can have in a quasi-democracy. It is insanely dysfunctional, filled with passionate predators and egotists who race from think tank to cable news channel and generally try to make people unhappy and hateful. Unhappy and hateful people are great defences against doing anything about the malefactors of great wealth. That is what they are for. Corruption is not simply a perversion of a healthy system, it what the casino is built on.
