Corruption
Webster defines corruption as:
a: dishonest or illegal behavior especially by powerful people
b: inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means
c: a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct
d: decay or decomposition
In regards to politics, corruption is word heard all the time these days, though its precise meaning is somewhat unclear. In my time in Nigeria and Tanzania, corrupt invariably preceded the words politics and government. This usage implied, from above, both a & b. Certainly there is corruption, however much of the time, dysfunction, not corruption would be a more accurate description. In Nigeria and Tanzania, a lack of government infrastructure and processes create dysfunction people deride as corruption.
The United States is a different story. Corruption, as defined by a & b, has been around in some form since the founding. Today, it can be argued such corruption is of an unprecedented level and magnitude. However, unlike Tanzania and Nigeria, corruption of American politics and governance also results from c and d, that is, a “departure from the original” and “decay.” Almost no American implies this in claiming corruption.
The Financial Times has an excellent story unwittingly exemplifying this aspect of corruption, while simultaneously adding to it. Coverage of American politics, the same for all large corporate media, is overwhelmingly of the presidency. What's very funny is the article concerns the tribulations of the Biden administration without ever mentioning the fact his biggest grief is caused by his party barely controlling both houses of Congress, that would require a less corrupted understanding of the American system.
The idea that governance begins, ends, and revolves around the presidency, or DC for that matter, is both a corruption of the original ideas about and the decay of the republican system and processes. It's been long time in the making, blame Lincoln and Roosevelt for starts, but certainly there's plenty of culpability and complicity to go around. This centralization of power in DC also fosters the corruption of the system as defined in a & b, which is what almost every American means when they say corruption.
Contemporary America is stuck in the same situation ancient Rome was in the last decades of their, the original, republic. Just as then, today there's no attempt to reform a corrupted system, only squawking that electing different people or tweaking this or that bit will make things work again, despite each year it becoming ever clearer the system itself is not functioning.
In his last speech at the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin in support of the constitution stated, “I believe that this is likely to be well administered for a Course of Years, and can only end in Despotism as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.” By other forms, Franklin most explicitly means the Roman republic, whose final decades corruption, all four meanings, is legendary.
To avoid Rome's fate, America might try to recapture some of the original intent of their republic, first and foremost the practice of self-government, and self-government relies on governance of the self. The US has an advantage on Nigeria and Tanzania in the respect that we have in place an extensive infrastructure of local and county governments, where power could be transferred back from DC, organization and democratic processes revived, and new participatory systems created. Certainly with many of the issues of the day, most imperatively environmental issues, the rubber literally hits the road at the local level. Developing healthy capabilities to democratically confront the tsunami of knowledge and information brought about by science and its technological offspring can only democratically be done with a distributed networked framework, county governance offers starting nodes.
Over the centuries, the Roman republic experienced increasingly concentrated wealth, citizens stripped of their economic power, and the crushing weight of empire. Outside of elections, citizens roles degraded, the elections themselves eventually going to the highest bidder. Franklin was absolutely correct understanding history often repeats, however it is not a universal law, but simply the present ignoring the clearest lessons of the past. The path the American republic is on is clear, continuing to just place one foot in front of the other will lead to the same destination Rome ended up. Stopping, turning down a different path is the only to go another direction.