Americans don’t do it voluntarily, but mainly because they don’t understand the way the US system works. Part of that is the nation’s legal system; part of it isn’t, but is instead international.
Regardless of whether or not today’s United States is a democracy, our legal system possesses two features that make corruption especially difficult to prosecute to conviction, and this difficulty is extreme and makes such convictions extremely rare at the top, amongst members of Congress, and Presidents, and former federal officials, and billionaires, so that people at that level need to be extremely stupid in order to be convictable for whatever corruption they might do. (And such extreme stupidity is virtually non-existent amongst that elite, most powerful, group. So, they get away with it. There is absolutely nothing to stop them.) Consequently, corruption is rampant at the top in America.
Both of these two domestic, US, features apply also to some lesser extent in every other country; and, at the end, I’ll describe the exacerbating factor that makes the situation especially bad in the United States — the international factor, which intensifies America’s corruption-problem.
Reason Number One why Americans favor corruption is that (especially at the top) corruption is, to a large extent — and very unlike lower-class crimes of direct violence — a judgment-call, largely political, and therefore specifically a partisan matter to judge. Anything that’s “partisan” is especially difficult to produce a unanimous verdict, which is what would be required for a conviction. Consequently, an individual of high status within the elite will be granted by his group or “party” every benefit of every possible doubt. This is likely to protect any elite person from being convicted.
Take, for example, the latest “CBS News poll: Majority of Americans and Democrats approve of Trump impeachment inquiry”. On the question of impeachment, 87% of Democrats approve, while 77% of Republicans disapprove. There’s nothing even approaching unanimity. However, since impeachment is not entirely an issue which is based solely on the possibility of there having been corruption, a better indicator here is the poll’s other main question, of whether Trump deserves to be impeached over Ukraine. That question concerns not only the possibility that Trump might have acted corruptly in this matter, but also the questions of whether Hunter Biden did, and of whether his father Joe Biden did. Consequently, it measures only on corruption (abuse-of-office), not at all on other impeachment-issues; so, this is an ideal measure, for our purpose. Of course, Trump is a Republican but the latter two are Democrats, and Joe aims to replace Trump if Trump doesn’t become impeached by the House and then convicted in the Senate, and Joe aims to replace Mike Pence if Trump does become convicted in the Senate and replaced there by his Vice President. Though corruption is the issue on both sides (Republicans versus Democrats), it is an extremely partisan issue and therefore plays extremely to each side’s political prejudices. 75% of Democrats believe that Trump deserves to be impeached over the issue of Ukraine, and 8% believe that he doesn’t. 70% of Republicans think that he doesn’t deserve to be impeached over Ukraine, and 16% believe that he does. Consequently, the single issue of Ukraine accounts for almost all of the beliefs on both sides regarding whether or not Trump deserves to be impeached, and this issue of Ukraine is virtually 100% an issue about corruption.
In a court of law, whenever a particular issue is politically charged, unanimous verdicts are virtually impossible to attain. Neither impeachment nor removal from office requires anything even close to any such unanimity as judgment in a court-case does, because neither the House nor the Senate would be voting anything like jurors do in a courtroom, and the rules are extremely different; and, so, any corruption trial that’s in a court of law faces an almost impossible barrier against conviction (because the standards of evidence and the other rules in a court-case are far stricter). So, this is one way in which most Americans favor corruption. (Like everywhere, Americans are prejudiced — i.e., partisan.)
Reason Number Two for this almost invulnerability at the top in America is that America’s elite, even more than in other countries, normally possess the financial wherewithal to hire enough lawyers of enough excellence in order to crush the prosecution’s case. Furthermore, there are a multitude of fine points in our laws that were written precisely in order to enable almost any of these people to be able to avoid being convicted. That’s one of the main things they buy politicians for — to get those types of “fine points” into the laws. It’s how the American system functions.
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