The system is rotten — and millions of Americans want to burn it all down

People attend a town hall meeting for constituents held by Democratic U.S. Senator Andy Kim at Teamsters Local 331 Hall in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, U.S. March 20, 2025.

The New Yorker said the crisis facing Max Miller is a test. "The Republican congressman’s bitter domestic dispute — in which he’s accused of physical abuse by his ex-wife, the daughter of an Ohio senator — is testing his party’s willingness to defend the indefensible."

If so, Miller passed. His party is clearly willing. The president has his back, as does the Republican conference in the United States House of Representatives. Few seem bothered by the appearance of Max Miller being a wife beater, child abuser and serial philanderer.

To be sure, party support is no guarantee of success. Miller's district near Cleveland is competitive. Republican strategists told the AP they fear his advantage has "vanished." Bernie Moreno, the Ohio senator in question, said Miller has no place in the Congress. Miller's Democratic opponent interpreted Moreno's remarks as representing the entire GOP. “His own party won’t stand behind him," said Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker. "His own family has said he’s not fit to serve." Poindexter also accused Miller of "moral bankruptcy.”

But Moreno is the exception. He's the victims' father and grandfather, after all. Otherwise, Trump is behind him. That means the party is too. Indeed, the president appears to believe Miller is the real victim. "I hope he's able to work it out," he said. "I feel badly for him." So even if he were to ask him to step aside due to outside pressure, Miller knows he wouldn't mean it. "There’s no chance that I’m removing myself from this race,” Miller toldNewsmax Tuesday. (Update: Alabama Senator Katie Hill said Miller should resign. "I stand with Bernie," she said.)

Some critics believe Max Miller is trapped in the bubble of rightwing propaganda, and therefore he does not realize the trouble he's facing during a backlash election year. That may be so, but I think Miller's impunity is better explained by the fact that elites everywhere in America act with impunity, and have for two decades. It's also explained by the fact that elite impunity has gone mainstream, as millions of Americans have lost faith and are cynically – and hopelessly – chasing "advantages" they believe elites are leveraging against them.

Moreover, an enduring solution to mainstream impunity cannot be failure on Election Day, because democracy should never be put in direct conflict with the rule of law, and because we cannot hope that the Democratic Party wins every election in perpetuity. As much as Democratic candidates want you to believe that with your $5 donation, they can indefinitely keep Republicans away from the levers of power, that's not the case. Let's not be foolish.

No, America doesn't need a dominant Democratic Party.

What America needs is law and order, starting with elites.

I think Philip Bump was right in tracing the source. "Perhaps the clearest point of origin for the idea that a certain amount of wealth could shield you from facing repercussions for your actions was the recession that began nearly 20 years ago," said the Hearst Connecticut Media columnist. "Banks that made historically terrible, economy-crushing bets had the dirt brushed off their knees and were gently put back on their feet by the federal government."

From there, the federal government pretty much stopped policing elites.

And because the federal government stopped policing elites, their fortunes boomed. "In 2015, Elon Musk was worth about $12 billion," Bump said. "Today, he's worth about 60 times that. His net worth has jumped $100 billion this year alone. By the time Trump was running for office again in 2024, Musk could take a small fraction of his net worth (a sum totaling hundreds of millions of dollars) and dedicate it to trying to get his friend elected."

I think there are two implications arising from this cause and effect. One is that "behind every great fortune is a great crime," as Mario Puzo put it in The Godfather. Two is that with those great criminal fortunes, elites amassed god-like powers to avoid consequences that would doom mere mortals. Of course, the most conspicuous of these is Donald Trump.

But as I have said before, Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Elite impunity predates him. It will postdate him, too, especially given how deeply mainstream impunity has become over the last two decades. As a consequence, a growing number of Americans believe that neither party serves their needs, that the government is for the benefit of the few, not for all, and who are being drawn to outsider candidates who promise to smash the status quo.

The AP said today that a federal judge "reluctantly dismissed the seditious conspiracy case" against the Oath Keepers for their involvement in Donald Trump's insurrection, complaining that the Justice Department asked him "to absolve these Defendants of crimes against the United States.” No social order can endure when the very top and the very bottom get away with murder, because eventually, everyone else starts to believe murder is an option, too.

In the wake of the 2008 panic, Barack Obama chose to overlook elite impunity to pursue his agenda. The next Democratic president must understand that impunity is the agenda. What this country needs is law and order, starting with elites and working its way down – break up monopolies, confiscate ill-gotten gains, and maximally prosecute white-collar crime.

If the next Democratic president does not see the truth of this, we can expect to see more stories like The New Yorker's, in which men like Max Miller – wife beater, child abuser, philanderer, criminal in spirit if not in a court of law – face test after test, but never feel the consequences of failing them, because, for men like them, there is no such thing as failure.

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