from the seems-bad dept

For years, we’ve written about the concept of “soft corruption,” which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government.

Lately, of course, it feels like the corruption is becoming more and more blatant. But there’s something telling about how soft corruption works: it operates by creating an atmosphere where everyone implicitly understands the game, but no one says it out loud. Though, apparently, that may be changing. Teddy Schleifer got a fascinating quote from Wall Street investor (and LimeWire founder… and RFK Jr. anti-vax funder) Mark Gorton, who was one of Andrew Cuomo’s biggest donors in his complete flop of a New York City mayoral run/comeback from disgrace:

If you can’t read the screenshot, it reads:

As donors try to assess their next moves in the mayoral race, one of the biggest donors to Andrew Cuomo’s super PAC, the investor Mark Gorton, said he is likely to back Mamdani. That is because of the support that Mamdani had gotten from Brad Lander, who Gorton said he ranked first. “I feel like people misunderstood my $250,000 for Cuomo for real enthusiasm,” Gorton said in an interview. “It was basically, ‘Oh, looks like Cuomo is coming back. We don’t want to be shut out. Let’s try and get on his good side.’ That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo. It’s sad political pragmatism. I wish we lived in a world where those sort of things were not useful things to do.”

Read that again. “That’s kind of how things work with Cuomo.” A quarter-million dollar donation, described casually as protection money to avoid being “shut out” by a politician with a reputation for vindictive retaliation against those who cross him. And Gorton’s matter-of-fact tone suggests this isn’t scandalous—it’s just Wednesday in American politics.

This is notable on multiple levels, starting with the fact that one of Cuomo’s biggest donors didn’t even rank Cuomo first on the ranked-choice ballot. But, the real story is the honest admission from Gorton that the only reason he felt he needed to cough up a quarter of a million dollars to Cuomo was to stay in his good graces.

This is soft corruption in its purest form: not a quid pro quo, not a bag of cash, just the quiet understanding that those who don’t pay tribute risk being frozen out when decisions get made.

What makes Gorton’s admission so damning isn’t just what it says about Cuomo—it’s what it reveals about how normalized this has become. We’re not talking about some back-room deal or smoking-gun evidence. We’re talking about a major political donor casually explaining, to a reporter, that a $250,000 contribution was essentially protection money. The fact that he’s comfortable saying this publicly suggests that everyone already knows this is how the game works.

Of course, in this case, it may have also contributed to Cuomo’s loss to Zohran Mamdani. Even as some people remained critical or cautious of Mamdani’s policy proposals, he came across as real and earnestly wanting to help actual people in New York, whereas Andrew Cuomo came across as… Andrew Fucking Cuomo, deeply cynical and a career political opportunist with no fundamental principles or beliefs beyond the pursuit of power.

This kind of soft corruption creates a feedback loop that undermines democratic governance in ways that are harder to prosecute but just as destructive as outright bribery. When wealthy donors make contributions not because they believe in a candidate but because they fear retaliation, it distorts the entire political process. Politicians learn that intimidation works better than persuasion. Donors learn that access requires tribute. And the public learns that their representatives answer to whoever can afford the protection money.

It’s also worth noting how this normalizes the harder (and even more blatant) corruption we’re seeing at the federal level. When “stay on his good side” donations become routine political pragmatism, it’s a shorter leap to the kind of brazen pay-to-play schemes we’re witnessing with Trump’s corporate deal approval power and Meta’s $25 million protection payment. The soft corruption creates the cultural infrastructure that makes the hard corruption possible.

But, really, the main takeaway from this is that we’ve become so inured to the corruption all around us that major political donors can casually describe protection rackets to reporters without expecting any blowback.

When the quiet part gets said out loud—and nobody seems particularly surprised—we’ve crossed a line. We’ve moved from a system where corruption hides in shadows to one where it operates in plain sight, confident that we’ve all accepted it as just how things work.

The real question isn’t whether we’ll slide into a system where corruption operates openly—we’re already there. Trump’s presidency has made it clear that the “soft” and “hard” corruption aren’t sequential phases but parallel systems. While Gorton was cutting checks to stay in Cuomo’s good graces, Trump was openly selling access, handing out get out of jail free cards to those who help him, and now requiring corporate executives to kiss his ring for deal approvals.

What Gorton’s casual admission reveals isn’t a warning about where we might be headed—it’s evidence of how thoroughly we’ve normalized the foundation that makes brazen kleptocracy possible. When protection rackets become “sad political pragmatism” that donors discuss matter-of-factly with reporters, we’ve already crossed every meaningful line.

The question now is whether we have any capacity left to recognize that this isn’t normal, isn’t inevitable, and isn’t something we have to accept. Because once we’ve shrugged our way through both the soft corruption and the hard corruption, what’s left to protect?

Filed Under: andrew cuomo, corruption, mark gorton, nyc, politics, protection rackets, soft corruption, zohran mamdani

One thing leftists and conservatives often seem to agree on is the idea that since World War 2, America has lost all) of the wars it has fought. For leftists, who want to see American empire humbled and beaten, this is a way of reassuring themselves — the big baddie is actually a paper tiger, etc. America occupies a position in their cosmology similar to that of Satan in Christian lore — always looming, full of terrible power, yet always defeated by righteousness in the end. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to think that if we would just be less liberal, we’d start triumphing instead of getting whipped every time:

The recent U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban’s imminent return to power, seems to drive home this point. Another empire, sent to the graveyard of empires.

But is this true? Does America actually lose all, or even most, of its modern wars? Let’s take a hard-headed look at that question. First, let’s go to the ultimate arbiter of truth: Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a page called “List of Wars Involving the United States”, with a column listing the “Results for the United States and its Allies”. Victories are in green, defeats in red, inconclusive results are in blue, and ongoing conflicts are in a sort of tan yellowish color. Here are the lists since WW2:

Defeats:

1. Vietnam War (1955-75)

2. Multinational Intervention in Lebanon (1982-84)

Inconclusive:

1. Korean War (1950-53)

2. First U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War (1992-94)

3. Second U.S. Intervention in the Somali Civil War (2007-21)

Victories:

1. Operation Beleaguer (1945-49)

2. Lebanon Crisis (1958)

3. Korean DMZ conflict (1966-69)

4. Dominican Civil War (1965-66)

5. Invasion of Grenada (1983)

6. Invasion of Panama (1989-90)

7. Gulf War (1990-91)

8. Iraqi No-Fly Zone Enforcement Operations (1991-2003)

9. Bosnian War (1992-95)

10. Intervention in Haiti (1994-95)

11. Kosovo War (1998-99)

12. Iraq War (2003-2011)

13. Operation Ocean Shield (2009-16)

14. International Intervention in Libya (2011)

15. Operation Observant Compass (2011-2017)

All other wars are listed as ongoing, including Afghanistan.

So if the U.S. were a boxer, its record since WW2 would be 15-2-3. Now, you can argue with Wikipedia, but if you think it’s wrong, my suggestion is that you try to edit it and see what happens.

Besides the obvious reason of needing to push the above-mentioned narratives of national weakness, why do all these people on the left and the right feel the need to repeat the falsehood that America loses all its wars? From what I can tell, there are several reasons.

One reason seems to be that many people compare modern wars to World War 2. In that war, the U.S. committed its full national resources, defeated great-power rivals decisively on the field of battle, occupied its fallen enemies, and helped them transform into some of the world’s richest, most peaceful, and most stable nations (and our enduring allies to boot). In the process, the U.S. improved its technology and its institutions, strengthened its economy enormously, and created a sense of national unity. And the postwar settlement left the U.S., if not the undisputed master of the world, at least the first among equals — the first true superpower in history. That was an absolutely startling success — perhaps the most dramatically positive result ever achieved by a country in any modern war.

Most wars throughout history have been nothing like that. In particular, I challenge you to find any war since World War 2 whose result has looked even remotely like the result of World War 2. You will not find even one. If “didn’t do as well as America in WW2” is the criterion for a loss, then every country loses every war now.

Because essentially no war ever goes as well as WW2, people who are inclined to believe that America loses all its wars can simply pick out one thing that went worse than WW2 for each war, and claim that this makes the war a “loss”. For example:

• In the Gulf War, the U.S. crushed the enemy on the battlefield, obtained favorable peace terms, and enhanced its international standing, all for a fairly low financial cost. But it didn’t effect regime change or conquer Iraq, as it did in Germany and Japan in WW2.

• In the Iraq War, the U.S. defeated all battlefield enemies, conquered the country, effected regime change, and installed a regime of its choice. But unlike in WW2, the U.S. lost prestige and international influence as a result, with little economic gain and a lot of cost.

• In the U.S. intervention in Libya, the U.S. carried out regime change, but the country disintegrated into chaos, unlike the success stories of postwar Germany and Japan.

…And so on. In each of these cases, the result for the U.S. is something that would be called a “victory” if you were reading about 17th century France in a history textbook — battlefield triumph combined with the accomplishment of wartime objectives.

The Korean War is an interesting case. The U.S. and China fought to a stalemate on the battlefield, and established the status quo ante bellum, so this gets counted as a tie on Wikipedia and a loss in the minds of the Twitter narrative-pushers. But the long-term outcome for South Korea was as good as that of Germany or Japan — it was saved from conquest by one of the world’s most nightmarish regimes, and went on to become a rich, stable, democratic nation.

Afghanistan might not get logged as a “win” by Wikipedia, but the story will generally be similar — lots of objectives accomplished and battlefield dominance established, but not the kind of unambiguously positive result that we saw in WW2. The U.S. carried out a successful punitive expedition after 9/11, killing or capturing all of al Qaeda’s senior leadership, as well as the individual Taliban leaders who aided and abetted those terrorists. It had its way with the Taliban on the battlefield, and signed a peace deal that basically said that the Taliban won’t go up against America again. America then consolidated its power by dumping the problematic country into the hands of its chief geopolitical rivals. But since the Taliban will overrun the unsupported puppet government that America set up during the occupation, the same people who count every U.S. war as a loss will count this one as a loss as well.

So the U.S. actually wins most of its wars. But now let’s ask a more interesting question: Who cares?

Kings and emperors in the old days might have thought about war as a boxing contest, with the need to build up a favorable win-loss record in order to secure their personal glory or the glory of their nation. But that was an utterly destructive, zero-sum way to approach international relations — untold millions have suffered precisely because some guy in a fancy robe thought it was important to get those W’s. The point of this post is not to advance a jingoistic rah-rah triumphalist narrative — that would be worse than useless, and a little disgusting besides.

Instead, I want to make a more useful point here: Victory is not enough of a reason to fight a war in the first place.

The human cost of conflict is obvious, and by itself is plenty reason to never go to war unless you absolutely have to. What’s less obvious is the fact that there are now so few economic gains from beating up another country. Yes, mobilization can be a potent Keynesian stimulus for a country in a recession. But in general, war simply costs a huge amount of money with little possibility of gain. Seizing agricultural land isn’t very valuable, and even seizing extremely dense, high-priced commodities like oil is generally too difficult to justify the cost of the seizure (as the U.S. found out in Iraq). Enslaving a country’s population — as the Nazis tried to do to conquered East Europeans — isn’t really feasible either.

In other words, Norman Angell was actually right when he said that conquest no longer makes economic sense. Obviously he was wrong when he predicted that this fact would put an end to war — countries still fight, even though there’s no longer an economic case for fighting.

So how did the U.S. do so well economically in WW2? First of all, we avoided getting invaded; France and Germany and Japan and Russia and China didn’t have such good economic outcomes from that war. Second, the national and global institutions that were built as a result of that conflict were more conducive to peaceful trade and growth; but this kind of transformation is rare. And third, the U.S. war effort involved a huge ramp-up of scientific research and government-funded innovation — again, a highly uncommon outcome (though you could argue that the Cold War had a similar effect).

In other words, we should basically expect never to get economic gains from war the way we did in WW2. This should be a powerful incentive for peace — we should listen to Norman Angell, even if we don’t.

There’s another reason war is generally a losing proposition these days even when you win: Low fertility rates. The industrialized regions of the world all have very few children compared to olden times:

Only in some parts of Africa is fertility still fairly high, and even there it’s coming down.

This has at least two implications for war. First, it means that the human costs of war are magnified; when soldiers die, it often means parents are losing their only child, and countries are losing precious young workers. Second, it means that displacing or killing an entire enemy population and replacing them with your own settler colonialists is not really an option anymore.

So the financial benefits of war have mostly vanished, even as people’s assessment of the human cost has risen. That doesn’t mean it’s never worth it to go to war, of course; if someone tries to conquer you, it still makes sense to resist them. But wars of conquest and occupation are now overwhelmingly likely to be Pyrrhic victories. And indeed, most of the U.S. victories listed above have been very Pyrrhic ones; we won the Iraq War, but it was an unmitigated disaster for our country. In terms of what it actually achieved for our country or the world, our victory in Iraq looks none too dissimilar from our loss in Vietnam.

Which brings me to my reason for pointing out that America wins most of its wars. The point here is that even victories tend to feel like losses, because war is almost never a good idea in this day and age.

For some, the false narrative that America loses all its wars might seem like it would be a deterrent to future military misadventures. No one wants to play a game they always lose, right? But in fact, I don’t think it works like that. When you have an unfavorable win-loss record, the urge is often to fight more and improve your record. When people feel their honor has been slighted, they often feel the need to get it back. Thus, a sense of recent descent from military glory probably inspires belligerence among those who feel like, in Trump’s words, “we never win anymore”. In particular, the people on the Right who think we lose wars because of wokeness will want to prove that their own cultural prerogatives lead to enhanced military effectiveness.

So the false claim that America loses all (or most) of its wars isn’t helping anything. It just encourages more wars. The right message is that war isn’t worth it, even when you rack up a W. Sometimes you have to fight, but 9 times out of 10, the only winning move is not to play.

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Hours after the U.S. bombed several sites in Iran, President Donald Trump called the operation a "spectacular military success."

Whether or not that turns out to be true, the attack looks rather different as a legal matter. Trump appears to have significantly overstepped his authority, as the attack was not authorized by Congress and was not in response to an attack on American soil or American troops. The best the White House has been able to come up with so far is that Trump acted under the legal authority "afforded to him as Commander in Chief," as a White House official told Real Clear Politics on Saturday night.

Sorry, but that simply isn't good enough.

Under the War Powers Act of 1973, the law that governs presidential authority to order military strikes, there are three lawful ways for a commander-in-chief to order the bombing of another country. None of them appears to cover the strikes carried out on Saturday.

Here is the relevant section of the law (emphasis added): "The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."

The first two options provided by the law are clearly not involved here, as Congress did not declare war against Iran and did not pass an authorization for the use of military force (as was done to allow the invasion of Iraq in 2002).

The third circumstance also does not apply to Trump's attack on Iran, which was not carried out in response to an attack on American troops and did not respond to a crisis threatening American soil. As Reason's Matthew Petti wrote in the wake of the attack last night: "This campaign is a war of choice. And the administration did not try to sell it to Congress—let alone the American people—before embarking on it. Instead, Trump watched Israel launch a first strike on Iran, then threatened to get involved, talking himself into a corner. Now he seems to be hoping that Iran simply won't respond to being attacked."

The War Powers Act does not include a clause allowing presidents to bomb other countries just because. It also—despite the fact that the law is frequently discussed in political media in these terms—does not allow a window of 48 hours for the president to do whatever he pleases before alerting Congress and seeking further authorization.

That 48-hour window (as outlined in a subsequent section of the War Powers Act) applies only if the president is engaged in a lawful use of military force—that is, if he is acting in accordance with one of the three mechanisms built into the first section of the law.

"If there's an attack in progress on the United States (i.e., currently happening), we expect the president to respond swiftly to neutralize the attack and protect Americans—and then we will hold the president to account," explained former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.) in a post on X. "The Framers of the Constitution agreed at the debates in the federal convention of 1787 that the president should have the 'power to repel sudden attacks' but not the power to otherwise introduce forces into hostilities without congressional approval."

Some current members of Congress seem to be greeting the news of Saturday's attack with appropriate skepticism about Trump's authority.

"This is not constitutional," Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) wrote on X after Trump announced the attack. Massie introduced a bipartisan resolution last week to block the use of military force against Iran without congressional authorization, but the measure has not received a vote.

"While President Trump's decision may prove just, it's hard to conceive a rationale that's Constitutional," Rep. Warren Davidson (R–Ohio) wrote on X.

Some Democrats, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) and Rep. Sean Casten (D–Ill.), said Trump's decision to strike Iran without congressional authorization should be grounds for impeachment. That is one option that should be on the table as Congress considers how to respond to Trump's ordering of this attack.

But there are unlikely to be any direct political consequences for Trump as long as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) is willing to look the other way. In a statement released on Saturday night, Johnson said the strikes were "necessary, limited, and targeted."

Even if that is true, it would just underline the importance of getting approval from Congress. The White House could have made the case to lawmakers (and their constituents) that a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities was necessary and in the best interest of the United States.

The War Powers Act should not be treated as a series of suggestions that can be discarded when they seem inconvenient. Indeed, limits on executive power are most essential at the moments when they are inconvenient—otherwise, they are meaningless. Trump's attack on Iran was not just an assault on a suspected nuclear weapons program; it was yet another blow against the separation of powers and the fundamental structure of the American constitutional system.