G: I did find a prior note: we apparently did talk about this, and the old takeaway was: for federal executive-branch scandals/convictions, Republicans heavily outnumber Democrats; for Congress-only corruption convictions, both parties show up, with Democrats often more numerous in older bribery lists.

Reality check:

1. “All politicians are corrupt” is too broad. DOJ/TRAC data show hundreds of “official corruption” convictions, but most are local/state officials, law enforcement, procurement, programs, etc., not famous national politicians. FY2023 had 334 official-corruption convictions, with local officials the largest labeled category. citeturn848601view1

2. Party data is messy because DOJ does not classify corruption by party. The cleanest official category is “public corruption,” not “Democrat vs Republican.” DOJ’s Public Integrity Section covers bribery, election crimes, and government-integrity offenses involving officials at all levels. citeturn848601view0

3. Federal executive corruption is asymmetric Republican. A 1961–2016 compilation comparing equal years of Democratic vs Republican presidencies found Republican administrations had 18× more indictments, 38× more convictions, and 39× more prison sentences in major administration-linked corruption cases. It is a partisan-facing source, but it lays out criteria and matches the obvious history: Watergate, Iran-Contra, Abramoff-era scandals, etc. citeturn640965view0

4. Federal legislative corruption is not cleanly one-sided. Lists of federal officials convicted of corruption offenses include many Democrats and Republicans; the Congress-heavy corruption-offense list includes names like William Jefferson, Bob Menendez, Abscam Democrats, George Santos, Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, etc. citeturn640965view1

5. The public perception is broader than criminal graft. Pew found large majorities in both parties think donors, lobbyists, and special interests have too much influence; 83% of Republicans and 80% of Democrats say major donors have too much influence on congressional decisions. citeturn640965view2

Bottom line: before 2025, the strongest provable asymmetry is Republican corruption in presidential administrations/executive scandals. In Congress and state/local corruption, the picture is more mixed, often driven by local machine politics and opportunity, not just ideology. So “both parties have corruption” is true; “therefore it’s balanced” is false.

G: You're remembering two different things that often get blended together.

1. The "everybody does it" defense absolutely became a recognizable Watergate-era strategy

One of the recurring themes after the exposure of the entity["historical_event","Watergate scandal","United States political scandal 1972-1974"] was not necessarily proving innocence, but reframing the discussion as:

Politics is dirty.

Everyone bends the rules.

We're only being singled out because we got caught.

That's not unique to Watergate. It's an extremely common response to corruption accusations in many countries and eras. Political scientists sometimes describe it as a form of normalization: if voters can be persuaded that corruption is universal, then corruption stops being useful as a differentiating factor.

The logic is:

Deny.
Minimize.
Claim equivalence.
Shift the debate from "did it happen?" to "doesn't everyone do this?"

And once voters accept Step 4, accountability becomes much harder because the choice becomes "corrupt guy A versus corrupt guy B."

2. The party realignment question is real, but people often oversimplify it

When people say:

"The Democrats used to be the right-wing party."

that's both true and misleading.

Before the mid-20th century, the parties were not sorted the way they are now.

The old Democratic coalition contained:

Southern segregationists
Urban immigrants
Labor unions
Some progressives

The old Republican coalition contained:

Business interests
Many Northern moderates
Many Black voters (the legacy of entity["people","Abraham Lincoln","16th President of the United States"])
Some progressives

Those coalitions were internally contradictory.

What happened over several decades—especially from the 1930s through the 1980s—was a gradual sorting process.

The key thing that shifted was not that every voter suddenly changed parties.

Rather:

Conservative Southern Democrats gradually moved Republican.
Liberal Northeastern Republicans gradually disappeared or became Democrats.
Civil-rights politics accelerated the process.
Cultural issues accelerated it further.

So when people say:

"The racists were Democrats."

there's a historical truth there.

But when someone says:

"Therefore modern Democrats are the descendants of those racists."

that's where the analysis usually breaks down.

A better way to track continuity is not by party label but by ideological position.

If you take a Southern segregationist Democrat from 1955 and ask:

Which modern coalition would he be more likely to join?

The answer is overwhelmingly the Republican coalition.

Not because Republicans today are segregationists, but because the conservative wing of American politics migrated there over time.

3. This creates a trap in corruption discussions

One reason these conversations become frustrating is that there are actually three separate claims:

Claim A: "Some Democrats are corrupt."

True.

Claim B: "Some Republicans are corrupt."

Also true.

Claim C: "Therefore corruption is evenly distributed."

That does not automatically follow.

The first two statements are existence claims.

The third is a statistical claim.

You can have corruption in both parties while still having one party exhibit more of it during a particular period, in a particular branch of government, or under a particular set of incentives.

That's why the executive-branch numbers we discussed matter. They aren't asking whether corruption exists on both sides. They are asking whether the rates appear similar.

Those are different questions.

4. One thing I think you're remembering

Over several conversations, you've tended to push back against what might be called the "glass statue" theory of politics—the idea that voters should expect leaders with no flaws, no scandals, no mistakes, and no complicated histories.

The tension is that:

"Nobody is perfect" is obviously true.
"Everybody is equally bad" does not follow.

A politician can be imperfect without being corrupt.

A politician can be corrupt without being uniquely corrupt.

And a system can contain corruption without the corruption being evenly distributed.

A lot of political rhetoric tries to collapse all three distinctions because it is easier to argue:

"They're all crooks."

than to ask:

"How many crooks, doing what, and in which direction does the evidence point?"

The second question is much more annoying, but it's usually where the useful information lives.

M: I was focused on corruption in terms of the political shift, although your clarification also clarifies that part as well. Or rather, it explains why 1961 or so is a better time to think about than the entirety of the 20th century. It's because the comparisons and the lines that are being drawn stop having relevance before a certain point because that coalition structure you were talking about was not ideological. It sounds like, at that point, both sides had elements that you could call Democrat and that you could call Republican. Sorry, that you could call left-wing and right-wing in the current times. Or objectively, depending on, yeah, that's a whole word definition thing. But it means that in terms of corruption measurement, it might not be a stark line, but the discussion of whether Democrats or Republicans were more corrupt becomes meaningless because the personalities that would have been on the left or right were kind of mingled in terms of party affiliation. And I think in the... The case of the Watergate stuff, there's no doubt that the attempt to normalize the corruption has happened before. I think the reason it is notable we came up with was that Watergate was, like, the first time for America that it happened at a national scale, and it was done during an era of mass communication that led to the polluting of the entire nation because even though at that point it was a bipartisan attempt to handle corruption, Nixon got off kind of a final poison shot by, while trying to prevent his political death, seeding the idea that somehow this was corruption on the part of the Democrats and did so so powerfully that now the perception is that everyone is equally corrupt, up to and including my own father. Even though numerically, when you break things down, there is a certain skew towards the right wing, both in terms of occurrence and degree. That's why I asked for pre-2025. It's because right now, various of Donald's kids and Donald himself are just using the position to advance themselves for billions, and yet there are still people out there who, as a defense, will raise the idea that Hunter Biden used his father's name to get a position on a board without ever, like, actually granting any access to his father. Not because those things are equivalent, but just because they've grown up believing that somehow everyone is equally corrupt in politics. And I think we were disregarding the lobbying thing, because that's a little bit more difficult to untangle, as opposed to the absolutes of actual convictions and things like that.

G: I think you're putting your finger on two separate analytical problems that often get collapsed into one.

The first is the realignment problem.

If someone asked, "Which party was more corrupt from 1880 to 2025?" my immediate reaction would be that the question is partly malformed. Not because corruption didn't exist, but because the labels "Democrat" and "Republican" are not stable ideological categories across that whole period.

A Southern Democrat in 1925, a Northern Democrat in 1925, a Rockefeller Republican in 1960, and a conservative Republican in 2025 are not occupying the same ideological space.

So if your interest is:

Is corruption associated more with left-wing politics or right-wing politics?

then party labels become less useful the farther back you go.

That's one reason studies often start somewhere around the postwar era. By the 1960s, the coalitions are still sorting themselves out, but they're much closer to the modern alignment than they were in, say, 1900.

The second issue is what I would call the equalization problem.

Suppose you have:

Side A commits 100 offenses.
Side B commits 20 offenses.

The moment both sides have at least one offense, it becomes rhetorically possible to say:

"See? Both sides do it."

That's a true statement at the level of existence.

It says nothing about magnitude.

The human brain is surprisingly vulnerable to that move.

Once the audience accepts "both sides do it," many people unconsciously slide into:

"both sides do it"

→

"both sides do it about the same amount"

→

"there's no point measuring it"

Those are three very different claims.

Where I'd be a little more cautious than your reconstruction is on the specific role of Nixon.

I think there's a strong argument that Watergate accelerated public cynicism.

But I would hesitate to say Nixon single-handedly created the modern belief that all politicians are corrupt.

There were a lot of ingredients:

Watergate
Vietnam-era credibility crises
intelligence-agency scandals
the 1970s economic malaise
later congressional scandals
campaign-finance controversies
cable news
talk radio
internet politics
social media

All of those reinforce the same lesson:

If the only stories people hear are about misconduct, eventually they stop distinguishing between levels of misconduct.

A city councilman taking a bribe. A governor steering contracts. A congressman lying about expenses. A president obstructing justice.

Those are not the same thing.

But in public memory they often become:

"politician scandal."

What I think you're remembering from our earlier discussion is that convictions are easier to count than influence.

Lobbying, donor influence, revolving-door employment, access politics, regulatory capture—those are real phenomena, but they're difficult to quantify and often legal.

Convictions are much cleaner.

Someone either was convicted or wasn't.

Someone either went to prison or didn't.

Someone either resigned under indictment or didn't.

The drawback is that conviction statistics only capture the corruption that investigators could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

So they are a lower bound, not a complete map.

And that may be why the Hunter Biden example keeps recurring in political arguments.

The debate is often not actually about corruption metrics.

It's about category collapse.

One side says:

Here is evidence of direct misuse of public office.

The other side responds:

What about this relative of a politician who profited from his family name?

Even if both criticisms have merit, they're not necessarily measuring the same thing.

One is usually a question about conduct by a public official.

The other is often a question about influence, access, nepotism, or appearance.

Those can all be problematic, but they aren't automatically equivalent categories.

A lot of modern political argument consists of taking unlike categories and treating them as though they're interchangeable.

Once that happens, measurement becomes almost impossible, because every discussion gets redirected into proving that some other bad thing also exists somewhere else.

Which brings you back to the equalization problem: not proving innocence, not proving equivalence, but making comparison itself feel futile. That's a very effective rhetorical position because if nobody believes measurement is possible, then nobody can ever conclude that one pattern is larger than another.