Ornamental Rules: On microlooting, grift, and norm enforcement
When 'both sides' becomes the cover story | What microlooting teaches the Senate
The token launched on a Friday, three days before the inauguration. A cryptocurrency bearing the incoming president’s name. No equity. No product. No underlying asset beyond the name and the implied access to power. By Saturday morning, the market capitalization was in the billions. His wife launched a companion token that weekend.
This should trigger something in the system. Some clause, some mechanism, some piece of the architecture that fifty-five men spent four months in Philadelphia designing with precisely this danger in mind. The founders were obsessed with the corrosion of public office by private interest. They wrote an emoluments clause. They designed competing branches with oversight authorities. They built accountability into the structure because they knew, from hard experience, that power untended will serve itself.
The machinery sat idle. Not because it was broken. Because it had been jammed from the inside.
The founders feared two forms of tyranny: majority and minority. They’d fought a revolution against the second and built a constitution against the first. Madison’s architecture: checks that slow power without freezing it, balances that distribute authority without fragmenting it, competing interests forced through the friction of deliberation to produce workable outcomes.
That architecture has been captured.
A single senator can hold up dozens of executive appointments indefinitely. Sixty votes are required for anything consequential in a body where fifty-one was designed to be sufficient. A minority of the population controls a majority of the Senate through geographic distribution the founders never anticipated at this scale. The filibuster, the hold, the procedural motion, the committee chair’s pocket veto: each came to function as a brake. Together they function as a lock.
This is minority rule. A third kind, one the founders didn’t specifically engineer against: procedural capture by organized minorities who can block everything and build nothing. The system serves those who’ve learned to operate the machinery itself.
Each of these mechanisms came to be justified as a constraint on power. But a constraint wielded by the powerful to prevent their own accountability is a tool of the very power it claims to check. The filibuster itself was never designed at all. It emerged from an accidental rule change in 1806 and was only later rationalized as a deliberative safeguard. The filibuster invoked to force deliberation is one thing. The filibuster invoked to prevent a vote on emoluments enforcement is another. The form is the same. The function has inverted.
The pattern has a name. James Burnham, in The Machiavellians (1943), drew the distinction between a political rule’s formal meaning — what it explicitly says, the deliberative purpose it claims — and its real meaning: what the rule actually does, whose interests it protects, which arrangements it serves. Formal meaning can persist intact while real meaning inverts. The ornamentation stays. The function moves underneath it.
The procedural apparatus justified as deliberation has become a system of toll booths. The senator who holds up a nominee extracts concessions. The committee chair who controls the markup extracts provisions. The gap between what the Senate claims to do and what its procedures actually do has widened until the stated purpose is decoration on a locked door. When every node in a system has a veto, dispersed power becomes dispersed obstruction.
The result is stasis.
Extraction adapts to anything humans have built: chaos, transitions, every environment. What stasis provides is something specific: impunity. When the accountability machinery is frozen, extraction can operate in daylight. The system that would punish it can’t move.
What stasis provides is something specific: impunity.
Who the ice serves
Treating all extraction as identical is part of how it survives. There are three layers, and the distinctions matter.
The first is genuinely bipartisan. Members of Congress trade on information they receive in classified briefings, oversight hearings, and regulatory previews. They designed the disclosure requirements themselves, and designed them to be functionally toothless. The STOCK Act was supposed to end this. Instead it created paperwork nobody enforces and penalties nobody fears. The institution is corrupt. Nearly everyone in the building participates or quietly tolerates those who do. When someone says “both sides” about congressional stock trading, they’re right. The whole body is implicated.
The second is paired but asymmetric. Each coalition’s authoritarian shadow shows up on its own side of the spectrum.
Two administrations used federal banking regulators to cut off disfavored industries from the financial system. Under Obama, it was firearms dealers and payday lenders. Under Biden, it was crypto companies. Both times, businesses found their banking relationships severed by coordinated regulatory pressure. Both times, it was done quietly, denied through official channels, and confirmed only through document requests and whistleblowers. Disgusting. Un-American. And done in the dark because those who did it understood it was wrong.
The Trump family’s extraction operates in daylight. The cryptocurrency tokens launched during the transfer of power, while the incoming president had no blind trust, no divestiture, no ethics review in place. The foreign licensing deals that continued through the first presidency were public knowledge; so were the hotel bookings by foreign governments seeking favor.
Jared Kushner’s firm received two billion dollars from the Saudi Public Investment Fund six months after he left the West Wing. The fund’s own screening panel had recommended against the deal: excessive fees, inexperienced management, operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Mohammed bin Salman overruled the panel personally.
None of this was hidden. None of it triggered consequence. Three emoluments lawsuits were filed during the first term. Not one reached a ruling on the merits. Two were vacated as moot when the term ended. The procedural machinery to adjudicate them had been jammed by the same vetocracy that paralyzes everything else.
The distinction between concealed and open corruption is about what each does to the system. Karl Popper understood that the rules of an open society are not self-maintaining. Normative rules exist only through the willingness to enforce them. A rule that is openly broken without sanction has already become ornamental. Hidden corruption, for all its ugliness, acknowledges the system’s authority by fearing exposure. The corrupt actor calculates that consequences exist and acts accordingly. Open corruption makes a different calculation: that the system cannot respond. And when that calculation proves correct in public, it teaches everyone watching the same lesson.
Hannah Arendt spent her career studying what happens when that lesson takes hold. She called it thoughtlessness: the point at which transgression becomes so normalized that ordinary people stop recognizing it as transgression. The danger lived in the moment the public stopped distinguishing between the ordinary and the monstrous, because the language for making that distinction had been emptied of meaning. A system where corruption hides is a system where the rules still carry weight. A system where corruption operates in daylight, without consequence, is a system where the rules have become ornamental.
Both examples above are un-American. But the distinction between them matters. One conceals itself because it knows the system would punish it if the system could function. The other operates in the open because it has calculated that the system can’t function at all. That second calculation is the product of vetocracy, and its correctness teaches everyone watching that the rules are ornamental.
This is not a federal pattern alone. San Francisco’s BART system lost a generation of riders because the rules had become ornamental at the turnstile and on the platform: fare evasion, open drug use, the slow drift of ordinary decorum. Ridership is returning because the city started enforcing basic fare and basic civic minimums. At the same time, a New York Times Opinion podcast coined the term “microlooting” for stealing from corporations as political expression. The New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino, on the panel, said she had shoplifted from Whole Foods, “didn’t feel bad about it at all,” and concluded: “Everyone, try it. See what happens.” The framing: the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I. These are different altitudes of the same lesson: where the rules are not enforced, they are not rules. What the Trump family extraction teaches from the top, microlooting teaches from the sidewalk. A population that accepts ornamental rules at the turnstile will accept them at the Senate.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa gave us the formula in The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” That is the familiar paradox of elite adaptation: surface transformation masking structural continuity. But vetocracy inverts it. Nothing changes. Nothing needs to. The system is frozen in a configuration that enables extraction, and the freeze is maintained by those who extract. The paralysis isn’t a side effect of the architecture. The paralysis is the architecture’s highest-value product.
The paralysis isn’t a side effect of the architecture. The paralysis is the architecture’s highest-value product.
Ordinary corruption works around the system: bribes, backroom deals, influence peddling that at least acknowledges the rules by breaking them secretly. What we have now works through the system. The vetocracy has made accountability structurally impossible, and the grift hides behind that impossibility. The rules are ornamental.
And we participate in this, quietly, by treating the paralysis as dysfunction rather than design. We shake our heads at gridlock as though it were weather. Something that just happens. But gridlock has beneficiaries. Stasis has operators. The question nobody asks about a frozen system is the most important one: who is sipping frozen margaritas?
The symmetry trap
“Both sides do it.”
In the right context, this is honest analysis. Congressional trading: both sides do it. Preference falsification, the habit of publicly conforming while privately disagreeing until you forget what you actually believed: both sides exhibit it. The psychological mechanisms of fleeing from freedom, trading the anxiety of choosing for the relief of someone else choosing for you: symmetric across the spectrum. True and useful and worth showing.
But “both sides do it” is also an ideology. And ideology is rationalization. The function of the phrase, applied reflexively to every instance of corruption, is permission. Permission to name nothing specific. Permission to treat escalating extraction as background noise because someone, somewhere, on the other side, once did something comparable.
The format is familiar: every panel has two sides, every scandal gets a whatabout, every accusation is met with an equivalent from the opposing archive. When everything is corrupt, nothing is specifically corrupt. When everyone is guilty, no one is particularly guilty. The wash is the point.
I’ve been writing about mechanisms across the spectrum, and about the costs when the “both sides” frame crosses from analysis into camouflage. I believe in showing the structure rather than the tribe. The psychological dynamics of mass movements, preference falsification, escape from freedom: these are genuinely symmetric. Showing that symmetry is honest work, and I’ll keep doing it.
But I’ve watched the symmetry become a hiding place. As long as every critique is paired, nothing gets named. As long as the mechanism is the focus, the specific actor disappears. We show that both sides exhibit the same psychological patterns, and someone walks away thinking the current theft is normal.
The current theft is not normal.
There is a difference between showing that both sides use the same psychological mechanisms and declaring that both sides are equally corrupt at any given moment. The first is an analytical observation. The second is a lie that protects whoever is currently doing the most damage.
The founders built this system so free people could govern themselves. They designed checks to restrain power and balances to distribute it. They assumed the machinery would function because they assumed citizens would insist that it function.
When the machinery is jammed from within, when extraction operates openly because the system can’t respond, when reflexive symmetry becomes the ideology that prevents naming what’s visible: the system has failed the purpose it was built to serve. And we are in a moment of generational crisis where the urgency of the moment becomes cover for what would be intolerable in calmer times.
I don’t know what the institutional fix is. Reform is blocked by the same vetocracy it would need to dismantle. Public pressure fractures along tribal lines before it can coalesce around specific, observable wrongs. Those who benefit from the paralysis have every incentive to maintain it. And vetocracy is only half the problem: it explains why courts and committees can’t act. The other half — why half the country doesn’t demand they act — is a different essay and a different shelf of the Canon.
And I won’t pretend that citizen-level honesty substitutes for structural reform. Plutarch could have told us two thousand years ago: individual virtue does not save a structurally rotten republic. Cato’s honor did not save Rome. But structural reform will stay blocked until enough citizens can see past reflexive symmetry and name what is in front of them. The citizen fix is what makes the structural fix possible.
But I think honesty requires distinction. Some corruption is genuinely bipartisan: name the institution. Some is paired but asymmetric: name both, but tell the truth about scale. Some is specific and directional: name it.
Grift is grift. Un-American is un-American. The willingness to say so, even when it looks like picking a side, may be the last check the founders didn’t write into the document.
But naming the grift is the easy part. We keep waiting for better leaders. Lincoln called for “the better angels of our nature,” and we keep expecting those angels to appear in the Senate, in the White House, in the committee chair’s office. They won’t. Lincoln’s better angels lived in the citizenry rather than the capitol.
And the citizenry’s work starts earlier than the ballot box, quieter, closer to home. It starts with the question I’ve been circling for months: am I signaling a position, or do I actually hold one? Am I performing analytical balance because I’ve examined the evidence and found symmetry, or because symmetry is more comfortable than what the evidence actually shows?
The unjamming is quiet work. It begins with stopping the private preference falsification: the small, daily decision to not-see what is plainly visible because seeing it would cost me my sense of being above the fray.
Arendt argued that action is a beginning rather than the conclusion of a process of understanding. The beginning she meant was ordinary. It was the decision to think when not-thinking is easier. To exercise judgment when procedure offers a comfortable substitute. The founders assumed citizens would provide the last check themselves. They didn’t write it into the document because they couldn’t: the willingness to see clearly, and then to speak from what you’ve seen, is not a mechanism anyone can design. It’s a practice. And like every practice, it exists only if people do it.
The machinery can be unjammed. But not from the outside, and not all at once. It gets unjammed one honest judgment at a time, by people who’ve stopped performing balance they don’t believe, who can distinguish between genuine bipartisan rot and specific directional extraction, and who are willing to bear the discomfort of saying so.
That willingness is the better angel. Nothing else qualifies.
Sources and Inspiration
The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper
Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt