Deregulation Only Works If Good Actors Exist—And They Don’t Anymore
The Era of Functional Corruption is dead
I used to be a conservative Republican. I was born in Illinois, so it’s a bit different. We always knew the fix was in and not for us, so we operated on a more idealistic plane. I was not just a voter, I was an operator—writing, refining, shaping messaging. I believed in the basics small government, fiscal accountability, stewardship— and deregulation because, in a world where people want good results, deregulation makes sense. But that world doesn’t exist anymore.
Deregulation was always a trade: we let you bypass bureaucracy, but you’d better deliver. Chicago had a version of this—pay-for-play wasn’t about eliminating oversight, it was about streamlining governance. If you skipped the permit process to build a porch, fine—but if that porch collapsed, you were held accountable. That system worked as long as people cared about outcomes.
But what happens when people stop caring? The porches start collapsing and the contractors point fingers.
Chicago’s pay-for-play model shifted from functional corruption to selective corruption—from “pay to bypass bureaucracy” to “pay for access to power.” And that shift killed deregulation as a viable system. Because deregulation only works when there are competent actors at the helm. Once short-termism overtakes long-term governance, the whole framework collapses.
Chicago wasn’t the first city to run on corruption as a functional model. Tammany Hall ran New York for over a century on the same principle—pay to play, but you’d better deliver. Boss Tweed was corrupt, but he built infrastructure. When you paid Tammany, you got roads, bridges, and jobs. It wasn’t clean, but it worked. The problem isn’t corruption—it’s corruption without accountability.
Henry Hyde’s old school feeling of duty vs. The Modern Political Class
Henry Hyde was an old-school Republican—a serious legislator who saw himself as a good actor. When I was a kid, my mother, a young lawyer, would leave me in his office while she worked at Suburban Court. “Georgette?! Leave her here… she needs to spend time with her own kind”he would tease my dem-machine mom. When a young mother is building a law practice, it really does take a village to entertain we the children. The people who helped my mother were all volunteers.
I was a difficult and formal child and I had ideas about everything. Hyde never treated me like a child being humored—he debated me, engaged with me, took my policy idea seriously. He believed in nurturing young conservatives.
In contrast, many of the democrats who watched me were transactional about it and would have liked me to have an off switch.”don’t you get it? It’s never going to work because they won’t let it work!” I was told when I proposed anything
Hyde wasn’t perfect—but he was an engaged babysitter and his stance on abortion, for example, was shaped more by constituent obligation than by a real understanding of bodily autonomy. He asked me regularly “what is our ethical obligation to constituents.” You might be surprised to hear that this obsessive catholic saw his duty as subverting that agenda in favor of expressing the voices of constituents— he still saw governance as a process of reasoning and responsibility.
(Doesn’t mean he always got it right, of course. While trying to protect some abortion rights he created a framework that denies bodily autonomy.)
But…Compare that to today’s politicians.
Hyde may not have understood bodily autonomy, but modern conservatives dismiss rape culture outright. He may have been deeply religious, but he still engaged in intellectual debate. Today’s political class? They don’t engage. They consolidate. They enforce. They “win.”
Even Richard Nixon—who played the game as cynically as anyone—still engaged in traditional stewardship and governance. He created the EPA, expanded Social Security, and went to China. He was a crook, but he was a crook who built things. That was the old model. The new model doesn’t build—it extracts.
This is the real shift—from governance to statecraft.
From Governance to Statecraft: How Power Changed
Politics used to be about getting resources for your constituents. Look at Lisa Murkowski—an old-school politician who fought for Alaska’s infrastructure, ensuring that federal dollars went where they were needed.
But today? That model is dead. Governance has been replaced by pure power accumulation.
• The old guard fought for their states and districts.
• The new guard fights for ideological dominance.
• The old guard engaged in governance.
• The new guard sees governance as an inconvenience.
This shift explains why Republican messaging was always weaker. Conservative policies were long-term, complex, and hard to sell in soundbites. Democratic messaging was always simpler, more immediate, more accessible.
Enter Karl Rove.
Rove built the modern GOP on voter segmentation and message manipulation. He figured out how to break the electorate into blocks and win through precision-targeted persuasion. And for a time, it worked.
But even Rove was outmoded by the Trump era.
When Rove offered his services to the Trump campaign, they laughed him out of the room. The dark prince of voter manipulation himself was no longer needed—because algorithmic behavioral control had taken his place.
Roger Ailes understood television messaging better than anyone. He built Fox News into a narrative weapon. But even Ailes had control—he structured a pipeline, a linear progression of radicalization. Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok don’t work like that. There’s no pipeline, just feedback loops. That’s why Karl Rove’s model fell apart. The algorithm doesn’t persuade—it reacts, mutates, and self-optimizes.
The New Politician – Elected Office as a Lifetime Benefit Package
This is the new model: elected office as a job, not a duty.
Once, politicians fought for office to bring resources back to their districts, to govern, even to consolidate influence. Now? It’s a career track. A permanent benefit package. A lifetime security plan.
Figures like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene don’t thrive because of policy or competence. They thrive because they’ve cracked the new game:
✅ Keep your name in the media cycle.
✅ Generate outrage, engagement, clicks.
✅ Don’t legislate(that only exposes oneself to attack!)—grandstand.
✅ victory condition: Secure elite healthcare and post-office lucrative opportunities.
The game isn’t governance anymore. It’s job security through perpetual chaos.
Puppet Masters Losing Control?: The New Era of Political Chaos
Once, corporate backers, ideological funders, and dark money operatives controlled the game. They crafted candidates, dictated talking points, set the boundaries of acceptable political discourse.
Now? They’re herding cats.
Puppet masters entangled in strings attached to players who should have been perfectly under control but are now dragging the body of the hand that tries to hold the leash.
And if you want proof of that, look at how language itself has been weaponized. It’s in the open: and it’s also an inside joke… their there too to not always errors now but often signaling.
There’s a long history of using coded language to create insular communities. The Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s had secret handshakes and initiation rites. The early Bolsheviks built ideological purity tests into their recruitment. Today, it’s online tag groups, dog-whistle phrases, and intentional misspellings. The mechanics don’t change—(nlp works…)only the medium does.
That’s why persuasion doesn’t work the way it used to. It’s not a conversation—it’s a performance.
The Fallout: What Happens Next?
The old corrupt politicians still believed in running a government. The new political class only believes in controlling one.
So the real question is: What’s the new play?
I romanticize the disconnect of the old guard, but it’s not ideal. The sheer number of vulnerabilities in our system that can be tracked not to malfeasance but just to obliviousness is staggering. But… there was something good about politicians fighting to voice the concerns of voters— and we have lost that
TLDR The old logic of deregulation doesn’t work anymore—not when governance itself has been replaced with ideological theater.
If the game has changed, what’s the next move?