Doneyes: Is the System Really Bad?

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A, i think that there's a feelingim not going to say how accurate it is, but on the republican side, there's a lot of corrupt people. On the democratic side, there’s a lot of ineffectual persons. And one of the big arguments i make in the book is thatw this matters enormously because rotten systems attract rotten people and D systems attract good people. I'm quite hopeful, because you can change systems more easily than you can change people.

All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the greater good. Power corrupts, we are told — but to what extent is that true? Would any of us, upon receiving great power, be tempted by corruption? Or are corruptible people drawn to accrue power? Brian Klaas has investigated these questions by looking at historical examples and by interviewing hundreds of people who have been in this position. He concludes that power can corrupt, but it doesn’t necessarily do so — we can construct safeguards to keep corruption to a minimum.

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Brian Klaas received his D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He is currently Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. His new book is Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us. He is host of the Power Corrupts podcast.