A Whorehouse at Low Tide
Now that corruption’s Prohibition is repealed, how do we define the American spirit?
Well, I'll tell ya, you know, it's touching. Like a lot of things in life, we laugh because it's funny and we laugh because it's true. Now, some people will say—reformers, they'll say, “Put that man in jail! What does he think he is doing?” Well, what I hope I'm doing, and here's where your English paper's got a point, is—I'm responding to the will of the people.
— Al Capone, aka “Scarface,” The Untouchables
What moonshine is fermenting in our nation’s capital?
Searching for some answers, I’ve learned a lot of new terms lately. We clearly have budding autocrats in the distillery, but how poisonous is this rotgut? Is it straight-up fascism? Absolutism? Authoritarianism? Caesarism? Totalitarianism? Colonel Hans Landa might raise a toast: “that’s a bingo!”
Games aside, perhaps what’s brewing under the cover of darkness is a “personalist dictatorship,” where a leader values loyalty over competence and has a general distrust of intelligentsia. Bitter, but the profile fits.
Can we brush aside monarchy, patriarchy, theocracy? There is a self-proclaimed “king” and “chosen one” manning the still. Kakistocracy is a mouthful. It means governance by the worst possible people, kind of like authoritarian bathtub gin. I stumbled upon foolocracy, which any fool can figure out (yep, it’s in the dictionary; a bit too on the nose).
Oligarchy has gone viral. Are we fast becoming a mafia state, like Putin’s Russia? President Trump is surrounded by goodfellas, after all. Stevie “two times” meets with the Don twice a day to discuss important policy matters and white nationalism. This new Cabinet looks more like the cast of the Sopranos: pasty, roughed up, too much makeup and too little sleep. And poor Lil’ Marco just looks frightened, like he’s under witness protection.
I’m being harsh, bootlegging must be exhausting. But seriously, are we in good hands? Are things being “taken care of” on the up-and-up? Fuhgeddaboudit.
Perhaps “broligarchy” is being bottled? Ew, I hope not. Massive amounts of unchecked power in the hands of a few toxic men—what could go wrong? Before long, sexual harassment will be tax deductible and refusing to wear a gargantuan Rolex will get you five years of hard time.
The oligarchy-adjacent crony capitalism, or cronyism, is already aging inside the Beltway. I believe Elon Musk would be an example of a crony but need to curb my hate speech. Corporate oligarchy is a thing, and so is corporatocracy. And “inverted totalitarianism” is a theorized form of corporatocracy. Help us, Mike Judge, you’re our only hope.
Technocracy resonates but I’m afraid to Google it. (Dammit, I just did and that led me to algocracy, which is “government by algorithm.” I’ll take the blue pill, thank you.) There’s also techno-authoritarianism, aka IT-backed authoritarianism, digital authoritarianism, or digital dictatorship. Is this a deus ex machina? I need a drink.
How about electoral autocracy? Anocracy? Plutocracy? Narcokleptocracy? The latter is governance by drug lords. We’ve seen no signs of Noriegaism in America but it is just March. And despotism is a dark concoction; I’ll dig deeper when the kidnappings begin.
Holy autocracies, Batman. Pick your poison but we’re clearly not in Kansas anymore (the state was recently renamed to Mansas, btw).
The appearance of law must be upheld, especially while it's being broken.
— Boss Tweed, Gangs of New York
Jonathan Rauch, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, says one word describes Trump: patrimonialism. In short, patrimonialism blurs the lines between public and private power. Corruption and opportunism pair well with patrimonialism, and personal loyalties are paramount. Democracies can be patrimonial, which is comforting.
Patrimonialism sounds like the bee’s knees, but I’m fixated on another dark term related to governance: kleptocracy.
If you need a refresher like I did, here goes: kleptocracy is a fancy word for government corruption. As Merriam-Webster defines it, “kleptocracy is government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.” It’s also referred to as thievocracy.
Like ears and noses in Gangs of New York, kleptocracy will be my “trophy of the day” until someone (or some algorithm) convinces me otherwise. I hope they do. But last week on the Senate floor, Senator Chris Murphy only bolstered my fixation: “Six Weeks In, This White House Is On Its Way To Being The Most Corrupt In U.S. History.”
Murphy’s presentation hits the high notes, but I’ll add a few from an armchair expert.
First, Ukraine has been fighting a war against corruption for years. Before he started dropping bombs, Putin tried to beat Ukraine into submission via corruption. The embattled country worked tirelessly to remove its oligarchical rot, culminating in the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. President Zelensky ran, and was duly elected, on an anti-corruption ticket. Ukraine is “fighting the good fight” against kleptocracy and they should have U.S. support.
But not in Trump 2.0. This administration is instead bullying Zelensky and siding with the openly corrupt Putin. Why? It seems that no one fully understands Trump’s so-called strategies, but it’s clear that he and Zelensky don’t see eye to eye on corruption. That alone is informative. Loyal pundits can spin this shit until the cows come home, but a country that isn’t anti-corruption can no longer claim to be pro-democracy.
Looking out a few years, let’s say 2028, it’s worth noting that kleptocrats like Putin need other kleptocrats (old and new) to remain in power for their own survival. Kleptocrats also aim to silence fearless anti-corruption activists, who are a kleptocracy’s kryptonite. Lest we forget Alexei Navalny, who was labeled as an “extremist” and murdered in broad daylight for his anti-corruption work.
Another bad sign, one that even surprised kleptocracy experts like Casey Michel, is the executive order pausing enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The FCPA is essentially our anti-bribery act, one that has set the model for other countries worldwide. On Hudson Institute podcast Making a Killing, Michel referred to the FCPA as “the great American commitment not to export corruption.” And a 2025 survey of economists disputed the executive order’s lame justification:
...there was overwhelming agreement among economists that ending enforcement of the act would increase global levels of bribery and corruption and none of the surveyed economists held that it would increase the long-term profits and competitiveness of US businesses.
As for imported corruption, oligarchs already launder their money in the United States. According to the podcast, some of our legal loopholes—attorney-client privilege, shell companies, financial privacy, and the absence of a beneficial ownership registry—enable them to do so. The U.K. and the EU are in the same boat. Imports or exports, my armchair assessment is that corruption will flow freer than whiskey under Trump 2.0. Maybe this isn’t terribly surprising, but that doesn’t make it any less troubling.
Finally, we’re seeing thoughtless layoffs and blatant politicization at numerous federal agencies that play a role in combating corruption. Trump fired 17 federal watchdogs, the people who guard against loss, waste, theft, and undesirable practices (here’s a crypto coin, kid, you didn’t see any of this). The attorney general dissolved all kleptocracy-related task forces at the DOJ, conflicts of interest are a nonissue, and big law firms are afraid to take on new cases. Nixon had his Enemies List. I bet Trump’s stretches to Kiev.
Kleptocrats are deranged, nefarious, and secretive. They harm citizens’ civil rights and quality of life. I’m starting to understand DOGE better.
Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.
— Officer James Malone, The Untouchables
Researching kleptocracy reminded me of Brian DePalma’s 1988 The Untouchables, a movie that gives me a wave of nostalgia.
Starting in 1968, DePalma directed over 30 movies. Some of my favorites are Blowout (1981), Scarface (1983), Carlito’s Way (1993), and the first Mission Impossible (1996). Quentin Tarantino is one of DePalma’s biggest fans and lists Blowout as one of his all-time favorite movies. It was DePalma who introduced Martin Scorsese to Robert DeNiro, who plays crime boss Al Capone in The Untouchables—a brilliant casting and an unforgettable performance.
Written by David Mamet, The Untouchables is a fictionalized version of corruption-plagued Chicago during America’s Prohibition era, but Kevin Costner’s Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness and his “untouchable” team embody something timely: an unwavering respect for the rule of law. Ness and his volunteer unit are heroic in many ways, but they’re “untouchable” because they’re incorruptible. They’re among the few that fight back against Chicago’s systemic corruption, including offers of bribery, with Ness saying: “You tell Capone that I'll see him in hell!”
The Untouchables stand for something larger than themselves and they’re willing to die for it. Some of them do. They stand for the rule of law because they know there’s no equality without it—and without equality, there's no democracy. Fact or fiction, the Untouchables are heroes of democracy.
I learned something cool about The Untouchables in a college film studies class: DePalma’s masterful climax at Chicago Union Station—where Ness and his team kill Capone’s accountant in a blazing gunfight while simultaneously saving a baby carriage that’s tumbling down a grand staircase—pays homage to the 1925 Soviet silent film Battleship Potemkin.
Like The Untouchables, Battleship Potemkin is historical fiction. After Russian sailors refuse to eat rotten meat and stage a mutiny on the battleship, inspired citizens mobilize against an oppressive government. The government deploys its cavalry to quell the disturbance, there’s a confrontation on a giant outdoor stairway, and the cavalry opens fire. Caught in the crossfire, a baby carriage rolls down the steps as civilians are being massacred.
We didn’t have YouTube in the early 90s, so this was my introduction to cinematic homage—it blew my mind. Dozens of other artists have paid homage to the classic sequence in Battleship Potemkin, including Denis Villeneuve on the Atreides steps of Dune. As Salvador Dalí said: “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
The sequence from Battleship Potemkin is set at the Odessa steps, also known as the Potemkin Stairs, in Ukraine. People fight back when they’re confused, hurt, unemployed, undervalued—let alone scared for their lives. As corruption threatens our democracy and good people are pressed harder, will there be an uprising in America similar to Odessa? It’s not hard to imagine.
I see a double entendre in The Untouchables: Al Capone thought he was untouchable, that he was above the law. Men who think like this always fall hard. But it takes the inverted untouchables—the good men and women on the other side of the coin, the incorruptible—to knock them down.
One more thing, you have an all-out prize fight, you wait until the fight is over, one guy is left standing. And that's how you know who won.
— Al Capone, The Untouchables
I’m not saying Donald Trump is Al Capone. There’s really no need. But do I trust the Trump administration running our country any more than I would Al Capone or say, Joseph McCarthy or Roy Cohn? I do not. If these men care for average Americans, I’m Aldo the Apache.
Just as Capone did, just as Putin does, Trump, Musk, and their cronies obviously think they’re untouchable—and they’ll continue to believe so until proven otherwise.
Is it too soon to call our government a kleptocracy? Probably. But the terminology we use isn’t as important as the actions we’re seeing. Action is character, and we’re seeing a lot of corrupt actions from the Trump administration. But then again, we’re in a civil war of words as much as anything. I’m probably a “radical leftist” for referencing Merriam-Webster.
Art is the highest form of hope.
— German painter Gerhard Richter
Fiction provides an escape, but it also gives us hope. I find some comfort in knowing that we don’t know where all of this is going, that we don’t know how this story ends. This can be scary and anxious, but it can also be hopeful.
Corrupt men fall sooner or later, just like Al Capone did. Putin will fall hard. Maybe he finally pisses off the wrong oligarch and gets tossed off a building in Moscow. That’s how Ness handled Capone’s enforcer Frank Nitti on the big screen.
As for Trump, Musk, and cronies, maybe they get arrested eventually and we reopen Alcatraz, where Capone lost his mind. We could call it The Greatest American Penitentiary. No internet, no TV—just time alone to think. The ultimate punishment for unhinged megalomaniacs.
Let’s do some good
I spoke with an enlisted airman this week and he told me two things: first, despite the corrupt actions we’re witnessing, he still believes in the idea of America and what it stands for; and second, he sees all of this corruption and planned chaos as an opportunity to help people, to work from the inside and fight for what’s right, to do some good.
The airman didn’t know it at the time, but that’s exactly what Eliot Ness says in The Untouchables. As he leads his team on their first raid on a Capone operation, Ness turns to his men and simply says, “let’s do some good.”
Kleptocracies are reshaping global politics, and now corruption is reshaping America in real time. If we keep getting whiffs of kleptocracy, we’ll need our Untouchables now more than ever.