I could get behind David Warsh’s complaint that the apathy surrounding the latest GOP scandals is actually a big deal and something very bad for our democray. But I don’t know what we get calling by calling it "postmodern corruption." In my mind postmodern politics has a potentially useful reference to a political mode in which decision, persuasion and acclamation occur at the level of mass-mediated images. It’s politics of a second order, "the people" instead of the people, "history" instead of history, "protest" instead of protest. Maybe that conception can get unweildy, but to me it’s more useful than simply using "postmodern" as a shorthand slur for "people don’t believe there’s any meaning or morality," which is how Warsh uses it and which is the journalist’s straw man based on bad undergraduate papers on the topic.
Perhaps we should speak of "anomic corruption" instead. There’s of course the complicated issue of why "the United States has drifted from the days, 25 years ago or so, when its citizens took their leaders’ honesty and integrity pretty much for granted." Any possible explanations? I’m also wondering about the Gilded Age corruption; I suspect that honesty and integrity were not taken for granted then. Perhaps the mid-twentieth century serves as an exception, not a rule, in American history.
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