This is a lightly edited transcript of the November 17 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is our show Right Now. I’m joined now by Adam Bonica. He’s a professor of political science at Stanford University. He also writes this excellent Substack and blog called On Data and Democracy, where he uses data but talks about these core democracy issues that we’re all grappling with.

So Adam, welcome.

Adam Bonica: Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me, Perry.

Bacon: So I want to start—you wrote a piece a few months ago that I really want to zone in on, which is basically arguing that … the opportunity for the Democratic Party is to become a party fixated on being the anti-corruption party. So when you say anti-corruption, describe what that means for people, first of all.

Bonica: So that’s a broad set of things that “anti-corruption” can mean. In the context of what we’re looking at now in American politics, it’s pretty much everything. We’re looking at an administration that—Steven Levitsky, who is a very prominent political scientist, the author of How Democracies Die, has said the Trump administration is the most basically openly corrupt regime that he has ever seen. And you see this as a through line through pretty much everything we see, especially within the second Trump administration.

Part of the reason that I think this moment points towards the politics of anti-corruption is twofold. One, just having a cursory knowledge of how authoritarian regimes worldwide are successfully challenged, there’s very few examples where anti-corruption was not either the main pillar of the anti-authoritarian movement, or at least a very key part of the component. Now, most recently we saw in Nepal an authoritarian regime that was very quickly overthrown and replaced by an anti-corruption crusader. We have tons of other examples throughout history, including in Bangladesh in 2024, Slovakia in 2018, Malaysia, and the 1MDB [1Malaysia Development Berhad] scandal. I could go back and list like 30 different examples.

That’s where the starting point is, but it’s also something that’s very much in the DNA of American politics, right? So if you go back to 2006 and the culture of corruption campaign, that was very much an anti-corruption platform that Democrats ran on. In 1994, you could argue what Republicans were doing was an anti-corruption platform, and then going back to Watergate.

So there’s just a lot of empirical evidence backing this idea that anti-corruption is a very powerful force in politics, and I think there’s a lot of evidence in the moment pointing towards a regime being extremely vulnerable to arguments about it being corrupt.

Bacon: You listed a bunch of countries where the authoritarian regime was defeated in part by an anti-corrupt message. Does that imply that authoritarianism always involves corruption, or is there a formal tie or a formal study there?

Bonica: Yeah, I see those. Corruption is the Achilles’ heel of authoritarians and is frequently their downfall, as I pointed out, but they just can’t seem to resist, and it seems to be part of what keeps these regimes together—there’s this notion of you’re in the in group, and these in groups trade with this currency of corruption. You can see all these members of the Trump administration now getting in on the act. I think the ProPublica piece about [Homeland Security Secretary] Kristi Noem, most recently, but we have one or two a week of [Border czar Tom] Homan or [FBI Director Kash] Patel recently having these examples.

And so you do see these regimes, they almost always have a very strong component of corruption built into them, and it becomes a very huge vulnerability for them politically if it can be exploited by the opposition.

Bacon: So talk about if the Democrats decided to take this advice and to become … what would that look like? What would an anti-corruption agenda look like?

Bonica: So it could take multiple forms, but the most likely form, I think … I’ll back up a little bit. So, what is the thing that’s stopping Democrats from just pushing down the pedal on anti-corruption? And polling data shows us that people were pretty, pretty pessimistic about Democrats, in terms of seeing them as corrupt as well.

There was a recent poll by YouGov that asked people whether they thought members of Congress would take a bribe, and said—it was like 70 percent of people, around that number, said that yes, a Democratic member of Congress would be likely to take a bribe. And they said this about specific Democratic and Republican politicians.

So the starting point is, people seem to look at American politics and see both parties as similarly corrupt. It’s an interesting observation because it’s very clear that one party is much more openly corrupt than the other. But I think that points to—OK, so what might be driving what would seem like a false equivalence, but one that may have some footing in an actual—how people see and understand politics?

And I think that’s because of a lot of what we see as legalized corruption. So campaign finance, for instance—it’s hard to really differentiate between a large donor having influence and that not being a type of corruption, even if it’s legal. And I don’t think a lot of voters necessarily make that distinction.

And I don’t think, honestly, that they should. I agree with most voters that even these legalized forms of influence are forms of corruption. And so I would say the way that this would take place is: one, it has to be a focal point, right? You have to talk about corruption, but more importantly, for it to really stick, Democrats need to find a way to signal very clearly that they are not corrupt.

They need to take very clear—probably costly—action to show that they are different. They have not done that yet, but that, I think is the crucial step. If they can accomplish that, then they have one of the biggest electoral openings I think any party has seen in our lifetimes.

Bacon: Give me examples of what actions they could take to seem really strongly anti-corrupt.

Bonica: So I’ve been arguing and putting together these plans for how they could think about doing that. One is they need to clean their own house. So when we talk about things that … congressional stock trading—people hate that. Voters hate it. There’s no political advantage to supporting it, and no electoral advantage for a party to say, We’re not going to ban it.

There’ve been efforts, and they have been blocked by leadership within the Democratic Party, right? So that’s an easy example. Democrats just need to come out and say, Well, we are against this. The whole party is unified against this. And those who don’t, they’re outside of the official platform, and so forth.

But how do you get a broader coalition of anti-corruption to congeal within the Democratic Party? That’s what the leadership is for. And I think the way that Democrats could do this is that they can run on something—you remember, going back to 1994, the Contract of America—that was a way for the Republicans at the time to signal that they were different than the entrenched, powerful Democrats.

Now Democrats have an opportunity to do something like that as well, where they could say, We’re running on—here’s a contract that if we take back office, here are the very concrete things we are going to do. And you can do most of these with just a speaker’s power within Congress—internal rules.

You can do a lot of campaign finance reform by saying members of our own party are going to be required to........

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