Western liberals imagine the ‘autocrat’ as ‘an absolutely corrupt congressman’ because they’re incapable of imagining a different system. But a genuine autocrat would have too much power for corruption to make sense; he faces directly the existential question of what a nation is.
A stably corrupt state requires a special set of conditions. It must have a ruling class of absentee owners who care only about their position in the game of finance. This is the basis for a perfectly corrupt system, not autocracy. The US is such a state.
There are 3rd world kleptocrats but the possibility of looting a nation-state only exists because Anglo-American financial institutions make it possible. You can loot a whole nation because you can put the money in an off-shore account and spend it in the ‘free world’.
In the stably corrupt state, the people who benefit from the corruption want to keep the game going in perpetuity and they never ask the existential question (what’s the purpose of the state?). That’s the absentee owner. He forms a parasitical, insular community of elites.
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