You can SEE how different the priorities were back then.

"[...] The ambition and the manoeuvres of the one will serve, on the contrary, to unmask the other. The vices of a magistrate, in democratic states, are usually peculiar to his own person." 😬 (de Tocqueville)

"[...] A corrupt or an incapable magistrate will not concert his measures with another magistrate, simply because that individual is as corrupt and as incapable as himself; and these two men will never unite their endeavors to promote the corruption and inaptitude of their remote posterity. [...]"

I feel like I learned this ONLY from Ottessa Moshfegh's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation'.

poet red alert