Well... the UKs Tories have been a corrupt shitshow for the last decade. Germany's President Steinmeier was involved in the Murat Kurnaz mess (an Afghani dude wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo), the Chancellor in the Cum Ex tax-cheating scandal, and the opposition parties are taking lessons from Trump in rhetoric tactics. Italy's government is composed of a literal post-fascist party whose youth openly glorifies Mussolini, and then you got the legacy of Europe's most corrupt and creepy politician (Berlusconi).
No matter where you look, corruption and unpunished scandals galore in the West. And the general public doesn't care.
The general public doesn't care about corruption if it doesn't affect them directly and if their basic needs are met. As long as the valuation of their housing keeps going up and so is their pension, they don't care what corrupt shit those in power are doing. It's the "fuck you I got mine" human mentality.
I would argue that it is more of learned helplessness.
My experience from 35 years of democracy in my country is that either you vote for corrupt old crooks, or you vote for outsider rebels who promise to uproot corruption only to become corrupt crooks themselves once they got to the levers of power.
Once you witness the same process iterating itself five or six times, you start regarding corruption as approximately as inevitable as aging or bad weather.
>I know here in the US, we can take one look at our own presidential candidates
Yeah, the US presidential candidates are either an old senile man and an old xenofobic liar, either not great options, but none of them have run the country into the ground no matter how shit they are. I mean Trump spews complete nonsense and Biden can barely string a coherent sentence together or remember what he said 30 seconds ago, let alone run a country and yet the US seems to be doing fine.
Part of me thinks that the US still functions so well no matter the president or political situation is that F500 actually run the US and the president is just for show.
