There is very little in this world as dramatic as the coup d’état, but it is not only presidents and princes who are susceptible to the allure of power. New York City enjoys the services of the nation’s best-led and most professional big-city police department, but its officers have been known to abuse their power in ways ranging from the banal to the antiheroic, from taking petty bribes to acting as mob enforcers for the Lucchese crime syndicate. Political power is corruptible down to the level of public-school administrators and DMV clerks.

Indeed, from the fiction of Franz Kafka to the headlines in National Review, we have seen that it very often is not the great man who gives in most consequentially to the temptation of corruption but the anonymous bureaucrat. This probably has something to do with the passage of time. A president of these United States need resist his worst inclinations only for four or eight years. That may not be enough time for those without a prior education in the field even to learn how to be effectively corrupt, much less to develop and execute a program of corruption. The civil servant is a different matter. After 20 years on the job, suffering the inevitable slights that accompany a bureaucratic career, he has the specific local knowledge and the opportunity to indulge his baser nature. He may also have the motive: Why should a successful car salesman or trip-and-fall plaintiffs’ attorney enjoy such a higher standard of living than a lifelong servant of the public interest? (He has convinced himself he is a servant of the public interest rather than lacking in skills or ambition.) Why should some night-school lawyer lord power over him just because a congressional district in some flat and featureless farm state preferred his empty speeches and intelligence-insulting television commercials to the empty speeches and intelligence-insulting television commercials of some other guy?