Legitimacy, Responsibility, and the Social Conditions That Sustain Power
Interpretive Frame
This essay examines a question that surfaces repeatedly in moments of political scandal and moral outrage: How do political leaders get away with actions that appear unethical, harmful, or openly dishonest? Popular explanations often reduce the problem to corruption or bad character. Drawing on Max Weber’s theory of legitimacy, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on responsibility, symbolic interactionism, and my Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) Cycle, this essay argues that such explanations are insufficient. Political leaders “get away with it” not simply because they are immoral, but because power is sustained through social meaning-making, institutional normalization, and collective patterns of response that stabilize authority even in the presence of wrongdoing.
The Comfort of the Corruption Narrative
When political leaders violate ethical norms or evade accountability, the most common explanation is moral failure. Corruption, narcissism, or greed are invoked as though they fully explain the phenomenon. While such traits may be present, this framing offers a misleading sense of clarity. It reassures the public that the problem lies in the individual, rather than in the social and institutional conditions that allow misconduct to persist.
This narrative is emotionally satisfying. It provides a target for outrage and preserves the belief that, if the “right” people were in power, the system itself would function properly. But sociologically, this explanation obscures more than it reveals. History demonstrates that similar patterns of abuse, evasion, and normalization recur across political eras, ideological traditions, and leadership styles. The persistence of the problem suggests that something more structural is at work.
Legitimacy and the Endurance of Authority
Max Weber’s concept of legitimacy helps clarify this endurance. Authority does not persist because leaders are virtuous, but because people continue to recognize their right to rule. Legal procedures, institutional continuity, and symbolic authority can remain intact even when trust erodes. As long as the structures that confer legitimacy remain operative, authority can survive significant moral compromise.
This helps explain why exposure alone rarely produces accountability. Scandals may generate outrage without destabilizing legitimacy. Institutions absorb violations by treating them as exceptions, controversies, or political theater rather than as existential threats. The question is not whether wrongdoing is visible, but whether it is interpreted as delegitimizing.
The Banality of Responsibility
Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil shifts attention away from dramatic villainy and toward ordinary participation. Harm, she argued, is often produced not by monstrous intent, but by routine role-following, institutional obedience, and the fragmentation of responsibility.
Applied to contemporary political life, this insight reframes the question of accountability. Leaders do not act alone. Advisors, bureaucrats, media organizations, party structures, and citizens themselves participate—often incrementally—in sustaining systems that excuse or minimize harm. Responsibility becomes diffuse. Each actor performs a limited role, while no one experiences themselves as accountable for the whole.
This diffusion does not absolve individuals of responsibility; it explains how responsibility is managed, displaced, and ultimately neutralized within complex systems.
Meaning, Framing, and the Definition of the Situation
Symbolic interactionism further illuminates how leaders “get away with it.” Social life depends on shared definitions of situations. When actions are successfully reframed—as strategic necessity, political realism, or partisan exaggeration—the moral disruption they might otherwise cause is softened.
Framing matters as much as facts. Competing narratives do not merely describe events; they organize interpretation and shape response. If misconduct is framed as inevitable, exaggerated, or irrelevant to “real” concerns, collective outrage dissipates. The issue is not ignorance, but meaning.
The EIR Cycle and the Stabilization of Power
My Experiences–Interpretations–Responses (EIR) Cycle clarifies how these dynamics unfold over time.
- Experience: People encounter repeated instances of political misconduct, contradiction, or ethical breach.
- Interpretation: These experiences are filtered through existing narratives—cynicism, partisan loyalty, moral fatigue, or resignation. The behavior is reinterpreted as normal, unavoidable, or beyond remedy.
- Response: Outrage may appear briefly, but it is often followed by withdrawal, rationalization, or selective attention. These responses, in turn, reinforce institutional stability rather than challenge it.
Over time, the cycle shortens. What once provoked shock becomes expected. Leaders do not “get away with it” because nothing happened, but because collective responses adapt in ways that preserve continuity.
Gestures toward historical recurrence make this visible. Similar cycles can be observed in earlier periods of political retrenchment, moral panic, and institutional drift. The patterns repeat not because people fail to learn, but because social systems are skilled at metabolizing disruption.
Responsibility Beyond Outrage
This analysis does not distribute blame evenly, nor does it deny real asymmetries of power. Leaders wield disproportionate influence and bear heightened responsibility. But focusing exclusively on their character allows the broader social processes that sustain power to remain unexamined.
The harder implication is that accountability depends not only on exposure or condemnation, but on altering the interpretive and relational conditions that stabilize authority. Responsibility is not exhausted by outrage; it requires sustained engagement with how meaning is produced, how legitimacy is maintained, and how responses either interrupt or reinforce existing systems.
Reframing the Question
The more sociologically useful question, then, is not “How do they get away with it?” but “What are we collectively doing that allows authority to persist even when it no longer deserves our trust?”
This question is unsettling because it implicates institutions, narratives, and citizens alike. But it also reframes frustration into understanding—not as resignation, but as a clearer diagnosis of the work required for genuine accountability.
Political leaders do not get away with it alone. They do so within social worlds that interpret, respond, and adapt in ways that make endurance possible. Understanding those worlds is not a substitute for action. It is the condition for action that might finally disrupt the cycle.
How to cite this article:
Green, R. K. (2025). How do they get away with it? Legitimacy, responsibility, and the social conditions that sustain power. The Emergent Self. https://theemergentself.com/how-do-they-get-away-with-it/
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