Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?
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Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold?<br>Civilizations can carry a surprising number of parasites and live. But there’s a line — Rome crossed it, the Gilded Age toed it, and for the first time in history, we can measure it.
Carlyn Beccia<br>Jul 02, 2026
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During the reign of Boss Tweed, editorial cartoonist Thomas Nast denounced Tammany as a ferocious tiger mauling the country, personified as Columbia. The tiger became a lasting symbol of Tammany Hall. | Public Domain<br>Grim Reminder: A Grim Historian is a reader-supported newsletter and depends on your 5$ donations to keep the most depressing politics and history in your inbox. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber or sharing with someone who loves misery.<br>Share
In 1894, a man from Tammany Hall climbed four flights of a Lower East Side tenement carrying a turkey.<br>Not a metaphorical turkey. An actual turkey. Feathers, legs, the whole Thanksgiving corpse.<br>Tammany Hall was New York City’s Democratic political machine, and calling it “corrupt” is like calling the Titanic “damp.” Tammany sold judgeships the way Costco sells rotisserie chickens. It buried building inspections. It let firetraps stand until they burned with people inside. It turned municipal government into a cash register with a flag on it.<br>And every Thanksgiving, it delivered free turkeys to thousands of poor families across the city.<br>This particular turkey went to a widow with three children and no husband. There was no welfare in 1894. No Social Security. No food stamps. No unemployment check. If you were poor in New York, there was exactly one organization that might show up at your door with food, coal, rent money, and maybe a job for your oldest kid at the gasworks.<br>That organization was Tammany Hall.<br>The deal was never written down because nobody on that stairwell was stupid. Turkey in November. Vote in November. That was the receipt.<br>She took the turkey. So would you. Don’t lie.
Title: Big dish but mightly little turkey, 1985 | Public Domain<br>One Tammany boss, George Washington Plunkitt, was so untroubled by any of this that he explained the whole system to a journalist, on the record, cheerfully: “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”<br>He died rich. The widow did not.<br>Here’s the part that should bother you. Tammany didn’t steal New York at gunpoint. It bought the city one turkey at a time, from people who understood the Faustian bargain.<br>Two thousand years earlier, a North African king named Jugurtha rode out of Rome having just bribed a tribune to shut down his own corruption hearing — then arranged a murder while he was in town, for which Rome’s punishment was a polite request to leave. Looking back at the city, he delivered the greatest exit line in ancient history: “a city for sale and doomed to perish if it finds a buyer!”<br>That line gets quoted as an indictment of the people who sold Rome. It is worse than that. It is an indictment of the buyers.<br>Jugurtha wasn’t indicting the Senate for being evil. He was indicting them for being cheap. He walked into the mightiest republic in the Mediterranean, expecting resistance. He found a clearance sale.<br>There is a line. Cross it, and the arithmetic flips. The people gaming the system start to outnumber the people holding it up. Every honest person left standing starts to feel like a sucker. Then that person stops being honest, which moves the line again. Then the next person adjusts. Then the next.<br>A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.<br>That is the asshole threshold.<br>Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?<br>A coalition of nobodies dragged it back. How they did it is the most important story nobody tells. Because we are standing at the line again — and this time we can measure it.<br>The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
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The Oldest Complaint in Western Literature
Around 700 BCE, a Greek farmer named Hesiod sat down and wrote one of the first burn books of Western literature.<br>It was a complaint about assholes.<br>Works and Days is technically a farming manual. It is actually 800 lines of Hesiod telling his brother Perses to stop bribing judges. Perses had sued Hesiod for a bigger share of their...