So this brings to mind one of the truly weird things that happened to me during the Trump era. The FBI, which was always one of the great villains in my personal cosmology, started to take on instead this kind of honored role.
So after COINTELPRO, Fred Hampton, Waco, Ruby Ridge, all the big-ticket stories of the federal government's law enforcement arm doing terrible things, I suddenly got to hear from people like James Comey who seemed genuinely interested in law and justice and wanted to work hard for those things, independent of any personal ends or personal loyalties.
Loyalty to a noble concept builds structures of government that are lasting, and draw genuine support from the people involved in them. Loyalty to a person or a personal interest builds structures of government that are more like a big mafia. I think every structure in the real world is going to have elements of both, but the Russian system seems doomed to fail in the long run because of which side it mostly represents, and the last few years in American history have shown me a lot more nobility in the American government than what I thought I would see it represent.