The New Yorker said the crisis facing Max Miller is a test. "The Republican congressman's bitter domestic dispute — in which he's accused of physical abuse by his ex-wife, the daughter of an Ohio senator — is testing his party's willingness to defend the indefensible."

If that is the test, Miller has passed it. His party is clearly willing to stand by him. The president has his back, as does the Republican conference in the United States House of Representatives. Few seem bothered by the appearance of Max Miller being a wife beater, child abuser and serial philanderer. Miller, a former Trump White House aide who served as deputy assistant to the president for legislative affairs before running for Congress, is in many ways a product of Trump's political orbit — which helps explain the depth of that loyalty.

Party support, however, is no guarantee of success. Miller's district near Cleveland is competitive, and Republican strategists told the AP they fear his advantage has "vanished." Bernie Moreno, the Ohio senator involved in the case, said Miller has no place in Congress. Miller's Democratic opponent interpreted Moreno's comments as reflecting the entire GOP. "His own party won't stand behind him," said Brian Poindexter, a union ironworker. "His own family has said he's not fit to serve." Poindexter also accused Miller of "moral bankruptcy."

Moreno is the exception, but only because he is the victims' father and grandfather. Otherwise, Trump is behind Miller, which means the party is too. The president appears to view Miller as the real victim. "I hope he's able to work it out," he said. "I feel badly for him." Even if Trump were to tell Miller to step aside under outside pressure, Miller knows that warning would not be serious. "There's no chance that I'm removing myself from this race," Miller told Newsmax on Tuesday. (Update: Alabama Senator Katie Hill said Miller should resign. "I stand with Bernie," she said.)

Some critics argue that Max Miller is trapped inside the bubble of right-wing propaganda and does not understand the trouble he faces in a backlash election year. That may be true. But Miller's impunity is better explained by a broader reality: elites across America have acted with impunity for two decades, and that impunity has gone mainstream as millions of Americans have lost faith and now cynically — and hopelessly — chase the "advantages" they believe elites are using against them.

An enduring solution to this culture of impunity cannot be failure on Election Day, because democracy should never be set in direct conflict with the rule of law, and because no one can assume the Democratic Party will win every election forever. As much as Democratic candidates may suggest that a $5 donation can keep Republicans away from power indefinitely, that is not the case. America does not need a dominant Democratic Party.

What America needs is law and order, starting with elites.

Philip Bump traced the source of the problem back to the recession that began nearly 20 years ago. "Perhaps the clearest point of origin for the idea that a certain amount of wealth could shield you from facing repercussions for your actions was the recession that began nearly 20 years ago," said the Hearst Connecticut Media columnist. "Banks that made historically terrible, economy-crushing bets had the dirt brushed off their knees and were gently put back on their feet by the federal government." The Troubled Asset Relief Program, signed into law in October 2008, authorized $700 billion to stabilize the financial system — a rescue that, whatever its economic justification, cemented the perception that Wall Street bore no real consequences for the wreckage it caused.

From there, the federal government largely stopped policing elites. And because elites were no longer policed, their fortunes boomed. "In 2015, Elon Musk was worth about $12 billion," Bump said. "Today, he's worth about 60 times that. His net worth has jumped $100 billion this year alone. By the time Trump was running for office again in 2024, Musk could take a small fraction of his net worth (a sum totaling hundreds of millions of dollars) and dedicate it to trying to get his friend elected."

There are two implications from that cause and effect. One is that "behind every great fortune is a great crime," as Mario Puzo put it in The Godfather. The other is that such fortunes gave elites god-like power to avoid consequences that would doom ordinary people. Donald Trump is the most visible example.

But Trump is the symptom, not the disease. Elite impunity existed before him and will outlast him, especially because mainstream impunity has become so deeply embedded over the last two decades. As a result, more Americans believe neither party serves their needs, that government exists for the benefit of the few rather than everyone, and that outsider candidates promising to smash the status quo deserve support. Gallup polling has tracked a steady erosion of public trust in government over the same period, with confidence in Congress, the presidency, and the judiciary falling to or near historic lows.

The AP reported today that a federal judge "reluctantly dismissed the seditious conspiracy case" against the Oath Keepers over their role in Donald Trump's insurrection, saying the Justice Department asked him "to absolve these Defendants of crimes against the United States." The dismissal came after group members including founder Stewart Rhodes had already been convicted at trial — Rhodes was sentenced to 18 years in prison — making the reversal all the more striking. No social order can endure when the people at the top and the bottom get away with murder, because eventually everyone else begins to believe murder is an option, too.

After the 2008 financial panic, Barack Obama chose to overlook elite impunity in order to pursue his agenda. The next Democratic president must understand that impunity is the agenda. What the country needs is law and order, beginning with elites and moving downward — breaking up monopolies, confiscating ill-gotten gains and aggressively prosecuting white-collar crime.

If the next Democratic president does not grasp that truth, stories like The New Yorker's will continue to appear, with men like Max Miller — wife beater, child abuser, philanderer, and criminal in spirit if not in a court of law — facing test after test and never suffering the consequences of failure, because for men like them, there is no such thing as failure.