No. It relies on having a system that isn't inherently open to partisan distortion - gerrymandering, voter suppression, manipulation etc. Actually, I can't believe that you ... & especially Danoff, are advancing such a cynical & pessimistic viewpoint. OK, people may act in bad faith sometimes, but you try & build a system that is not structurally open to corruption. This does not seem to be in place in the US ... at least not in some states. The rules themselves are not fair & impartial, so taking advantage of the rules doesn't even really involve "immorality", just gaming the system. It's like Trump & his taxes.
Just because something is cynical and pessimistic doesn't make it false. I agree completely with your characterisation of my opinion, but I don't see why that makes it unbelievable. Or wrong.
Let's get a definition out of the way early so that we're all talking about the same thing. "Corruption" in this case is intentionally disregarding the rules of government. It's not people who are technically following the rules but using them in really abusive ways.
And that's kind of the problem. It is logically impossible to build a system of government that
must be followed by people who intentionally disregard or break the systems of government. You can't defeat rule breakers by adding more rules. And if nobody follows the rules, it doesn't matter at all what the rules are. That's why coups and civil wars are scary; people are explicitly not following the rules any more.
You
can build a system that is structurally more robust against
limited amounts of corruption but that just makes it harder, not impossible. This is why dictatorships have such a poor reputation - all it takes is that one guy to be corrupt and the whole system is basically broken. Modern governments tend to have larger groups of people, part of the intention being that any one bad actor can't really accomplish that much. To break a modern democracy you need to have a significant portion of the politicians all working to undermine the established systems, and that's harder.
So we can have a hierarchy of systems where some are more susceptible to corruption than others, but ultimately all will be defeated if enough of the participants are corrupt. If enough people will act with you, you can undermine any set of rules you care to name.
Now, there are
also obviously problems that even people who are following the rules of government are able to do things that are pretty clearly destructive to the citizenry and the country. See, police brutality as an easy example. They're following the rules, and it's awful. But as you say, that's just part of the game. Those things in theory should be able to be fixed by changing the rules to disallow that behaviour and enforcing those rules appropriately. And that works because you have people who are being abusive, but they're still playing within the rules.
Related to this, I think the US also has a bit of a problem with tradition. Tradition is great, and one should always be careful of changing things just because. But I refuse to believe that in the last 50 years the only thing that was worth amending in the US Constitution was how salary changes for members of Congress were handled. People can see that the rules need to be changed to meet modern circumstances, but it isn't happening.
And this is where you potentially run into the problem that if the system is poorly structured enough you can get to a state where it's unable to self-correct without violence and destruction. A good governmental system should be able to change and adapt as appropriate to meet the needs of it's citizens and the changes as the society grows, because only a great fool thinks that there's some perfect system that will work for everyone, all the time, anywhere.
But this is where it rolls back around to where we started. Even if a government adapts and changes to remove all abusable rules, the gerrymandering, voter suppression, etc. that you mentioned earlier, and comes to be a system that is consistent and righteous and serves the people well, that can still be broken by someone or some group of people in power simply refusing to play along.
