Western analysts use the word corruption to describe these systems, but this can be misleading: here corruption does not describe bureaucrats soliciting bribes for small acts of civil service (though this happens too); it describes the people in charge using the instruments of government in order to amass wealth, but also using their wealth to perpetuate power. This corruption is integral to the system. The system cannot exist without corruption because corruption is its fuel, its social glue, and its instrument of control. Anyone who enters the system becomes complicit in the corruption, which means everyone is always in some way or another outside the law—and therefore punishable.
Gessen, Masha. Surviving Autocracy (p. 47). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Gessen points out that the money to be obtained in politics isn’t exactly corruption because it is a natural, necessary fuel for the old so-called "democratic processes.” It takes huge amounts of money to campaign for Federal and State offices and that money comes from corporate donors and oligarchs who want their politicians elected who will do their bidding.
So it is a system of pay to play. 47 is right when he says the system is rigged. It is rotten to its core. How can this toxic practice be changed if we are to improve our democratic processes if we ever get beyond the current American autocracy?
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