In his recent Washington Post column, Fareed Zakaria listed a host of self-dealing activities that President Trump, his family members and other close associates have engaged in since his return to the White House. Zakaria says that in his second term, Mr. Trump has exhibited “a relentless discipline devoted to monetizing the presidency.”

Zakaria asks how all that is possible in America, and why it has elicited such little resistance. He acknowledges that subtle forms of graft such as campaign donations and awarding of consulting contracts have always been present in advanced democracies. But he says, “Trump has taken the elaborate machinery of an advanced industrial state and used it to accelerate something far cruder: old-fashioned personal grift.”

Like Zakaria, I grew up in the developing world where official corruption tends to be rampant. In that universe, there are few checks against such abuses by people in power. America, in contrast, has institutional constraints that are supposed to limit the corrosive effects of sleaze. Those restraints have become ineffective lately.

Zakaria says the abject failure of Congress to fulfill its oversight responsibilities exposes a hidden flaw in the American system. He thinks the constitutional framework the Founding Fathers built is magnificent but says, “it rested on an assumption they did not spell out: that public officials would retain some shared commitment to unwritten civic norms.” Zakaria’s recommendation: “After Trump, the urgent task for the American republic will be to turn norms into statutes, curtail the ethical immunities of the presidency and find legal ways to ensure that the highest public office in the world can never again become a platform for family business.”

It is practically impossible to turn norms into statutes. The original handwritten U.S. Constitution is just four pages long. The 27 amendments that were later ratified substantially expanded the document, but that still left a lot of unwritten rules—social, political and cultural norms—that we are all supposed to recognize and live by.

After he stepped out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in September 1787, a woman reportedly asked Benjamin Franklin what system of government the Framers had designed. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” The response signaled a concern.

In most monarchies, kings and queens make the rules and hand them down for their subjects to follow. In a constitutional republic such as America, all citizens, regardless of social or economic standing, participate in the rule-making process. The involvement may be indirect for the majority of the population, but average citizens still retain a significant say in how they are governed.

There is only so much that can be documented in any constitution or legal code. In the commercial arena, the legal profession often attempts to cover all bases. It does so by employing thousands of arcane words that are written in minute font. We all know how that turns out. When we are asked to consent to such “agreements,” we simply check boxes and move on because no one is able to read the contents. Even after all that, lawyers frequently go to court to argue over things that are missed.

We should be careful not to end up like India. There, as The Economist says, everything is against the law. When people are inundated by oceans of written rules, the risk is they become so jaded that they don’t bother obeying anything anymore. For that reason, most societies rely largely on unwritten codes and general adherence to social, cultural and political norms.

Simply having laws on the books is never enough. The presence of a strong culture of respect for norms—and laws—is far more important. Codifying norms into statutes, as Zakaria recommends, is unlikely to materially change our political landscape from its current state.

Benjamin Franklin probably foresaw a future America in which extreme political partisanship and culture wars made it impossible for society to agree on what constitutes right and wrong. That, unfortunately, is where we are today. Our best bet is to return to the old days when respect for norms was the default expectation.