He was pissed off at France after his stint in Europe and thought the Cult of Reason was fake as hell. He wasn’t talking about a dictatorship but rather subversion of religion and using fancy words to enrich a political class. He thought trade and commerce was a better approach to getting rich.

I take it to mean immoral people can make mincemeat out of the best government.

Yes, unless there are safeguards and Constitution that keep "immoral" people out of the government. But I agree something like that was probably what Adams was trying to say.

As an example in recent news Super Court justices have been accused of taking bribes. It is no surprise because there is now ethical rules the right-wing majority of the Supreme Court says it would have to follow, by law. I'm not sure if that is true but surely there could be such a law.

So we need laws, and we need better laws, which means laws that have fewer loopholes, and which apply to all, even Supreme Court justices and Presidents. Are we there yet? Not yet.

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...

Adams assumed that a widespread immoral conduct can make life miserable for everyone and predicted that in such scenario a weakly governed country is more vulnerable than a strictly governed one.

> Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by [...] morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or [amorous] galantry, would break the strongest cords of our constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102

spitballing: laws exist to take care of outliers, they cannot regulate a society of people who are, on average, looking to exploit each other for personal gain.

The reason outliers are outliers is because of laws. Laws have an effect on people's behavior, no?