The Empire Strikes Out
Today’s inept and malevolent American oligarchy is the inevitable destination of mass democracy.
The contrast between the two presumptive major party presidential candidates could hardly be greater than it is now: a bloodied fighter standing tall with his fist in the air, implicitly declaring victory and calling for his soldiers to fight for their country, versus a doddering, longtime political hack who refuses to take responsibility for his own and his supporters’ unbelievably reckless rhetoric and barrage of falsehoods that set the stage for an assassination attempt against a former president.
There is more to the story than two personalities, however. These two men characterize the two contrasting visions for America which are being fought over today.
As has become the consensus talking point among the commentariat, President Joe Biden’s debate performance last month was something of a revelation for the nation’s public. It became obvious that the president is not in charge, and consequently that who really is making the decisions for this nation is entirely unknown.
Biden’s performance in a subsequent highly scripted softball press conference did nothing to change the situation. It was largely the Biden we have seen regularly during the past couple of years: a diminished mental capacity (which never was very high in his case), bizarre outbursts and weirdly obvious (and therefore ineffective) attempts at emotional manipulation (such as the whispering and shouting), extremely politicized and reality-denying opinions on all subjects, a diabolical hatred of his political opponents (even to the extent of pridefully alluding to his grotesque, fascism-emulating 2022 speech outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia), gaffes even more amazing than is usual for him (Vice President Trump, Ukraine President Putin), demonization of anyone who disagrees with him, sentences trailing off into oblivion followed by a blithe “Anyway … ,” and the like.
All of this was abetted by a White House press corps so servile as to make performing seals look rebellious by comparison.
This, we are expected to believe, is a person fit to be president of the United States.
I used the passive voice in the sentence immediately above, with purpose. People outside the president’s immediate circle do not know who is running things. The public is apparently not to be trusted with that information.
I have made no secret of my belief that Biden and the government he ostensibly leads have been incompetent (such as here, here, and here, where I use that exact word). The important knowledge to derive from this turn of events is that the trouble is not with a particular candidate but with our political system as it currently stands.
American politics has deteriorated into an oligarchical managerial regime in which an embedded and lavishly compensated political class holds (but does not dare to assert) formal control over a massive, entrenched bureaucracy that micromanages the nation through a complicated scheme of lengthy, elaborate, and unfathomable laws and regulations developed in concert with gigantic multinational business interests whose government-relations teams fashion those laws and regulations to their stockholders’ and managers’ advantage.
In this environment, no one is safe from government harassment and eventual destruction—including the nation’s notional commander in chief, as President Donald Trump found out to his dismay. Rule of law has become rule of lawyers, and those with the cleverest and most unscrupulous schemers on their legal teams win.
Trump was wrong to call this the “deep state.” It is the state, pure and simple. There will always be elites, in any social system, and they will generally grab as much power as they can. Armed with modern managerial tools, extremely sophisticated public-relations propaganda techniques, and an enormous military built on the pretext of multiple fearsome foreign adversaries, a small group of elites wields a lever big enough to move the Earth. And move it, it does.
Today’s American oligarchy is the inevitable destination of mass democracy.
Although the real authority of elected officials has been eroded to next to nothing, their formal authority is essential to the system’s credibility, its (absurd) claim to represent the will of the people.
That is what “Our Democracy” really is: a fig leaf for a destructive oligarchy entirely without meritocratic norms and run increasingly as a hereditary kleptocracy. Biden let that fig leaf fall to the ground and is now being kicked repeatedly as he fumbles around looking for it. As Fred Watson Jr. put it at The American Sun,
Our president sits atop a system. That system makes decisions and very few get to the president’s desk. Despite that, you still want someone who can think or just draw a clock to sit atop the system. The frightening thing for normal citizens is that yes, a dementia patient has the nuclear codes. They swim in propaganda and can buy the line he was okay. Seeing something on the tv screen makes it real for them, so this was a shock. If he cannot run for president, he should not be president. The greater problem is that it reveals that yes, Virginia, we do live under a managerial system. No one knows who is in charge, but a system is in charge. This lays it bare for them if they want to see it.
That is the great political crime for which Joe Biden faces ejection from “power”: he exposed the fundamental fakeness of the U.S. government. This exposure was inadvertent on Biden’s part, as he is clearly not capable of controlling himself, but it was nonetheless an unforgivable lapse on his part.
Now Biden’s party must choose whether to rally behind him or replace him. This is where “the, the, the thing—you know, the thing” was always heading. It is a result of the Democrats’ bad luck—and spectacularly bad judgment—that the bandwagon arrived at the fork in the road well after Biden secured the president nomination.
To reaffirm support for Biden would be an attempt to continue to play the game as the party has been doing. It is possible that it would work, yet it seems decidedly unlikely. Biden is now so obviously past it that keeping him on the Democrat ticket would be an open declaration that the United States is ruled by a shadowy oligarchy, the motives of which seem to be dubious at best and in fact almost certainly sinister and grossly destructive. That is precisely what the party wants to avoid.
Jettisoning Biden in favor of any candidate other than the sitting vice president would jeopardize the party’s immense campaign war chest and infuriate the Democrats’ increasingly restive leftist base while intensifying the political visibility of the latter’s antisemitism. This, too, would tend to bring out the fact that the party stands for an oligarchy not apparently answerable to the people in any way.
Replacing Biden with Harris seems the safest course. With little evident intellectual ability or even a normal human curiosity about how things work, plus no sign of strong moral principles, Harris would be exceedingly unlikely to try to use the formal authority of the presidency to challenge the real powers behind the fake government. Moreover, it appears that the current election laws would allow Harris to inherit the Biden campaign’s money.
Choosing Harris as candidate for president would surely anger the “Squad” and Bernie Sanders’s army of democratic socialists. It is possible, however, that these factions could be bought off with a vice president candidacy plus a promise to pack the cCabinet, courts, and bureaucracy with others of their ilk—and of course money. It worked when they tried it with Biden.
A Harris plus democrat socialist ticket could restore some credibility to the party, indicating that its leaders listen to their constituency and respond accordingly. That is hooey, of course, but some people love nonsense. In addition, it would be an obvious decision to concede the November elections. However, there is no guarantee that the party’s real masters would ever let Trump take office again, so it might not matter much anyway.
The real goal for the Democrat Party must be to restore the fig leaf and keep up the lie. To do otherwise means bringing on a war with the American people by refusing to accept the election results, one way or another. As Watson writes,
Win or lose, the Democrats face many issues. They are the proverbial bosses who run our show. No one believes it is a republic or a democracy now. The President Biden lie destroys that. The selected candidates doing nothing in office further prove that it is an unaccountable system. The Democrats are creeping towards a point where Biden’s decay forces them to finally admit that we live in a managed democracy and shut up, you get what we serve. This tip toes closer to an openly commie authoritarian regime. Those last when you don’t know who makes decisions and there is no class of individuals to target for removal. It becomes more precarious and requires much more force to maintain when everyone knows who is making their life miserable for no other reason than a suicidal ideology.
Obviously, nobody wants to go there unless there is no other course.
In Britain, thoughts seem to be turning in that direction, as the British independent political commentator Morgoth wrote gloomily at his Morgoth’s Review Substack page on the first day of the new Labour party government in the U.K.:
[I]t appalls me that the democratic system allows people to sabotage a great country and face no consequences beyond being “voted-out”. British people are routinely raped and murdered by foreigners allowed in by politicians, and all we can hope for is to get them out of office. Accountability is supposed to take place at the ballot box; that’s where you’re allowed a little cathartic dopamine, a piss-poor substitute for a trial and gallows, but there we have it. Ephemeral catharsis for a superficial, childish system of governance. Oh, the rapes and murders are real, and the casual anti-white hatred on the streets is real, but any repercussions are wrapped up in soft padding like an infant’s playpen.
And so, as the scum of the Tory Party flies off to their new jobs within the NGO and Public Private Partnership networks, we’re staring down the barrel of ten years of hard Labour.
Is open conflict in the United States still as inconceivable as we have always taken it to be? It seems to me that the bullets directed at former president Trump were less than a half-inch from bringing that on. I think of the founding of our nation and must acknowledge that the people who did that would have risen up in arms against our current regime long before the sham Biden presidency reached this stage of decrepitude and desperation and bullets started flying toward a presidential candidate and his supporters.
Are we no longer Americans, or has the reigning oligarchy underestimated its chosen foe?