“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken famously wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” But America today is neither a democracy — at least in the most authentic sense of...
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“Democracy,” H.L. Mencken famously wrote, “is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” But America today is neither a democracy — at least in the most authentic sense of the term — nor a republic. The people rarely get what they want, in the limited moments when they are able to make up their minds about what they want at all. Nor would they be virtuous or self-governing enough to keep a republic, if that’s what our political system was, which it most certainly isn’t. (And hasn’t been for some time.)
Ennervated, humiliated, and alone, the bureaucratic state slouches towards November, no longer sure of who they are or what they stand for.
America today is an advanced-stage managerial regime with democratic characteristics, and a handful of anachronistic counter-majoritarian republican institutions (i.e., the Electoral College and the Senate) that have managed to survive the various political revolutions of the twentieth century, but have been drained of almost all of their original purpose and function. It is presided over by a ruling class of bureaucrats whose names we will never know, whose positions will never be put up for a vote, and whose decisions are utterly insulated from democratic accountability. It is for this reason, as Jonathan Turley wrote in the Washington Post in 2021, that “the fourth branch” — i.e., the administrative state — “now has a larger practical impact on the lives of citizens than all the other branches combined.” Turley continued:
The rise of the fourth branch has been at the expense of Congress’s lawmaking authority. In fact, the vast majority of “laws” governing the United States are not passed by Congress but are issued as regulations, crafted largely by thousands of unnamed, unreachable bureaucrats. One study found that in 2007, Congress enacted 138 public laws, while federal agencies finalized 2,926 rules, including 61 major regulations.
It would not do, then, to say that Joe Biden is giving Americans what they want, good and hard. What many Americans “want” is simply what is dictated to them by mass media, mass education, and mass culture, and even if they were capable of authentically independent demands, President Biden — whose mental condition, as we saw in last week’s debate, is roughly equivalent to that of a medical cadaver — would be unable to meet them. (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Anarcho-Tyranny Is Official White House Policy)
What Biden does represent, in very stark terms, is the regime of interlocking bureaucracies that made him president in the first place, and whose interests he has served to the exclusion of almost anybody else’s since he first came into office. America’s real political system today is governed by and for the journalists, cultural tastemakers, big-money donors, foundations and NGOs, think-tank experts and academics, Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives, and the vast array of bureaucracies (and bureaucrats) that run between and through all of their institutions. For them, and only for them, democracy does exist. (More often than not, the transfer of power — from Republicans to Democrats, from Democrats back to Republicans — is the result of competitions between various factions within this elite.) And with President Biden, they are getting what they want, good and hard.
In an even more basic and fundamental sense, however, Biden is not just what the ruling class wants. (If the hysterical panic from left-wing pundits and activists in the wake of last week’s debate is any indication, he may not even be what they want anymore — though at this stage in the race, they have very little choice in the matter.) He is an embodiment of who and what they are. This is all the more true today, in Biden’s advanced and decaying state, than it may have been a decade or two ago. As America 2100 put it, “Joe Biden is running on a story that nobody believes anymore, repeating slogans that no longer mean anything, at the behest of institutions that have lost all legitimacy. You could not find a more perfect embodiment of America’s ruling class.”
The president represents an attempt — on behalf of forces beyond both his control and his understanding — to summon the last fumes of a world that is already dead in service of an imagined (and imaginary) world that is yet to be born. His carefully-curated (and almost entirely fictitious) public persona is a direct appeal to voters’ nostalgia for a political archetype from the old America — a working-class, blue-collar Democrat, speaking for the concerns of everyday people; a wise and decent elder statesman, steering the ship of state with a steady hand — but the purpose of that appeal is to shore up electoral support for the political, social, and cultural transformation that brought about the end of that nation in the first place.
What Biden’s declining poll numbers and vegetative mental condition demonstrate is that the aforementioned transformation has not only lost the confidence of the American people; it has lost confidence in itself. It has failed to deliver on its signature promises of a more just, fair and prosperous world for all, and it can no longer even perform the bare minimum task of shoring up the support of its core constituencies, as is attested to by the increasingly desperate bribery schemes designed to redistribute wealth and resources from America’s productive middle class to young college-educated elites, racial minorities, and single women.
It has lost whatever claims to legitimacy it may have once had — a fact that its leaders are vividly aware of, and haven’t the foggiest idea of what to do about. (READ MORE: Trump Shouldn’t Cozy Up To Wall Street)
Biden may not resemble the younger, more diverse, and more cunning members of his shadow cabinet that have been running his presidency for the past three and a half years, but in a more fundamental sense, he is the personification of the broader social forces they represent. Ennervated, humiliated, and alone, the bureaucratic state slouches towards November, no longer sure of who they are or what they stand for, disenchanted by the mantras and formulas they used to believe in, filled with anger and resentment for a nation that has not become the utopia they once foresaw.
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