State of the Union: She was but a face of the unaccountable swarm. The swarm remains in power.
The post Director Cheatle’s Resignation Does Not Change the Rot appeared first on The American Conservative.
If you want to know who rules over you, all you have to see is a congressional hearing. The now former U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle is the perfect face for the unaccountable swarm government—smug, stern, contemptuous, vacant, and incompetent. If anything, it showed how impotent the Congress is. This woman should have been fired, and worse, in custody by now for dereliction of duty or negligence, or even worse, conspiracy.
Instead she resigned, after stonewalling the Congress for over a day and refusing to provide any information or accountability, and after threats from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) over perjury. That is a kay-fabe. The rot remains, just as the swarm will now select another head from the Hydra to be its face. The system will be perpetuated as designed, under the panoptic and mythical umbrella of democracy.
A lot of commentators commented on the lack of honor in Cheatle, or in any other bureaucrat, including Anthony Fauci or Alejandro Mayorkas. True. Japanese officials during the Second World War committed seppuku for far less than the security lapse that allowed a would-be assassin to take a shot at the former President Donald Trump. We don’t live in those days where honor meant something in a public servant. But this is not about honor. This is much more than that.
Michael Anton once said in a lecture about the “national security state” that the most difficult question in front of the political scientists today is to answer what type of government we live under, and where the accountability lies. The design of a massive bureaucracy is to ensure there is no hierarchy and no single point of responsibility and accountability. Swarm government is unaccountable by design.
Early parts of the 20th century showed how messy public opinion is and how destructive democratic passions might be. A consistent effort since the Second World War has been to erode the power of the demos and bypass the volatility of it all. But on the other hand, we don’t live in the age of empires, either. The result is this syncretic form of government, where democracy is tweaking the corners, when the real power remains out of sight. The phrase “deep state” doesn’t encompass it, as that would mean that there is a cabal of people who sit in dark rooms deciding the destiny of the masses.
The Russians and the Turks have a genuine “deep state.” This is worse than that. Expansion of the midwit bureaucracy has led to essentially a directionless autopilot. A swarm. Vibe politics at its peak. There are people who get credentialed in colleges, come join the Borg, and continue to exist, grow and maintain sinecures. That is it. One random failure of a director resigning does not change any of this dynamic. They cannot speak in normal languages; just watch the hearing again. All replies are in managerial bureaucratese. Again, that is by design—to obfuscate and evade.
The most important sentence of the entire show was from Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who said, “This whole thing is a waste of time.” It is. That doesn’t mean the damage is irreversible. But under the current set-up, such a hearing is another circus attraction, without any real power. To reverse this rot, the entire security architecture of this country needs to be reformed, and new institutions need to be created with a linear hierarchy and business-like pyramid model. DEI, quotas, and other affirmative action agendas need to be torched. Agencies must be streamlined towards pure meritocracy and nothing else.
But one isn’t sure the people in Congress, despite their sudden fear of security lapses, actually wants to take back that much power of governing away from the hands of those to whom they themselves have delegated power for over half a century.
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