Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about my annual trip to the doctor, a post about the Biden crisis that is vexing our beautiful people and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Ross Douthat wrote a column where he contemplated the reality of the modern president, which probably serves no real purpose to the functioning of the managerial state. He makes some obvious points but then quotes Curtis Yarvin and his brain falls out of his head. The rest of his column is nonsense. This is the risk of reading Curtis Yarvin. Your brain cells begin to die at an alarming rate, mostly as an act of suicide in order to avoid reading Yarvin.

It is interesting how all of a sudden, the kept men of what we call conservatism use Yarvin when they want to sound edgy. There was no need to name drop Yarvin in this post, but Douthat wants his readers to know that every once in a while, he puts on the leather jacket and rides his Vespa without a helmet. Back when Yarvin was Moldbug and had an audience, so-called conservatives had no idea he existed, but now all of a sudden, they are all big fans.

Putting that aside, Douthat raises two valid points with regards to whether the job of president matters. One is the system found a way to work around Trump, thwarting his reform efforts and inserting their shenanigans into his program. With Biden, it is clear that he has been incapable of doing much of anything since the 2020 election, yet the machine has trundled along regardless. That is eight years where the machine of state has operated in spite of the president and without a president.

There is nothing novel about this. America has been a corporate state for a long time and corporate systems are designed to operate leaderless. Large companies often go extended periods with no one in the big chair. Maybe they have a caretaker or maybe it is a committee doing the basics, but the system rolls along until a new CEO is found to sit in the big chair. Often, the process of hiring the CEO is about finding someone who will not change anything important.

If you think back to the end of the Cold War, both parties were set up to prevent an undesirable candidate from winning the nomination. The stakes were too high to risk having a madman with the nuclear codes! Since the Cold War, both parties have tried to select for neo-liberal dullards like Bush and Obama. Look past the superficial and there was not much of a difference between Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Nothing of consequence changed with each “new” president.

That is the main reason the system freaked out over Trump. It was not just that he comes from outside the managerial class, but that he wanted to use the power of the presidency to do things. The people who actually run things were scandalized by the suggestion that an outsider could take the job and make the machine do things they did not want it to do. In other words, the managerial state has been running itself for a long time now and it is what is viewed as normal.

In this context, the twentieth century takes on a new look. The managerial system that emerged with FDR was born in the crisis of war and economic collapse, but it emerged from those times as the moral default. This base assumption that everything could be managed outside of the electoral process slowly gave way to a view that everything must be managed outside of politics. This led to the second phase of managerialism, which is consolidation.

You can probably date that to Watergate. The last president with real power who actually used it was Nixon. He was run out of town, in part, because of the “imperial presidency” claims by the managerial class. As someone noted in the comments behind the green door, this was also when they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. This handed power to the agencies, rather than the president, with regards to administering spending.

It was also in this time when the media lost its working class character because it was fully professionalized. In the 1960’s the typical Washington reporter was a high school grad, but by the end of the 1970’s they were not just college graduates, but graduates from elite colleges like Columbia. With professionalization came credentialization across the managerial system. What we think of as politics now operates within the corporate structure of the managerial state.

In theory, Congress controls the purse strings, but no one in Congress reads the bills that get voted out of Congress. These are written by staff that work with the agencies and the special interests linked to the agencies. Most of the rules that impact the citizens are crafted in the agencies, away from public view. Thus, we have arrived at a system that not only has no need for a president, but it can run fine without a House or a Senate. All of them could be replaced with code.

Note also that few House or Senate seats are competitive now. About ten percent of seats can go either way in an election. The most common way to lose you spot in Congress is quitting for a lobbying job. Death is the next most common exit. The third way to lose your place is to anger the system. Then you get a well-financed primary opponent and banishment from Washington. It is another reason the system seems to be on autopilot, immune from the voters.

This brings us back to the main question. Not only can the system operate without a president, but it also operates without a Congress. The theater of democracy is not just a pithy expression but the literal definition of our politics. It is just a show that provides a fig leaf for the managerial class. It is not unique to America. It is true of all democratic systems, because in the end, no society can last with the people having a final say on things, so every society has a ruling class.

The solution to this conflict between the ethos of democracy and the reality of human organization is the managerial state. Through this the economic elites run society, but the curtain behind which they stand is the theater of democracy. As America declines, the willingness and ability to maintain this illusion declines with it, thus we go from the theater of democracy to the farce of democracy. The penultimate stop in this process is the theater of the absurd we see emerging with Biden.

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