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Why, besides academic curiosity? After all, how much does "whether there is anything in her head" even matter? It's not like the President is actually in charge of anything, or serves any important purposes. (Sure, the rules on paper say POTUS matters, but those don't matter, and the rules as actually played in DC are completely different.)
I continue to maintain that this is all irrelevant, because democracy is fake, election outcomes don't really matter, power is all in the hands of permanent, unelected apparatchiks in various powerful institutions, and we're all powerless to do anything about it. "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." Call them "elites," call them "the swamp," call them the "deep state", call them whatever — all that matters is they are the strong, who will do whatever they want, and the rest of us are the weak, who can only suffer.
Isn't it a national humiliation to have a president who can't string a sentence together unscripted? All these people just saying 'oh yeah the country basically doesn't have a leader, this is fine actually' seem bizarre to me.
The whole point of having a leader is that this is the person who makes the calls, the final arbitrator, the one who decides on exceptions, makes quick decisions. A blob can't decide things coherently, a deep state can't plan anything out. Suppose the Pentagon wants to dump Zelensky and the Department of State wants to prop him up - who resolves this? Do they just go and do their own thing? The Department of Energy and big tech want more nuclear plants, the green faction wants more solar - what happens? Does the US buy solar panels from China or not? These questions need to be unambiguously decided by somebody, not left to a bunch of fractious court eunuchs.
The horse needs a rider, the newspaper needs an editor, the ship needs a captain. Throwing your hands up and saying 'oh well it's a clownshow anyway' misses the point that the clownshow is going to get a lot more chaotic if the ringmaster is unable to grapple with the job and delegates it to... who? The Smoking Man? The chaotic, aimless situation under Biden will keep entrenching and metastatizing as the govt runs away with itself.
And what I keep seeing people argue, in various contexts, is that for many people, you can't give a human being — any human being — this sort of power, not because they can abuse it to do evil things, but because they will abuse it to do evil things. Any authority not carefully laundered through procedures, algorithms, consensus-building, and all the rest of Weberian bureaucratization is, in this view, automatically tyrannical. (Hence why many in this set seem to hold machine rule by AI as their ideal government.)
Looking at the many past conflicts between "the red empire of the bases" and "the blue empire of the consulates" — as the dreaded Jim calls it — nobody resolves it, and, yes, they each do their thing. (Usually, the State Department ends up winning. Because for the Pentagon, the outgroup is whatever enemy we're fighting; while for the folks at the State Department, those guys are the fargroup, and the outgroup is the Pentagon.)
Lawfare, bureaucratic infighting, gridlock.
Yes, it will. It's only going to keep getting worse; that's the nature of government under Weberian rationalization.
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