Political Power is terrifying, as we all know. She's already committed to 100% sales tax as one of the planks of her platform, in an episode of the Chainsaw Man anime series. Sales taxes are extremely regressive, hurting chiefly those with little money and who therefore spend a large proportion of their income on buying products for their own survival, like soap and bath towels. Hence we can conclude that Power's politics are, at the very least, "right-wing".
The distinction between leftist politics and rightist politics really isn't that complicated. It's absurdly easy to tell who's right-wing from a brief sample of their talk, which is bound to be full of praises for some form of authority or other—Trump, Musk, Vance, soldiers, cops. Almost openly do they flirt with pure authoritarianism, but they're wholly committed and invested in their "Greatest American Patriot" act. They've puffed out ungodly volumes of doublethink to cover their tracks.
It's practically impossible to discuss politics now, because every single political word and term has been assigned multiple conflicting, doublethinkful meanings. The jargon and specialized knowledge of politics are mere playthings for pundits who only care about what's marketable, and if you call them out on that they laugh. "ROFL imagine someone who thinks 'left' and 'right' mean anything! 🤡"
Thanks to this process, power—in the political sense—has become very muddled, deliberately mystified for obvious reasons. If you keep the secret to power mysterious it can exploited into perpetuity, because you can always sell tips and hints about the big secret. I'm curiously reminded of the never-seen "Wish Granter" in Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, which is a film about desperation and other states of existence that stem from living with a disaster. If power is always remote and high off and far away, it's easier to teach people not to think about it. "Get used to not having any power," is the overall message of U.S. society to its underclass.
Clearly, however, political power can be straightforwardly estimated in physical terms. We know, for example, that a mayor is more powerful than a private citizen because the mayor can cause things to happen—physical things, like putting up buildings or moving people around from one place to another—by issuing orders. A private citizen can't do that, not that I'm aware of (but software exists to create the illusion of it.) A prime minister or President or CEO, similarly, is a person with greater power to move things around, to cause building and destruction to happen, on their command. The more such activity they're capable of rousing up on their behalf, the more powerful they are. Simple, right?
Reasoning by way of this simplistic estimation of political power, considering who's actually around and active in U.S. politics whether or not they're visible, I think it's reasonable to guess that the most powerful person in the United States can't possibly be anyone we see. I don't think any reasonable human being believes that Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin or King Charles III or UN delegates are, somehow, the most powerful people in the world. In our various ways, honest and dishonest, we acknowledge that our visible leaders are being controlled by others. The GOP has been using "who's actually in charge?" as a memetic gotcha precisely because the practice is now so widespread. It's a very safe sort of accusation to make. I support Biden (Irish Catholics have to stick together you know!) but not for a moment do I think he's the most powerful human being in the United States.
Who is? Heck if I know. I can suspect that they're probably very relaxed right now, safe in some womb or other, more or less. Their ideal is to sit and bask in success while the machinery of the world hums all round them, and they don't care how many humans are ground up in the machinery. Sometimes I can almost imagine it, the quiet that is not the gentle murmuring silence of Earth, but the stillness of death and the tomb. I expect Charles Murray thinks it's very serene.
I also find myself wondering who the most powerful user on X ever was. It certainly wasn't Elon Musk. My money's still on his mom.
~Chara of Pnictogen