The more comfortable my older sibling Frisk and I feel with remembering childhood days of being political, eagerly following current events and investigative journalism, naïvely admiring the feats of Daniel Ellsberg and the Woodstein boys, the more estranged we feel from contemporary politics. We're still trying to get used to how different everything is today, even though I've been furiously trying to keep pace with it. When we were growing up, Watergate still felt somewhat novel, even though the 1980s papers were full of Reagan scandals. Frisk and I could read about Watergate, feel appalled by such a catastrophic breakdown of public trust, and try to make ourselves believe that such things were a rarity, a thankfully limited excursion from the routines of liberal democracy.

Then, uh, well, things happened, and now we're here in 2024, realizing that we were wrong to think of Watergate as a rarity. Now it's clearly a normality. U.S. politics and political media had hastily slammed the door shut on the Watergate scandal even though justice wasn't even nearly satisfied—Nixon went on to a lengthy post-Watergate period of propagandizing himself, and now he's practically a hero and model for others. Everyone decided that Watergate would never happen again, by which they meant they'd never let reporters threaten political stability again.

Once it was a massive scandal to report that a U.S. politician had a "slush fund", a secret war-chest to fund shady political activities. Now it's safe to assume that everyone has such a fund, and nobody calls it a "slush fund" any more but a "political action committee" or something else bland and corporate. It'll have a respectable brand name and liaisons with the press. Corruption is more fun than honest government, so long as there's a mutual agreement not to examine it closely; that way, journalism about corruption can stick to a lively and profitable and entertaining racket, a steady stream of political gossip that never adds up to anything actionable.

My sibling and I just aren't used to it yet. That sounds pathetic.

~Chara

I'll keep this short. I wouldn't ever dream of NOT voting for the Democratic side of any political contest, but holy fuck do they make it difficult.

If there's any one trait of the Democrats that's most useful to the plans of their enemies, it's that the party keeps stabbing its own in the back. Like any weak and fearful leaders trying to compensate for a lack of credibility, they're constantly demanding loyalty from their subjects. But internally they have no loyalty, and indeed the most powerful Democratic politicians are the traitors. It seems like some ghastly manifestation of their singleminded devotion to compromise in lieu of better principles: they compromise even each other, and take a certain relish in being compromised themselves.

I feel really sorry for Joe Biden now. I didn't think that was possible. Do these disloyal Democrats who are piling slowly onto the "Dump Biden" bandwagon actually know something about President Biden that's not obvious to the public? Maybe. But it seems more like they're merely timid and easily rattled by bad press and polling fads. The Republicans aren't quite wrong when they laugh at the Democrats for believing in nothing. They don't. At least, they don't seem to have much more going for them beyond a dull commitment to "process".

I tend to detest the corporate braggadocio about missions, but...what is the mission of the Democrats? Really? Do they have a single rallying principle? The Democrats don't even commit to defence of democracy itself! The Democrats believe in "Democratic brand integrity", I guess, much like Disney sticking hard to being a parody of itself, soggy with nostalgia. That's roughly how the Democrats carry themselves too, like the fabled 1980s Reaganite bipartisan conviviality had actually been real.

And they have the cheek to demand LOYALTY. Hell's bells.

~Chara

so Orwell named his leftist tract (which was written by the bad guys as a lure) The Book.

...the Bible. That atheistic so-and-so was riffing on the Bible. The thing serves the same social function! Gawd why do I miss these things ~Chara

George Orwell's 1984 contains its fascinatingly liminal book-with-the-book, called...The Book, usually, but we do eventually get a title, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, the authoritarian system of government which dominates the Earth in Orwell's dystopia, taking different forms in the three super-nations which divide the world among themselves. Thus it's with some amusement that I found I'd hit upon an independent notion (I think), which I'm dubbing collective oligarchism in honor (or should I say 'honour'?) of Orwell. Even if he was a traitorous snitch, I still...respect some of his words.

Not all of them.

I don't really have a developed model, but the central point is this: while it's little appreciated in any of the mainstream U.S. political discourse I've ever read, every important office of any sort, whether it's in the government or out of it, is quietly and unobtrusively staffed by a group of persons, sometimes quite a large group. The dubious staffing practices of Richard M. Nixon seem (for some reason) to have become universal practice, and now everyone seems to think it's normal and natural for every major post—the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, all Congresspersons, Governors, Mayors, everyone, and then there's all the corporate officers and similar—to be filled not merely by a person, but by a small private army of advisors and assistants and staffers. There's even more distribution of political labor thanks to the universally accepted practice of allowing outside political groups to write legislation.

The upshot is that we must regard the political and social hierarchy of the United States as composed not so much of individual persons but rather individual microgovernments. Every political and corporate office of importance is really a small court, with the official office-holder as the monarch surrounded by a coterie of councillors. One implication of this system is that every such office is effectively ceremonial, or at least has the strong potential to become strictly ceremonial. If the office-holder is like a monarch, they can be like a weak captive monarch, a mere figurehead concealing a pack of ambitious underlings. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and now Donald Trump are spectacular examples of such "collective oligarchy" in practice. In no case was it ever certain who exactly was in charge of things, and we could only assume that there was some mass of advisors and underlings making all the decisions. Only occasionally would some one or few members of this unseen ring of councillors bob up in the news, never staying there for long.

I feel like there's certain implications here for bureaucracy. It's tempting to imagine bureaucratic hierarchies as straightforwardly branching trees, fanning out downward from a sole leader, each node a single person. But in reality each node is a microgovernment of its own, and that implies that there's complicated negotiations always going on between the nodes rather than straightforward intercommunication. And meanwhile, there's the interconnections that exist outside the official structures of hierarchical power...the unseen friendships and alliances, all that "Deep State" stuff which the GOP burbles about to hide their own conspiracies.

As with most of my brainstorms, I can't imagine this is really new. Whose territory have I strayed into? =0

~Chara of Pnictogen