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