The Insiders
Oligarchical Legitimacy and Leadership
Paul Ryan, for example, went to Washington penniless and retired with a net worth of $6 million. He landed in a seven figure job bribing his fellow colleagues. That should draw hundreds of candidates into every race, but politics is largely a closed shop, despite being democratic.
There’s not point here, other than that to point out that “natural markets” don’t exist, even in the absence of government. There’s almost no government role in the football coaching business, but it is a closed world controlled by relationships and insider information among the coaches. The same is true of politics. In theory, anyone can run for Congress. In reality, they allow in only those they want in.
-TheZMan, “Coaching Markets”
The most unpleasant truths have obvious explanations. That human society is hierarchical, everyone accepts. Society must have authority, and authority means differentiation in respect, honor, obedience, etc. Some are upper and some higher. Aristotle understood that 2300 years ago.
Thus, inevitably a republic becomes a thinly-hidden oligarchy. This doesn’t create legitimacy issues so long as some tenuous relationship between the oligarchy and the masses remains. Call it an obligation to pursue the interests of the masses in tandem with their own, or at the very least, not act with consistent indifference or hostility to them. Being open to talent from the masses helps as well.
But when the Oligarchy, or as we call it in America, the Meritocracy, becomes the enemy of the people? When it sneers at their traditions, mocks them at every turn, and uses every available instance to distance themselves from them? What inevitably happens?
Marx’s wet dream, perhaps, only less utopian. Only a Marxist could ever be so simple-minded as to believe that any revolution is ever the last revolution. Even when the last boss is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, someone still has to organize society. The new boss is the same as the old boss, only his power is newly won, and thus harsher.
Legitimacy thus derives less from any authoritative “voice” (God’s, or the People’s, or some mixture of both), but from serious commitment to the maintenance of the state. Note I say serious. The state survives not as a self-augmenting institution, and end in itself. It is a means for maintaining a people and its culture. Only so long as there is an England can there be a King thereof.
I do not, at this time, advocate any particular theory for accomplishing this. The Constitution was built on a theory, and the government established by it remains, but the theory is in tatters. Theories do not create freedom, or justice, or order, people do. What must be done to preserve and protect what we hold dear? Do that thing.
This is precisely as the American Presidency has acted throughout its existence. Every President has done what he felt was necessary to preserve, protect, and defend, from whatever he perceived as the threat. This is precisely the reason that the Founders built a strong presidency into the Constitution. Lincoln, Roosevelt, Trump, what have you, they all do what is necessary. Presidents who avoid doing what is necessary, such as Buchanan, Hoover, Obama, are not thought of nearly so well.
And as Rotten Chestnuts observes, with regard to ZMan’s speculation about football:
Belichick isn’t some kind of super-genius. Nor does he have some unique insight into the game. He’ll never write a book on “The Bill Belichick System,” because unlike every other celebrity coach, he doesn’t have a “system.” He simply does what he needs to do to win, one game at a time, with the pieces he has. That’s just leadership, in the traditional sense of the term, but so few people in our modern Media-driven culture have seen it that it totally fries our circuits. Surely he must have some double-secret grimoire of football excellence that he consults on the sidelines…?
Nope. Belichick’s secret is what he doesn’t have: A huge ego, a “system,” the my-way-or-the-highway mentality that infects nearly everyone given the tiniest smidgen of real power.
This also fits Trump’s pattern. Trump will say and unsay, hire and fire, sit down with anyone, and get up from the same table, because Trump is interested in what works. This looks chaotic, and in a sense, it is. But being the leader of a Great Power is necessarily chaotic.
All of this means that the Trump Era is both crisis of our ruling class (hence their spitting hatred of the man) and its opportunity. Because a man would have to be a fool to pretend that Donald Trump is a common man, who came up from nothing. He isn’t and he didn’t. He represents the Meritocracy as much as Hillary Clinton. The difference is that he still holds to the connection between the Meritocracy and the American people it governs, to their wishes as they express them, to their interests as they understand them.
Most of that class refuses to accept that Trump represents anything that can be legitimate, because their theory will not make room for it. Anyone who is not on board with the theory is a Deplorable, and thus illegitimate. Deplorables may be, and must be, cancelled.
People have long said that it’s a poor commentary on the American political system that a man like Donald Trump can win the Presidency. This is wrong. It’s not the system, but the Insiders who run the system, who are faulty. If they had not pushed narrative over truth and theory over policy, the rebellion of Trump would not have been possible. As with Goldman Sachs, they built their castle on lies.
