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Ryan McMaken
Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is executive editor at the Mises Institute and a former economist for the State of Colorado.
President Biden has not been seen in public since announcing he would not seek re-election on Sunday. Biden’s “resignation” was nothing more than a text-only post on Twitter/X – and we know that the president does not manage his own social media accounts. There has been no video of the president making an announcement, and the White House is apparently planning no press conference or official act of any kind. Biden has not been seen by anyone except his inner circle in days. (We can contrast this situation with Lyndon Johnson’s televised address announcing his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign.)
This is, in the words of Glenn Greenwald, “strange.” Moreover, Biden’s silence is inexplicable if Biden actually made the decision to withdraw from the race. After all, Greenwald, notes, if Biden is “well enough to decide, then he’s well enough to speak.” Yet, following one of the most important announcements of his political career, Biden has disappeared, and few things could better illustrate how irrelevant Biden now is to the matter of who is actually running the executive branch of the United States government. (We do have some audio of him speaking on a Monday phone call.)
A chain of events like this is characteristic of a palace coup – something along the lines of the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union, had it succeeded. In such cases, the chief executive is marginalized and replaced at the discretion of high-ranking bureaucrats and elites from within the ruling government itself.
It’s too early to get many facts about the details of what threats may have been used against Biden to get him to effectively step aside in favor of Kamala Harris. What we do know, however, is that the president is essentially absent and it is Harris who is conducting public events at the White House.
So, who is running the executive branch and the White House?
The fact that Biden himself is clearly not equipped for such a task has been undeniable since his performance at the presidential debate with Donald Trump last month. Since then, the official gaslighting propaganda about how Biden is “sharp as a tack“ has been exposed as an obvious lie.
Biden’s lack of any meaningful presence on the public stage does make it clear that someone other than Biden is running the White House, and someone is making decisions about policy. This could be an individual who is the de facto president, or it could be a group of people. If it is a group of people it is unknown if this group if coordinating decisions, of if these people are simply making decisions haphazardly as needed. Joe Biden’s inability to answer even basic questions during the debate makes it clear that Biden is not the one making these decisions, and he’s not equipped to manage the federal bureaucracy in any meaningful sense.
For example, the White House yesterday released a memorandum further outsourcing the president’s duties to the State Department and the Treasury Department. That is, according to the memo, “the functions and authorities vested in the President by sections ... of the Rebuilding Economic Prosperity and Opportunity for Ukrainians Act” are delegated to technocrats. The president apparently can’t even personally make decisions in areas that the White House calls a priority.
For all the regime’s talk about “democracy,” it is undeniable at this point that the White House is actually run by unseen, unelected personnel who function in the shadows and are accountable only to the elites within their own ruling coalition. Some call it the “deep state.” Others call it “the headless fourth branch of government.” In any case, we are reminded that the United States is a technocracy and not a democracy, a republic, or whatever word one wants to use to describe a system that is in some meaningful way answerable to the taxpayers who pay all the bills.
It is these unelected, unknown figures who are deciding the nation’s foreign policy, its immigration policy, and its political appointments. We simply have no idea who is deciding US policy in Ukraine, in the Levant, or in east Asia—three regions that are in danger of flaring up into major conflicts. Who really controls the nuclear launch codes? It seems only the oligarchs and some high-ranking technocrats know. Nor do we know who is crafting the present open-border policy that funnels billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of unemployed foreign nationals who receive blank checks to live in luxury hotels in American cities.
This legislative capriciousness is all the more dangerous now that the United States is no longer governed primarily by legislation debated and passed by an elected legislature. Instead, most new policy in the United States is a matter of rule-by-decree in which presidential executive orders are handed down and enacted by the technocrats.
In practice, it looks like the United States has now degenerated into the ideal technocracy – from the technocrat’s viewpoint. There is no political figure at the head of this bureaucracy to offer resistance to whatever it is that the technocrats feel like inflicting on the public at any given time. Rather, the bureaucracy is free to live out its collective vision for the country learned from Marxist humanities professors at places like Vassar and Harvard.
After all, the technocrats don’t have to run for re-election, and it’s virtually impossible to fire them. But who would fire them in any case? With someone like Joe Biden at the helm, it’s all smooth sailing for the deep state.
Naturally, the deep state would like to make sure this state of affairs continues. Thus, Biden has been replaced by the party elites with a candidate who is likely to be nearly as easy to manipulate and control as Biden: Kamala Harris. The technocrats have cunningly managed to appoint Harris as the Democratic nominee without a single primary debate or primary election. Consequently, Harris has no political organization loyal to her personally, and she has no independent constituency she can call on for political support outside the permanent government.
That is, her “base” is the technocracy itself. Under these conditions, Harris is likely to do as she is told, and that’s just how the deep state likes it.
This article was originally published by the Mises Institute.
