The problem is the Presidency, not the person.

in #bush5 years ago


I'm not inclined to speak ill of the recently departed, nor to lavish unjustified praise on them.

I will speak ill of this whole ritualised final act in the elevation of a mere government office and the person who happens to hold it. Not just the positive hagiographies that flow but also the contrarians getting in their last kicks in a way we'd never do to most other people on the occasion of their death. They're two sides of the same coin. Defining a historical era around the head of state, using them as the touchstone and lead character of our national narrative, the extravagant state funerals, the creation of pilgrimage sites from birthplaces and tombs: these are the trappings of monarchy and worse, cultish imperialism. It's un-republican, unhealthy, and counter-Revolutionary. Both the worshipfulness bordering on deification and the opposite breaches of decorum cheapen us and represent the culmination of a profoundly unfortunate pathology. And with our current structure and everything this office has been made into, it's practically unavoidable.



Edmund Randolph was correct at the Philadelphia Convention when he objected to a unitary one-person executive as the "fetus of monarchy." The psychology of it is too embedded, too inexorable, too deeply rooted in human history and evolution. It is the most fatal flaw in what is in many respects still a genius structure crafted with the best of opposite intentions. He instead wanted a three-person executive committee. I'm inclined more and more to admire the Swiss council system, whose eight members function more akin to a board of directors than a head of state. Or perhaps, if we must, there's something to be said for splitting the ceremonial role (head of state) from the functional role (head of government), which is exactly what the British monarchy eventually evolved into. Whatever the alternative, this isn't how a free people should conduct themselves towards our government functionaries.

Death and mourning should be private acts for the person, their friends and family and colleagues, and even their enemies. But it should not be an act of state. It should not be a society-wide ritual. It should be respectful and empathetic but also it should be far more constrained as life goes on for the unrelated and the unaffected. We all die. We all mourn loved ones. We all leave an imperfect and flawed legacy. It is one of the most egalitarian realities of human nature, and we have created this vicarious artifice of denying it. Denying it through the vehicle of a job that is really little more than a glorified personnel manager and legal administrator.

The presidency, not the person, is the problem.

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