The American voter does not participate in democracy in a direct way. Unlike in direct democracies (e.g. Switzerland), the US citizen has no direct, causal relationship to policy, planning, and decision-making. Citizens are still permitted to argue, disagree, and question in the digital commons, but politicians pay as little heed as possible. American electoral democracy can offer a choice between further empowering the Administrative State (which rules the Empire), or checking it. But there is no option on the ballot to return to a representative republic.
The legislative branch does very little legislating. Not only are legislators bought and sold in every conceivable way, but in some cases, they may be actively blackmailed by outside interests. Legislators do not write or read the bills they vote on. The bills are written by aides and lobbyists— by lawyers—who have an incentive to promote their own class interests by writing bills that only they, lawyer-lobbyists, can really understand.
The executive branch is immensely powerful as an administrative apparatus, but the president himself—the elected official nominally in charge—is more of an elected check on the power of the bureaucratic machinery he oversees. The president and the executive administration are thus in conflict. For example, arguably, the administrative machine used Covid as a pretext to effectively end the final year of the first Trump presidency early, and has not bothered to put the mask back on while it has governed through a senile Joe Biden, or campaigned through an unprepared, incompetent Kamala Harris.
The Deep State rules
Complexity and size, massive, malignant opacity, are the enemies of a genuine and functional representative democracy where informed citizens vote for officials who attempt to honor the political will expressed by the voters. Instead, under the guise of democracy, a vast, invisible, unelected administrative state—the “Deep State”—rules, and when that administrative state is challenged by popular democratic forces, it lies, imprisons, censors.
Under the guise of democracy, a vast, invisible, unelected administrative state—the “Deep State”—rules, and when that administrative state is challenged by popular democratic forces, it lies, imprisons, censors.
Simply, power protects itself, and in an overly complex federal system, power will protect itself in complex ways that nobody fully understands. This process will quickly become terrifying, even to those on the inside. A system of largely neutral, even decent bureaucrats, with just a few malign internal imperatives (like keeping defense contractors happy) quickly produces evil effects; voters find themselves voting for a government that lies, manipulates, steals. And this system can watch you (the NSA), but you aren’t allowed to watch it. It can shield its deepest inner workings from FOIA requests; and the complicit press will often bury the most important stories.
As a cultural critic, I’m not in a position to offer a detailed history or a description for how this labyrinth of power, this massive Borgesian system that largely ignores the voting public, works. I also don’t offer a specific prescription on how it could be dismantled. But, as a critic of language who is not part of the revolving door of managerial power (as “little magazine” writers sometimes are), I do feel entitled to assert that we cannot continue to use the term democracy, and by extension, liberalism, in good faith. Democracy is a form of government in which citizens are active political participants. This does not apply to what is called democracy in America today.
We cannot continue to use the term democracy, and by extension, liberalism, in good faith.
Democracy in America means something like “a great cable package of political agendas and policies, something that gets installed, that you can turn on anytime, that’s always there”. This consumerist idea of democracy, as a product that is in stock, ironically inverts the hidden premise, the subtle connotation of the term democracy (“rule by the people”).
The Role of the Managerial Classes
Our pseudo-democracy, i.e. our democracy-derived product, is a managed system (a military empire shielding a consumer market) that protects and indeed encourages political apathy, intellectual laziness, dogmatism, and moral selfishness. American democracy, because it functionally means the right to vote on different shades and tones of bureaucratic management by the System, disempowers civic instincts. Democracy, the question “how do we want to live?”, asked and answered in the active participation of sovereign citizens in the organization of their political commons, is absent.
In fact, the managerial classes conflate democracy with their own success. “Democracy” is identified by them with the system in which they’re most empowered. Nervous suburban Boomers, girlboss Millennials, donor class wine moms, Brooklyn Gen-Xers pontificating about privilege while their nannies do the actual parenting, SF progressives in securitized home fortresses, publishers turning Atlantic articles into books, and finally, those who think JD Vance is the anti-Christ are easy to manage, easy to convince, and will happily proselytize on behalf of the System. They don’t ever want the System to end.
The managerial classes conflate democracy with their own success. “Democracy” is identified with the system in which they’re most empowered.
American liberals, far from championing genuine democracy, seem to fear it. Liberal voters—whose electoral strategy is for the working class to stay home while the middle class is propagandized into backing the administrative state—prop up the administrative bureaucratic class: career employees, contractors, lobbyists, foreign agents, NGO presidents, diplomats.
Picture the trembling progressive generic D voter contemptuous of regular, unpretentious people. She’s driving to vote, NPR blaring, for Kamala this November. What is she really voting for? The right not to think, not to participate—to feel virtuous while the System autopilots propaganda campaigns? The generic D voter—just like the generic R voter in 2004—is thus ready to cynically vote for the System’s preferred candidate.
Trump, the Forester
The free-floating talking point that “Trump and the Vance/RFK/Elon/Tulsi coalition will end democracy” spectacularly inverts our political reality. This coalition, for all its flaws, offers a necessary check on systems that spy, wage war, and enrich corporations selling both chemical and spiritual poisons.
I don’t imagine that there’s a romantic, utopian outcome in which the relationship between citizen and state is redressed in the next four years—but we need foresters willing to clear the statist underbrush. Such an executive wouldn’t be a caretaker of bureaucratic overgrowth, but a restorer of political ecology. Imagine a president wielding a chainsaw, cutting back invasive administrative agencies, allowing sunlight to reach the floor of civic life. This clearing could be a controlled burn, allowing new political growth: self- and local governance.
We need foresters willing to clear the statist underbrush.
We can’t keep calling the present managed bureaucratic leviathan a “democracy” any more than we can call a clear-cut wasteland a forest. Our task, as citizens and truth-tellers, is to speak plainly about the system we have—a corporate-bureaucratic oligarchy masquerading as representative government—so we can envision what we want.
True democracy might look like decentralized power: citizen initiatives that matter, transparent budgets, and leaders who serve rather than rule. It might mean dismantling the administrative state that has metastasized far beyond its constitutional bounds. But we can’t even begin this work until we use language accurately, until we stop playacting at democracy, and admit we need to reclaim our lost sovereignty.
