The Post-Modern Presidency: A Chief Executive for America or a Caretaker for the Administrative State?

My friend John Batchelor is the host of the CBS Eye on the World radio program. Not content with that content creation, he also hosts a personal podcast, The John Batchelor Show, regarding current events. I have been honored to be a weekly contributor on this podcast, albeit if only to lower the bar so that other guests can leap over it. This they easily do, given their depth of experience and level of expertise in an amazing array of subjects. It is impossible to listen in on a conversation between Mr. Batchelor and one of his guests (other than myself) and not come away with new information nor discover an idea upon which to muse.

One of my personal favorite podcasts is “The Londinium Chronicles, 90 A.D.” In these episodes, Mr. Batchelor and Michael Vlahos don the roles of two Roman aristocrats, “Gaius” and “Germanicus,” off in occupied Albion and sitting along the banks of the Thames in Londinium. The pair ponder which play to see and discourse upon the events roiling faraway Rome and its empire. Of course, this theatrical device is ironically employed to facilitate limning the historical parallels between that former empire and today’s American empire. In their conversations, “Blue” is the left (Democrats and progressives); “Red” is the right (GOP and MAGA); and “Rome and the Empire” is Washington and America.

Per the show’s site, Mr. Vlahos is a writer and author who has taught war and strategy at Johns Hopkins University, the Naval War College, and Centro de Estudios Superiores Navales (CDMX) and is a longtime weekly contributor to The John Batchelor Show. In his role as “Germanicus” to Mr. Batchelor’s “Gaius,” Mr. Vlahos has proven an exceedingly astute observer of our chaotic contemporary political scene.

Consider the following “Londinium Chronicle,” wherein at approximately the 8:20 mark, Mr. Vlahos identifies not only what the two parties have at stake in the 2024 election, but more importantly, what is at stake for the American people, the presidency, and the electoral process itself. (Given his role as Germanicus, for the sake of clarity, I have occasionally put in brackets what Mr. Vlahos is referencing in modern American politics.)

Blue [the left] is attempting to redefine legitimacy itself, so that legitimacy does not require any sort of cognitive or leadership capability. It simply involves presentation, however orchestrated and managed it might be. In other words, ‘Blue’ is attempting to redefine the office of ‘emperor’ [president] as a mere figurehead; and, thus, as the representation—the face—of what is, in effect, oligarchic rule.

Is this attempted redefinition born of an ideological imperative or by necessity? Germanicus—er, Mr. Vlahos—believes both. “This is a risky move, and it is the only move ‘Blue’ has, given the fact that it has found itself for a second time in the position where it does not have a person who is up to the job.”

In sum, having secreted and steered the cognitively impaired Mr. Biden through the COVID pandemic’s restricted campaign possibilities, the Democrats found it impossible to do so a second time. Consequently, following his abysmal debate with former president Donald Trump, the handlers of Mr. Biden were confronted with the necessity of removing and replacing him as the Democrat Party’s [“Blue’s”] nominee. Their handpicked selection was his vice president, Kamala Harris.

It was an unprecedented switch in modern American politics, and, as Mr. Vlahos notes, ordinarily would spell disaster for “Blue”:

In any other situation, the other party would have destroyed any hopes that ‘Blue’ might prevail in this election, because were they to advance an effective leader who is part of the institutional framework of the ‘imperial office,’ then they would be marching to a very strong victory. But that is not exactly the case. So, you have a weak Republican leadership offer, and you have a nonexistent ‘Blue’ [Democrat] leadership offer; and the way that the ‘Blue’ oligarchs have tried to reframe the entire process is to do so as if it were an event, in which one could invest their emotions, because it is no different than a divertissement – an entertainment – and many in the electorate buy into that. So, you have the opportunity here to alter the terms of the constitutional order itself, where the president becomes no more than, say, the monarch is in the United Kingdom…

In sum, then, the Democrats have made two calculations. The first is the recognition that, whatever else the office entails, under ordinary circumstances one only needs to win a primary and a general election to become president. In the instance of Vice President Harris, her handlers have dispensed with the primary and now merely need to help secure the general election.

The second calculation is that the Democrats’ symbiotic relationship with the corporate media and Big Tech parroting their party line and stifling the opposition; with big banks, Wall Street, and a host of billionaires larding their party coffers and dark money accounts; the use of the federal bureaucracy and public and private employee unions to drive out the vote and help ballot harvest, V.P. Harris could be installed as president as readily as Mr. Biden had been in 2020.

As a result, we witness the spectacle of the junior partner in the Biden-Harris administration running a campaign of systemic deceit, pretending to be an agent of “change” and stuffing the failures of the administration she serves down the memory hole. It is a personality-driven exercise in identity politics and personal attacks upon her allegedly despotic Republican opponent, despite the fact that she has stolen many of his once-considered “authoritarian” positions. But again, all Blue must do is win one election.

If it does, V.P. Harris will be inaugurated as a president, and, following on the heels of her caretaker, stage-managed predecessor, Mr. Biden, and with the abetment of her complicit comrades in the media, academia, corporate America, and elsewhere, her elevation will transform the entire conception of the role of a president from a duly elected, active chief executive into a caretaker beholden to priorities and the perpetuation of the unelected administrative state. And a fourth, separate, unequal, and unaccountable branch of the federal government will have been cemented: the administrative, bureaucratic state.

This, of course, makes perfect sense. For despite their limp protestations to the contrary, the Democratic Party is not democratic. Under the guise of “their democracy,” all the power of the sovereign people is to be reposed in the federal Leviathan, from which it can never be returned. Their aim is the elitist rule of “experts” to govern the lives of formerly self-governing and sovereign citizens. In this light, the selection of V.P. Harris and their ensuing campaign of systemic deceit is all of an ideological piece.

As of time of writing, the polls between “Blue’s” and “Red’s” candidates for “emperor” are evenly divided, and whether Blue’s cynical decision to foist V.P. Harris upon the electorate will be rewarded remains to be seen. Per Mr. Vlahos:

There is an expectation, I think, among the broad swath of the electorate for a capable person to be inaugurated as president; and that (opportunity) does not now exist [on the part of ‘Blue’]. So, there are tremendous risks that ‘Blue’ runs right now. We will not know in the course of this week or next week. But, over the course of several weeks—the next seventy days—it will become clear whether or not the Democrats, ‘Blue,’ has been successful in reframing the terms of ‘imperial succession.’

And, therefore, it will become clear whether or not “Blue” has replaced the reality of an election with the illusion of an election, redefined the Post-Modern Presidency as merely a caretaker for the administrative state, and eviscerated the very concept of the consent of the governed.