Some Thoughts on Power (and Q&A)

Hi everyone. Thanks for indulging my brief hiatus. I overbooked my spring travel schedule, and spring is already a busy season around here. Oh, I got food poisoning for the first time, and it is every bit as bad as people have told me. Holy cow, knocked me flat for almost three days and I still feel like a sack of smashed assholes. But enough excuses - I’m back and I’m ready to go. For those of you who are new around here, don’t worry, this output schedule is not the norm, and I appreciate your patience. Truly, I don’t deserve you.

Here’s a quick update on some loose ends. The Peculiar Institution, the essay series I was working on before Enemy: The Germans’ War took over my life, has four more chapters to go. I’ve decided to write all four of them, then edit the whole series for release as an eBook and audiobook, both of which will be free to all Substack subscribers. I’ve been bearing down on the end of the next World War 2 episode. As usual when I near the end of a history episode, I’ve cut back my reading so I can obsess over story structure, factual detail, what to include and what to cut, etc., and it leaves little bandwidth for writing new material here. If I were a true professional at this, I would spend a few hours each morning working on something different for the Substack, but unfortunately when I’m this close I wake up thinking about World War 2, go through the day thinking about it, fall asleep thinking about it, and then dream about it until I wake up and start all over. I will be done soon, and we will be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Since I’m buried in World War 2 minutiae, why don’t you guys ask some questions to give me some writing prompts? Ask me anything - politics, religion, history, advice, myself, anything. It’s been hard to pull my head out of my, uh… my books, and I’d be very glad to have a list of questions to answer. Anyway, leave them in the comments below and start punching out answers tomorrow!

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In 1783, just a few months after the British were compelled to sign the Treaty of Paris recognizing her former American colonies as a newly-independent country, King George III dismissed Parliament’s ruling coalition, and appointed William Pitt (the Younger) Prime Minister of Great Britain. He was only twenty-four years old. Despite initial resistance from Parliamentary leaders who felt passed over, Pitt’s administration would steer Great Britain through two tumultuous decades following American independence - years which brought the French Revolution and the First Napoleonic War. How was it that a usually taciturn twenty-four year old could be appointed to the Premiership, and then successfully run a Parliament full of much older, better connected, and more accomplished men with their own dreams of being Prime Minister? Sure, Pitt wasn’t some nobody. After all, his father had been Prime Minister, but that was as likely to generate whispers of nepotism and name privilege as it was to bolster his legitimacy.

The answer is simple, really, and we don’t have to look further than the first speech he made as a Member of Parliament in 1780 (when he was only 21-years-old!). When he finished speaking, there was a brief moment of silence followed by thunderous applause. MP Sir John Sinclair wrote that Pitt’s speech was met with “utter astonishment… by an audience accustomed to the most splendid efforts at eloquence,” and that he never saw it surpassed, and only rarely rivaled, by any other MP. Haters, I’m sure, continued to hate, but the fact was that when William Pitt the Younger opened his mouth to speak, everyone knew the boss had arrived, age be damned.

Pitt’s ascension inaugurated Great Britain’s golden age, with the victory over Napoleon at one end, and the Victorian “empire on which the sun never sets” at the other. One of the reasons, I think, that Great Britain was so successful during this period is that her institutions were developed enough to enable efficient management of an empire, while still leaving room for superior people like Pitt to be elevated to positions of command. It’s hard to imagine something similar happening under our hypertrophied regime (even leaving aside minimum age regulations). In a developed country like the US or UK today, the system” has matured to the point that its rules and regulations challenge the authority of statutory, and even Constitutional law. Not that many years ago, for example, you would’ve been laughed out of any court in the land for suggesting that the President does not have the authority to fire, transfer, or reassign employees of the Executive Branch agencies under his command. The President’s Article 2 power over the Executive Branch of government is absolute: the agencies and offices only exist because the President can’t clone himself to perform the thousands of daily tasks required of his office. The State Department is not tasked with managing US foreign policy, but with carrying out the President’s foreign policy. The Defense Department exists to enact his military policy, the Department of Justice to implement his priorities with regard to criminal justice. These agencies are an extension of his will, and, by extension, the will of the people who elected him. They have no power of their own, but derive their power from the Office of the President of the United States. The idea that the President cannot make personnel decisions in the Executive Branch simply would not have been taken seriously in years past. But today, well, you see, there are labor contracts, tenure agreements, equal opportunity clauses, interagency consensuses - none of which carry the force of law, or, at least, not enough force to override the President’s clear Constitutional authority to manage the affairs of organizations he was democratically elected to run. Of course, power takes no account of our theories when deciding where to make its residence, and during Trump’s first term we got a real-life demonstration of this principle. Mass media organizations, global corporations, Ivy League college boards, the CIA - none of these have any political authority, but they all have power. When they (and the hundred other people and organizations I left out) are all in alignment, their power is considerable, often superseding genuine political authority to the point that elected officials feel helpless to oppose them even when doing so would put them on the side of most people.

It is impossible to understand politics without first grasping this difference between real and theoretical power. It’s like Roddy Piper’s sunglasses in They Live, allowing you to look past appearances to see what’s actually happening.