You Only Had One Job, Politicians

The current free-fall of the Biden administration is instructive. Because it shows the problem with modern politics.

If you accept my notion that the job of government and politics is to protect us against enemies, foreign and domestic, then the next question is: "what do you do when there are no enemies on the horizon?"

The answer is: "you make them up."

Let us pose the question in a different way. In their creation narratives, that Rousseau developed in his Discourse on Inequality and George Bernard Shaw wrote about in Fabian Essays in Socialism, the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is replaced by another event. For Rousseau in A Discourse on Inequality the fateful moment is described thus:

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying "This is mine" and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.

For Shaw beginning of Sin is the establishment of "the first colonist, the original Adam" into "a vast green plain of a country virgin to the spade". Shaw:

Adam is, as Political Economy fundamentally assumes him to be, "on the make": therefore he drives his spade into, and sets up his stockade around, the most fertile and favorable patch he can find.

Do you see the comedy in this? Both Rousseau and Shaw were city guys; the notion of growing your own food and defending it from others is become a joke. Hey, peasant: food is something you buy at the store. If only they had taken the trouble to tell Hitler that, because Hitler thought that the Germans, the most advanced people in the world, needed Lebensraum in eastern Europe to grow their own food.

But in the bad old days, including the days of chimpanzees, establishing a territory of food-yielding land was not just a scandal of private property, but a matter of life and death. If your little band of chimps didn't occupy and defend its patch of land then the girl chimpanzees didn't have enough food to bear and raise baby chimps. Ditto humans, down to the beginning of the industrial era when Rousseau and Shaw lived where food-growing land isn't an issue any more. What matters is to find something to do for which other people will pay money. It could be writing discourses on inequality and novels like Emile, Or Treatise on Education or writing essays on socialism and mega-hit plays about a London flower girl and a phonetics professor. Or, for lesser lights, it might be inventing power looms that make clothing affordable for poor folks and steam trains that let the poor move about.

What I am saying is that political leaders, whose job it is to protect us against enemies, don't have a job to do any more.

Oh, I know. George Soros's prosecutors are busy encouraging criminals so that in about five years or so some fool politician will rise to power on a platform of fighting crime.

My point is that politicians are running around pretending to be great leaders in an age when we don't need great leaders.

We don't need great leaders to solve the supply-chain problems; we just need someone to undo all the regulations that prevent the supply chain from doing its job. We don't need someone to order everyone to get a COVID vaccination; we just need a little more work on COVID treatments so that people with co-morbidities aren't quite so vulnerable to a disease that is about 5 times worse than the regular flu. We don't need the FBI to be hunting down domestic terrorists threatening school boards; we just need school boards that do their job and don't let rapists into the girls' bathroom.

Our great problem today is that we have ruling classes and political structures that want to act like ruling classes of olden times, fighting the foe to protect us from our enemies. Only, 97 percent of people can and should be just getting on with their responsible middle-class lives without unnecessary interference from elite people with a Savior complex.

What we are seeing right now, as the Biden administration dissolves into mind-numbing stupidity, is an object lesson in governance.

Government is only useful in fighting an enemy. All other human activity can be better done without political leaders wanting to shove themselves out front waving a sword and promising to save us from... well what, exactly?

And when rulers force themselves to the front and act like Henry V at Agincourt they only Make Things Worse.