The Empire has a Glitch

I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum's emperor worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum's ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the larger blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.

Purdum argues that Washington is"broken," that procedural disfunction prevents the rational management of the nation's affairs. The presidency, he writes,"has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the 'news' by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth -- these forces have made today's Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself."

But there's some good news, Purdum adds. Despite the crushing burden on the presidency, the guy who holds the job has gotten some big things done: he secured the passage of major legislation on health care, education, and financial reform, and the administration"managed the Afghan surge" with unnoticed skill and unmistakable political discipline.

So. The presidency is becoming untenable, as a single individual sits in a chair in an office and makes decisions about so many things:

The social and political future of whole swathes of the world -- Afghanistan, Iraq, the many other places where American drones fire missiles and Special Forces operators join CIA paramilitary warriors and federal contractors in shaping the competing place of Islam and pluralist democracy in foreign societies.

The future of American education, and the nature of the relationship between teachers and students, now sharply defined by federal legislation.

The future of the global economy, now closely regulated by an American government that travels the world to push other national leaders to follow the American path to economic recovery.

And on and on and on. The president manages the world, you see, and it's becoming too much responsibility for any one person to carry. But despite all those burdens, the president has managed to centralize the management of American health care with the passage of legislation that imposes a federal mandate on everyone in the country. And he's managed to expand the American wars overseas, going all in on the American bet that it can build a better society in Afghanistan. And he's pulled the regulation of finance and industry and energy to the center, where it can be better managed.

Yes, despite the growing centralization of power and the spectacular insanity of its untenable burdens on that center, the president has successfully managed to centralize more power. Despite the debilitating effects of the disease, he's managed to cause the disease to metastasize. Success!

Meanwhile, back on earth, the solution to the"gargantuan size, speed, and complexity" of the contemporary American presidency is for Afghans to run Afghanistan, local school boards to run schools, and state legislatures to give policy direction to state insurance commissioners regarding the regulation of health insurance. The solution is to spin power out and down. The difficulty of getting the rock farther up the hill isn't a procedural error. It's gravity. And the people pushing on the rock haven't figured it out, yet.

Despite the paralyzing effects of the growth of the federal government, the president has managed to implement a universal federal health insurance mandate. Nothing strange about that argument, no sir.

This moment feelshistoricallyfamiliar, doesn't it?