On the Powerlessness of the Governing Class

It's becoming more and more apparent that President Biden's diminished condition has been known and largely covered up by the White House for many months.

What is tragically amusing about all this from an outsider's perspective is that Biden could be in a state of complete catatonia or even a corpse for months and it would not matter much. Why? Because American presidents are powerless for the most part, despite the claim that when they are in office they are often referred to as "the most powerful person in the world".

The reality is that neocons, the neoliberal economic system, the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic-Surveillance Complex, the propagandists, the Judiciary, corporate donors, and lobbyists run things just fine with or without the President. Presidents and Prime Ministers do not 'govern'; they are bureaucratic administrators, functionaries, and middle managers whose job is to keep the elite class happy and shield the deep state from critical scrutiny.

The current Supreme Court of the United States has been a long-term project of right-wing reactionaries who knew that the path to a plutocratic corporatocracy could only become a reality through a judiciary ready and willing to embrace what Sheldon Wolin has described as a system that "pays outward fealty to the facade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, but it has effectively seized all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent."

It was precisely through the law (the Enabling Act, Nuremberg laws, Citizenship Law, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor ) that the Nazis were able to consolidate their power, legitimize biological racism, and essentially legalize antisemitism and genocide.

The extremist right in the US has been following Nazi Germany's lead, and they really don't need a POTUS to do it. All they need is to install an immune from criminal-prosecution imperial opportunist figurehead who is willing to do the bidding of the power elite and a reactionary judiciary willing to trade in their democratic republic for a plutocracy.