Confronting the overthrow of a President.

The coup d’état against President Biden illuminates the themes exposited in the essay on Senator J.D. Vance’s thought and rhetoric, to which I refer the reader. Coup terminology in this case is not overwrought: a sitting President of the United States has had his political future terminated, which means his political present is ended as well. Absent potential there is no power, and therefore no purpose. The logical corollary to the immediate end of his campaign therefore ought to be the immediate end of his Presidency.

By the bye, this is Vance’s view as well.

The managerial husk.

The managerial theory is that the discontinued President may persist in office, fully vested with its prerogatives, by virtue of the nature of the office. This is of course totally fictitious: Joseph R. Biden at midafternoon Sunday lost the ability to do nearly every meaningful thing intrinsic to the Presidency, including real cooperation with the Legislative branch, persuading the nation to make war, and representation of the whole American people in government. What’s left is a headless apparatus, dominated but not led — ruled but not governed — by the thousands of functionaries of the administrative state. It is a Deist simulacrum of government, the clockmaker having wound the mechanism, which will then inexorably tick forward undirected. But clocks break, God retains active sovereignty, and the American system requires a President.

The putschists who prevailed against President Biden therefore err badly in their assumptions, chief among them the belief that the office, not the man, is the singular thing conferring meaning and therefore power. This is an easily arrived-at error in the fantasyland of propositional civics, which replaces people with concepts, and in fact expects the people to conform to the concept: a coerced reversion to the pre-political state. But the truth is that a nation, contrary to propositionalism’s core thesis, is both man and law, both persons and forms. Moreover, the man and the person are the most-important elements. In 1798 a predecessor in the Presidency wrote to the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, then preparing to go to war with the French Republic, reminding its officers that “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Solemn affirmations of basic rights are after all commonplaces in the constitutions and laws of nearly every autocratic society….

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