You may have heard there’s a presidential election this year. The fact that many of your acquaintances (and possibly you yourself) have gone completely nuts is an indication that it’s very close.
Among the overheated things I’ve heard is that this election (like pretty much every other election in the 21st century) is “the most important election ever”. To some extent this is correct, but it’s also complete nonsense.
The Nation’s Receptionist
Despite what they taught us in high school civics class, most people operate under the assumption that we live in a monarchy, and the president is the monarch. L’état, c’est lui.
So if something goes right, the president did a good job. If something goes wrong, he must have screwed up somewhere.
In reality, this is not true at all.
You sometimes hear people worry about “political interference” with various departments of the federal government. It’s a long-standing worry, going back at least 100 years.
The good news is, they fixed this a long time ago. “Political interference” is code for “people getting elected might change how things are done”. So the various departments of the federal bureaucracy have become completely insulated from any meddling from someone who merely showed up because he got elected.
Consider: even though he’s the “chief executive”, unless it’s someone he appointed, the president is not allowed to fire anyone in the “executive branch”. It’s literally against the law for him to do this.
Let’s take the FDA. On paper, even though he’s at the top of the org chart, if the president is unsatisfied with the direction of the organization or any particular person in it or how the drug approval process works, there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.
The most he can do is make a nuisance of himself. But ultimately the people at the federal departments are there for life and he’s only there for four or possibly eight years. They’ll either ignore him or just wait him out.
In no way can the president change the FDA or how it operates.
(The big downside to all this is that, if someone does something bone-headed, nobody can or will do anything about that person, but that’s another story.)
Now if the president doesn’t have the power to fire some random low-level cubical dweller at the Department of Transportation — within the federal government that he’s nominally in charge of — how much power does he really have?
Instead of thinking of the president as the CEO of the United States, it’s better to think of him as the nation’s receptionist.
If you’re a five year old, it’s easy to think that the receptionist runs the company. My company’s receptionist is the first person you see after you walk in the front door, at a desk right underneath a gigantic corporate logo. You’re certainly more likely to see her than the guy who’s actually in charge.
She’s not completely unimportant. For people visiting the office, she’s the face of the company. But if we have a bad year, nobody is going to say, “We need to fire the receptionist!”
The president is not a monarch. The president is not even a CEO. The president is basically the nation’s receptionist.
He’s the face of the nation. You may not like his face. It may really bother you that his is the face that people think of when the think of the USA. But that’s more or less all he is.
If you feel like the country is swirling down the toilet, changing the president is not actually going to change the direction of the country.
He gives speeches. He might veto bills from congress, but most of the actual decisions for what the federal government is going to do happen within the standing bureaucracy, and outside of the usual legislative process.
He negotiates deals with other countries, but most of the nuts and bolts work is done by the State Department, which works more or less like the FDA, as described above.
He can appoint judges, but if judicial opinions start drifting too far from what the bureaucracy wants to do, how long before they start ignoring the courts? And if they do, what is anyone going to be able to do about it? The IRS can seize your paycheck. The Supreme Court cannot.
The best the president can do is offer leadership and make suggestions to the people who actually do things in the federal government.
So, I’m not saying the president doesn’t have any power. He does. Quite a bit. It’s just that he has about 5% as much power as people think he does.
Why It Matters Anyway
The big difference between a corporate receptionist and the presidency is that the grown-ups know that a corporation has an actual CEO in the building somewhere.
Since nobody actually “runs” the federal government, and since he has the title of “president”, people assume he must actually be the one in charge.
So while this election is basically about a figurehead, like the current Queen Elizabeth, people think they’re electing an actual monarch, and that either the current monarch is a ruining the nation or that the potential next monarch will ruin the nation.
Nobody wants their nation to be ruined, and precious few people are serene enough to say, “If this nation is going to hell, neither of these two people are going to be able to change that.”
This is a symptom of a national tragedy which no president can fix. As people become increasingly atomized, as civil society continues to collapse, increasing numbers people have nothing to anchor their identity to but politics.
That’s why, even though the office of the presidency has never had less power than now, people’s perception of its importance has never been higher.
So if the election delivers the “wrong” outcome, the chances that people will take to the streets, armed, and start burning things down, is higher than it’s been since probably 1860. And we all know how that worked out[1].
Don’t Let This Happen to You!
So the election matters, not because the person filling the role of “president” matters, but because people think it does.
If you want to vote, feel free. If you want to stay home, I certainly won’t try to talk you out of it.
But don’t do anything stupid. If people are going to break things and set fires, don’t be one of them! It’s a good way to get killed or get a criminal record which will outlast whichever presidency we end up with.
I heard about a startup founder, probably not a dumb person, who put his company’s brand and reputation on the line, and emailed all 10 million of his company’s customers to inform them that anything less than a vote for his preferred candidate is “a vote against democracy”.
Remember: this is the nation’s receptionist we’re talking about.
A few months or possibly even a few days after the election, all the overheated emotions will have cooled off. It’s not worth going to jail over. It’s not worth annoying your customers and blowing up your business over. It’s not worth emotionally blackmailing your family over.
And if this analysis fills you with rage that I’m trying to minimize the stakes here, which really are higher than they’ve ever been, consider that you may not be thinking straight.
Full disclosure: I am also not thinking straight. However, I’ve never thought particularly straight, so I’ve learned to work around this.
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[1] Some of you might know. The rest of you can ask Wikipedia about it.
