There Is No One In Charge

How We Ended Up With The Biden Administration

Who’s in charge? No one’s in charge. 

That was last week’s call and response. 

Biden showed undeniable signs of cognitive decline in his debate with Trump. The morning after, the supreme court overturned Chevron deference, a precedent radically expanding the power of executive bureaucracies, to left-wing outrage.

 

The American people are here because elites — politicians, journalists, and prior Justices — decided compliance matters more than judgment. The ability to comply with a schedule mattered more to them than the ability to make good decisions. 

There is a rapidly emerging line of cope articulated by Ezra Klein: “[Biden] did seem up to the job of the President, but that he did not seem up to the job of campaigning for President.” The purpose of this article is to stomp that belief into the dust. 

In one sense, Ezra has a point. In the vision of the bureaucratic left, the President’s only job is to ‘trust the process’. “The Democratic Party has become this party of normalcy and of systems and of institutions.” That system doesn’t need Biden’s judgment to rule. It’s more comfortable with no judgment at all. 

Here’s what Ezra gets wrong: the system that rules by bureaucratic procedure cannot be separated from the system that produced senile figureheads. They are the same system, made up of the same people, doing the same thing, with the same outcome. Center-left news outlet Axios describes the Biden circle as a “council of elders and governing oligarchy.” The rule by oligarchy responsible for cutting off Democratic primary challengers is equally responsible for the decaying governance of the Biden administration. 

Rule by compliance — the opposite of rule by merit — will continue producing similar outcomes until it is replaced. 

On a large scale, there are only two types of hierarchies: merit and campliance. A meritocratic hierarchy values the competent and is quick to notice, point out, and deal with the incompetent. It selects for getting the job done. A compliance hierarchy is all about inoffense. The process of meritocracy involves uprooting entrenched interests. It involves hurting people’s feelings. And oligarchy — more specifically, NGOs, contractors, activists, and bureaucrats — have figured out how to use the latter to prevent reform. 

As I satirized, the emotional instinct of the left is discomfort with discerning between good and bad. “The default reaction to a failing individual, social circle, or demographic group is to ask ‘how have healthy, successful people wronged them?’.” It’s obvious how this results in a candidate who can’t debate. But it also results in failed policy. It results in delaying critical semiconductor factories. It results in failing websites and failing to deliver benefits payments. As the same Ezra Klein notes, it results in a total failure to build housing and transportation.

This isn’t a right-wing critique of left-wing policy goals. It is the straightforward observation that the hierarchy of the Biden administration, along with those before it, have obstructed its own goals.

So how did we get here?

The fundamental problems with executing government policy are downstream of rule by compliance. As political theorist James Burnham puts it:

Managerial activity tends to become inbred and self-justifying. The enterprise comes to be thought of as existing for the sake of its managers—not the managers for the enterprise.

The rule of managers eventually bends towards compliance. 

It is true that the emotional valence of left-wing adminstrations favors compliance. But the permanent entrenchment of compliance across both administrations is because oligarchs use it to protect their monopolies. When merit and truth are discarded, more things are up for sale to special interests. 

Electorally, compliance means choosing a figurehead wholly lacking in judgment.

Obama’s deputy CTO Jennifer Pahlka calls them ‘Beltway Bandits’: the federal contractors, NGOs, consultants, and revolving ‘experts’ that take advantage of unmeritocratic government processes to give themselves monopoly rents. At every level of government, these groups reduce meritocracy and often make the problems they claim to care about worse.

Under Biden’s ‘council of elders’, these problems have only escalated. When technologists simply want their own companies to work on merit, left-wing journalists attack them. The Biden administration sold NIST's AI authority to a doomsday cult for 50 million dollars.

All it takes to stop this is for Biden to have the judgment of a median American and say “no, this is insane”. The incentive of a compliance system is to select against this. Trust the process, especially if it allows a contractor to enrich itself. At a large scale, compliance systems become self-reinforcing. Rent-seekers do everything they can to attack meritocratic individuals who threaten their artificial monopolies. Those who rise to the top are compliant. 

Compliance is not a static process you can ‘trust’. It is an ever-escalating cycle of poor judgment, culminating in President Biden … for now.