Today, as I write this, it was widely reported that some judges in Colorado, whose political careers are hopefully over, sought to remove the name of former president Donald Trump from the ballot. It is hard to imagine a move that would better serve to motivate Trump’s vocal supporters, who have all the more reason to view the act as part of a concerted and corrupt effort on the part of establishment elites to disenfranchise large amounts of American citizens through lawfare efforts. When one combines this with the recent efforts to politicize government agencies against the political opposition within the United States, as well as the simply braindead behavior of politicians like the New Mexico governor seeking to abrogate Second Amendment rights within her state, or the election of seemingly braindead politicians to high office within the United States, it is clear that there is a widespread effort to delegitimize the political process as a whole within the United States and to replace active civic engagement with an attitude of cynicism and a belief that elections are rigged and that no matter what the mood of and the vote of the people, elections will be won by those whom the elites want to win, with little that ordinary people can seemingly do about it. To say that this sort of attitude is fatal to a well-functioning republican government would be a massive understatement. To the extent that elections are rigged within a regime and the regime seeks to turn government agencies into ways to demoralize and punish political opposition, that nation is not properly speaking a democratic regime of any real nature.

Let us take a step back, though, from the current events perspective in which the political crisis of the United States is viewed in. If we turn our attention to other nations, we will see that there is similarly a complex relationship between the increasing hostility on the part of ordinary people to the corrupt elite-driven politics as usual which seeks to provide elites with comfortable living, often at public expense, while ordinary people face lives of privation in the face of forced globalization as well as austerity measures pushed as being necessary to obtain the financing that is required to run poorly governed states. Elites profit on both ends of the deal, with predictably negative consequences for them at home, at least unless they can manage elections successfully to maintain power. The problems of the United States are not problems for ourselves alone but can be found all over the world. At times, there are successful efforts at overturning one or more aspects of the corrupt politics as usual, but most often this process is merely re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as whose who gain power in any sort of electoral “revolution” or military coup are themselves subject to the same corrupting tendencies once they hold political power themselves that their predecessors fell prey to. It is immensely difficult to rule a nation properly and to seek the well-being of one’s people, to build the right kind of infrastructure and engage in the right sort of policies to provide for an amelioration of the suffering of common people here and now and also the development of the populace of a nation for the future. In stark contrast, it is a trivially easy task to divert funding from taxation or proceeds from public companies or foreign investment to the personal profit of rulers, their families, and their allies, although even this task is not easy enough that elites are able to do it successfully all of the time.

If we take a further step back, not merely looking at the behavior of corrupt elites and regimes all over the world in the present historical moment, but over the long and melancholy course of human history, we will note that it has been common for regimes to have a largely empty suit as the public face of the regime with actual power being held by ruthless men (and some women) who largely operate behind the scenes. It is often better, for the sake of the legitimacy of a regime, to have some sort of orderly process of voting or succession provide the public rulership within a given state. This provides confidence on the part of the people that their state is stable and pious in its operation. Similarly, having ruthless people in power who turn their ruthlessness to the well-being of the state that they serve is not a bad thing–it can sometimes work over centuries of time, as it did for the Parthian Empire in the ancient world or the Macedonian Dynasty of the Byzantine Empire in the Middle Ages or the various shogunates over much of Japanese history. A France that is served by a Cardinal Richelieu or Mazarin is hardly to be viewed as a defective state for having an overmighty subject serve in a role of immense power, so long as those in power serve the well-being of a nation’s people. It is not a crisis for a government to have women or children or people who are less than philosopher kings as the public face for a polity so long as those who are actually in control seek to serve the well-being of the people whom they serve and not (only) themselves.

It is, however, an intense problem when it seems as if the powers behind the throne in the United States and many other countries deliberately seek to promote leadership that is plainly incompetent and unable to handle leadership. When even the plausibility that someone with titular authority is the actual power within a regime is cruelly stripped away and mocked and trampled in the mud, one has to wonder what larger game is afoot. It is generally in the interests of those who hold power but do so illegitimately or unofficially to at least preserve the fiction that the existing regime is in charge. When the actual powers, like the mayors of the palace for the ineffective Merovingian French kings, overturn their puppet rulers, the goal at hand is to replace one dynasty with another that is actually leading and serving its people. It is, however, a serious problem when those who hold power do not seek to discredit their puppet rulers in such a way as to seek their own power in a legitimate fashion, but rather to make it plain that those who are being elected to office are clearly not those who are pulling the strings or deciding policy. In such a situation as our contemporary crisis, elections are not about choosing people for positions of authority that they will personally exercise, but about supporting vague and shadowy people in power who, for one reason or another, do not wish to win power or even show their face before the world, but wish to act through others who are clearly not in charge. How long this will last, and what kind of regime is sought by those who obviously pay little attention to the desirability or value of popular support, is a question of considerable importance and delicacy. There are obviously people behind the curtain turning our public society into a mere marionette show, but what sort of regime they wish to create with themselves in charge is not yet obvious.