All effective organizations administer power from the top down, that is to say, they are all accountable monarchies. Since the death of President FDR, the last American monarch, the American government has been run by an increasing number of unaccountable bureaucratic oligarchs. This establishment is progressive to a fault. The only way to resolve this overwrite of the constitution is with a right-wing executive.
American Monarch
FDR reformed America through the New Deal and the creation of 69 new agencies. These agencies were filled by 20th-century academia yet they were subservient to him however only informally, as he was their Prometheus. After he died in 1945, they had no such informal allegiance to his successors, and to this day they operate largely autonomously; examples of these bureaucracies include the FCC, FDIC and the SEC. None answer to the president, they all answer to the famously efficient US Congress.
Administration of Power
There are only two ways to administer power. One way is to have a top-down command structure that acts according to decisions made by the executive. The other is to have a process-based structure, in which all decisions pass through committees and impersonal mechanisms of bureaucracy. The top-down model is the way FDR’s administration ran, it is also how CEOs run companies. This is not to say Congress and the Supreme Court were without their checks on him, but rather that they could not prevent him from achieving his primary objectives.
The Establishment
FDR’s administration is still alive, however, this is strange as he died 80 years ago. Obviously, the government is no longer headed by FDR but power lies in the unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats who fill the various federal agencies he created across DC. Since there is no formal allegiance to the succeeding executives, a decentralized structure of process-based administration has been in practice since FDR’s death. Although newly elected Presidents do receive the Plum book–a list of a few thousand government offices the president may appoint–the rest of these federal workers, who compose the great majority of these agencies, are neither elected nor appointed and often spend their whole career in these agencies. They do not have term limits, they are immovable oligarchs.
This unelected and unaccountable administrative class is colloquially referred to as the ‘deep state’. The decentralized process-based model the deep state exists within has rendered the executive office impotent to opposing its collective will, one which is endlessly left-leaning. Go look at any topic, and notice that Harvard, the US State Department and The New York Times always agree.
Comparison of Monarchy and Oligarchy
With these facts in mind let us return to the comparison between command-based rule, monarchy and process-based rule, oligarchy. The most familiar form of a monarchy to Americans exists in the form of the CEO. Let's compare the effectiveness of SpaceX, a monarchy and NASA, a government agency and oligarchy. Elon Musk is the CEO of SpaceX. Employees bring him a solution to a problem and he approves or denies it. NASA is a government agency. It has no centralized command structure, it is run by administrative approval processes and must submit requests to the federal government to pursue objectives.
The annual budget for SpaceX is $3.1 billion, while NASA has a $24.8 billion annual budget. SpaceX has had 40 successful launches in 2024 alone. NASA has not launched rockets for years because it has none. NASA relies on the effectiveness and innovation of corporations like SpaceX to deliver satellites and future crews.
This is not because NASA is incompetent, it is because it is run the same way our government is, an unaccountable bureaucratic oligarchy. Elon, a monarch, is not subject to the collective will of his board of directors, he is instead held accountable for increasing the value of the company’s assets. NASA wastes money and twiddles its thumbs.
Restoring the American Executive
Now imagine the President as CEO of America. Would he not be charged with increasing the long-term value of the nation's land and citizens i.e. assets? Is this what you think when you imagine presidential administrations? It is more likely you think of a soap opera dramatization of politics and world events for the benefit of their reelection.
All presidents desire to be like CEOs but most are without such power. Over the last 80 years, FDR’s New Deal America has decayed into a bureaucratic nightmare. If a president aligns with the collection of neoliberal bureaucrats, he will face little resistance to collaborating with their will. Presidents like JFK, Nixon, Reagan and Trump, all opposed this establishment in different ways. Coincidentally, some were shot, and others were engaged in lawfare of the highest degree. All were ultimately defeated by the establishment’s homogenous agreement.
Presidents are executives, they should be empowered to act as such while held accountable by the vote. Effective executives do not answer to bureaucrats, lawmakers or arbitrary processes of limitation; it should be the inverse. Accountable monarchy is the solution to combating the establishment’s ineffective and bloated bureaucracy.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author.