America is Run By a Movement, Not a Man

Joe Biden has gone from a vacation at a billionaire’s estate in California to a postponed appearance at the DNC convention in Chicago, and then once more to a vacation in Delaware.

The man who formally serves as president of the country barely has anything resembling a public schedule. And his private one appears to be equally empty. Biden is satisfied with occasionally showing up at a few events a week, mumbling something and then moving on.

Meanwhile his VP is on the campaign trail and appears equally out of reach, only now finally agreeing to a single CNN interview with Gov. Tim Walz, her running mate, there to back her up. If Kamala Harris can’t handle a press conference, can she handle running a country?

And if neither POTUS nor the VP are running the country, who or what actually is in charge?

During the summer coup that successfully ousted Biden as the nominee (while leaving him in the nation’s highest office) it was revealed that there hadn’t been a full cabinet meeting since Oct 2003 and that those meetings that occur on camera are almost entirely pre-scripted.

But if the president isn’t running the country, who is? The same people who were all along.

If Biden had been running the country while suffering the profound cognitive failures that his own associates and the media rushed to put out there during the coup, it’s difficult to believe that members of his cabinet would not have invoked the 25th Amendment. Faced with a president incapable of discharging the duties of his office, they would have acted, if not in the national interest then in their own interest to be able to go on performing the duties of their own offices.

Why did cabinet members, top generals, and assorted insiders sit there and do nothing while the man at the top of the command chain could hardly stay up or pay attention to anything?

The uncomfortable answer is that Joe Biden was never running anything. The system is humming along the same way it did before whether he’s in the White House playing with paper clips and telling old stories or lying on the beach in Rehoboth. If that’s difficult to believe, it wasn’t all that long ago that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was on the verge of death, hospitalized and no longer knew where she was, kept signing letters and co sponsoring bills.

No one tried to remove Biden using the 25th Amendment because he didn’t matter anyway.

The presidency has gone from being a tangible exercise of representative power by the people to, like the British monarchy, an impractical but romantic embodiment of an idea. It no more mattered to Biden’s cabinet that he was out of it than 10 Downing Street would especially care whether King Charles III was fatally ill as a practical area of concern for running the country.

America is being run by the same people who were running it all along. Biden only secured the nomination because his people agreed to a deal brokered by Obama that put radical leftist allies of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Obama veterans and assorted organization lefties into power. All of those people represented a set of policies and ideas that they knew how to implement.

Biden’s participation in this arrangement was a largely symbolic one. By becoming the nominee, he got the privilege of making public appearances, delivering speeches and calling himself Mr. President. His was the privilege of being the public face of an agenda that he barely understood. Occasionally his press secretaries, his in name only, had to correct him when he misspoke or misinterpreted what the position of his administration, again in name only, actually was.

In the past it would have been unthinkable to remove a presidential candidate who had won all the primaries, but that was a decade or two ago when presidents were more than just symbols. Biden had not been nominated and had not won because of any policies or ideas, he had just been seen as the candidate most likely to provide a moderate facade for leftist policies.

And it was the policies that mattered. Never the man.

The policies are moving forward much the same way when Biden is asleep or awake, at the nerve center of government or with his eyes shut in the sun. America is being run by the people tasked with implementing those policies. Rather than taking orders from the top, the United States government, such as it is, is a decentralized cell structure of networked radicals.

These radicals are proceeding on their various missions, whether it’s persecuting cops, ‘queering the nuclear arsenal’, stealing money and passing it along to leftist groups or empowering Iran, in much the same way that they have all along. Now they no longer have to worry about being asked to perform for a confused old man at 1616 Pennsylvania Avenue.

America was not being run by a man, but by a movement. The movement is still in charge.

The movement transcends men and women like Barack Obama or Nancy Pelosi. It draws on their leadership, but it is more than they are. The last men who wielded any real control over it were Stalin and Mao, since then the movement has been its own defining force. And it is that very same movement, call it Marxism, Socialism, progressivism, wokeness or any one of a dozen names for the Left, that has been and is still running America. Top to bottom.

The trouble with Biden was that he came too close to exposing the scam. Like an old Soviet election, it became all too obvious that no one was in charge. And someone has to be in charge, not because they actually are, but because their presence helps to hide what is really going on.

Within a matter of weeks, the movement decided to oust the man. Directions were given and suddenly all the stories that were not being run and truths not being told were run and told. Then when the man had bowed to the movement, all the truths were untold again. A new symbol was swapped out for the old. There were shouts of joy as the system had a new facade.

A system, not a woman, backed by a state propaganda machine was installed. Her mission, like that of her old boss, is not to run the country but to distract from what is actually running it.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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