The President as 'Conductor': The Uniqueness of the American Presidency

The following was written in response to someone who emailed the following: 

The Executive machine goes on with or without Pres.  Deep state running things. The issue is who is at what desks making decisions.  White House staff, {National] Security Council, State, DoD, etc. machinery grinds on.

Policies have been in place, so the machine follows the policies. So, the “no leadership” is misleading. It is a good slogan.

People at the desks grinding on, however.

I’m aware of that. I am saying something completely different. “Government machinery” is true for all governments, and the machinery of the Executive Branch of our government is also only “what it is.” There is, however, a complete difference in the nature of the State, if the American people choose to accept the placing on public display that there is no President in fact. “We wish to inform you that you actually have no President. Any objections?” That is not only an invitation to dictatorship—that is an acceptance of dictatorship. That has, in fact occurred, and that is a shift, and it is a shift that has occurred in the last two months. This occurred from the Presidential debate, through the assassination attempt foiled only by Trump’s not losing his head, followed by Joe Biden’s Soviet-era-style “Resignation.” 

The present situation cannot and will not be properly analyzed by anyone who does not understand this challenge to the Presidency as a qualitative shift in current history. This represents, unless reversed, a specific, recent, ratcheting down of the morality of the American populace. It is not comprehensible, however, to those that operate under the presumption that a “machinery” drives government. It does not. The President may not, and certainly does not, if he/she does not exist. But neither does the “machinery.” Thermonuclear war may well result, while everyone shrugs their shoulder opining about the actually broken-down “machinery,” the idea Oliver Stone sometimes refers to as “the Beast,” as in his {Nixon} film.

This idea is an expression of the weird-but-logical cultural eccentricities of the past half-century, manifest particularly in the pathetically illiterate “educated” classes. For example, the idea of the “conductor-less orchestra.” “No one requires that guy waving his hands around in front of everyone. What instrument is {he} playing? And all of the players have professional levels of competence, know the music, and can use someone like the first violinist to set tempi, and the oboist for tuning.” And, in fact, you have things like the Orpheus Ensemble that do just that. 

There is a problem. The orchestra is an instrument, the which is played by the conductor. The unity of effect required, is not achievable except by means of a singular mind, as the active mental “focal point,” the singular, living intersection of the intent of the composer, each instrumentalist of the orchestra, and each member of the audience. The baton (or hand, without the baton) of the conductor is a metaphor for the direction of the music in physical space-time, even though the music is one idea, that is none of the individual motions (voices) of the instruments, nor the totality of all the motions of the instruments, but “above,” and in that sense, never moves at all. The conductor’s function is to hold  the composition, the orchestra, and the audience, in his/her mind as a unity, and to guide the performance of the  composition to the desired “unity of effect,” as a temporal (“contemporary”) expression of a universal fact.

That is also the function of the Presidency in a Presidential system, and is superior to, commensurate with, and completely different from the functioning of a prime minister, or a doge, a Tribune or Consul, or, of course, that of an individual senator or congressman. That Presidential system requires a vice-president, just as an assistant conductor is required, to substitute at a moment’s notice for this executive function. The purpose of the President is that which Lincoln understood, and that which FDR carried out. The President is the focal point of the Constitution and its related founding documents; the national legislature, meaning both houses of Congress; and the citizenry, supporters, non-supporters and non-voters. There is no capacity for executive action by the individual citizen, unless there is a President through which that citizen can seek to act. The achievements of the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, would never have been possible through the Congress and state legislatures, without a Presidency at least prepared to respond as did JFK to the vents in Birmingham, Ala. on June 11, 1963, one day after his American University speech [which defined a new approach and search for peace and cooperation as the foundation of all foreign policy.]. Those that assert that “anyone of reasonable competence can be inserted into the Presidency, and it would still work,” or “even if you don’t have a President, the machinery still functions,” are clearly tone-deaf to the actual trumpet that needs be sounded, and can only be sounded, through the American Presidency, whatever may be the limitations or even inclinations of the relevant occupant of the office at the time.

This is a minimal, not a high standard for the functioning of the Presidency, particularly after August 6-9 of 1945. The fact that degenerates in the United States and other locations are allowed to blaspheme about how “the American President doesn’t really run anything” as though it were a mere “commonplace statement of fact,” is like the same degenerates’ elevating prostitution to the level of a “viable career choice,” as has in fact been done through “Only Fans” and other platforms. The sophistication of the sophist is not enlightenment, although the Enlightenment, and its intellectual and moral victims, might have thought so.