In times of crisis, a certain sort of cynicism tends to set in: a citizenry’s belief that, despite feeling dissatisfied with the state of affairs or the leadership of the country, none of it actually matters. Because surely, those who rule us have a plan. Even when a political class is teetering on the brink, this automatic faith in its competence is enough to keep people from grabbing their pitchforks.
It is for this reason that the current political crisis playing out in the United States might end up being one for the history books. As far back as the 2020 election, there had been whispers about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. Since then, supporting evidence continued to mount — until 27 June, when the President’s house of cards came crashing down.
A fortnight after that wretched debate, the Democratic Party has passed through a stage of shock, then grief, only to now arrive at a determination to push Biden out. Polling is now showing that an increasing number of Americans believe Biden is too old to stand; party donors are in revolt; and senior Democrat lawmakers are publicly urging the President to resign. As the trickle of leaks from the White House increasingly turns into a deluge, the picture that emerges is one of a collapsing administration.
Yet the real crisis at the heart of the American political system is not the punctured pretence of Biden being able to run things. Rather, the problem is almost the opposite: it’s now become clear that nobody is doing the job for him. Protected in the White House by his disgraced son-turned-gatekeeper Hunter, and powered by the conviction that the presidency is his God-given right, Biden, somehow, is still the one calling the shots.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise: in America, the President is the head of the executive branch of the government, the only person with the authority to give orders to — and coordinate with — every branch of the executive apparatus. If he does not do this job, nobody else has the formal authority to step in: the Treasury Secretary, for example, cannot simply decide to give orders to the Pentagon.
Nor is this a situation lacking in historical precedent. In 1848, the Austrian Empire faced an incredibly serious set of crises, after a string of revolutions in Italy, Hungary and even Vienna threatened to tear apart the entire empire. The Emperor of Austria, Ferdinand I, was severely disabled since birth, and couldn’t be expected to navigate this crisis. Beyond his mental infirmity, simple day-to-day activities would trigger extremely serious epileptic seizures. In 1831, after Ferdinand was wed to Princess Maria Anna of Savoy, he suffered five seizures as he tried — and ultimately failed — to consummate the marriage.
But because the Emperor was the head of the Austrian state, his inability to do his job led to the various people underneath him picking contradictory policies and fighting factional battles against each other. As Prince Klemens von Metternich and Count Franz Anton von Kolowrat-Liebsteinsky — the two most notable members of the government at the time — attempted to increase their dominions, Austria see-sawed dangerously back and forth between one set of incompatible policies and another, even as the crises continued to fester. Armed struggle was breaking out in Italy, the Czechs were talking about independence, the Hungarians were clearly moving towards breaking free from Habsburg rule, and the streets of Vienna were filled with demonstrators and barricades. An impotent Ferdinand could do nothing about any of this, and the people who were supposedly running Austria on his behalf were too busy feuding to notice.
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