Political Analysis From an Advertising Character

Here are some things that should be made explicit, even though none of it will come as a surprise to anyone, so here’s a current picture of Chris Bray in his uniform of the night:

In Arizona this morning, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors certified the results of the controversial and poorly managed November 8 election in that county. You can watch the whole meeting here, timestamped to the opening, if you have literally hours of your life that you want to dedicate to that task, but spoiler alert: They got yelled at for a few hours, and then they certified the election results. If you want to just use the video below, fast forward — the meeting starts around the 25:00 mark, after a long notice telling you that there’s going to be a meeting.

There are many striking things about this meeting, but here’s the feature that was most telling: The implicit premise of identity running through the meeting is that the county was under attack, and the county supervisors were locking arms with county election staff to fight off the attack. We — county staff and county supervisors — are fighting off the rubes and conspiracy theorists from the public.

The supposed premise of representative government is that the elected representatives are the public, the delegated voice of the people, and they stand watch over the boundaries and uses of power from a mediating position between the public and the administrative machinery of the state. The oversight of a county government by a county board of supervisors is supposed to be adversarial, to at least some degree, as the elected oversight body challenges and tests the premises of the professional bureaucracy.

There is now no way to exaggerate how completely that foundational premise has gone out the window — and yes, you can scroll back up to the picture I put at the top if you’ve forgotten what it was. Angelo Codevilla:

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

In most cases, the elected representatives of both parties have the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. The line between elected county supervisors and the career county bureaucrats is that there is no line between the elected supervisors and the career bureaucrats. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors saw themselves as defending the county government against the people, not speaking for the people in a contest with the county government. If you doubt that, scroll to the end portion of the meeting, with the board of supervisors ranting at the stupid liars from the public who dare to besmirch the integrity of our fine organization. I thought about pulling out specific pieces of video to give examples here, but it’s all too tedious and pathetic to bother. Here’s a little taste, if you feel the need for it:

Brahm Resnik @brahmresnik

BREAKING Maricopa County Board unanimously certifies midterm election results after raucous 4 1/2 hour meeting. #Decision2022 #RuleOfLaw

To put all of that still more directly, we don’t have representative government. The foundational us and them — the people and their elected representatives against the apparatus of the administrative state and its power — has become an entirely different us and them. “Our elected representatives” aren’t.

But anyway.