The following was republished with permission from Armas.
The coup d’état against President Biden illuminates the themes exposited in the essay on Sen. J.D. Vance’s thought and rhetoric, to which I refer the reader. Coup terminology in this case is not overwrought: a sitting president of the United States has had his political future terminated, which means his political present is ended as well. Absent potential there is no power, and therefore no purpose. The logical corollary to the immediate end of his campaign therefore ought to be the immediate end of his presidency.
By the bye, this is Vance’s view as well.
The Managerial Husk
The managerial theory is that the discontinued president may persist in office, fully vested with its prerogatives, by virtue of the nature of the office. This is of course totally fictitious: Joseph R. Biden at midafternoon Sunday lost the ability to do nearly every meaningful thing intrinsic to the presidency, including real cooperation with the legislative branch, persuading the nation to make war, and representation of the whole American people in government. What’s left is a headless apparatus, dominated but not led — ruled but not governed — by the thousands of functionaries of the administrative state. It is a Deist simulacrum of government, the clockmaker having wound the mechanism, which will then inexorably tick forward undirected. But clocks break, God retains active sovereignty, and the American system requires a president.
The putschists who prevailed against President Biden therefore err badly in their assumptions, chief among them the belief that the office, not the man, is the singular thing conferring meaning and therefore power. This is an easily arrived-at error in the fantasyland of propositional civics, which replaces people with concepts, and in fact expects the people to conform to the concept: a coerced reversion to the pre-political state. But the truth is that a nation, contrary to propositionalism’s core thesis, is both man and law, both persons and forms. Moreover, the man and the person are the most important elements. In 1798 a predecessor in the presidency wrote to the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts, then preparing to go to war with the French Republic, reminding its officers that “[o]ur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Solemn affirmations of basic rights are after all commonplaces in the constitutions and laws of nearly every autocratic society.
The existence of the “moral and religious People,” to be sure, requires the very rootedness, cohesion, and shared history that propositionalism consciously overrides.
The Dead Collectivity
Stripped of purpose, the presidency — the sole office and person representing the whole of the American people in the Constitutional order — no longer participates in, and certainly does not fulfill, the Aristotelian telos of the nation. The polity is not merely a collection of persons in a place, but comes into “being for the sake of noble actions.” The president now is permanently neutered in this respect, capable of neither nobility nor action, and so long as he is, so too is the whole nation which he putatively helms. Simone Weil’s L’Enracinement, written in 1943 but published posthumously in 1949, speaks of the nation — a “collectivity” in the words of her translator — as existing to provide “food for souls,” each possessing “no equivalent anywhere in the entire universe,” existing as “the sole repository for the spiritual treasures amassed by the dead … the vehicle through which the dead can speak to the living.” The nation, in Weil’s telling, therefore possesses vitality and Aristotelian purpose by means of its particularity, its specific people, and its history — which is likely the first time a United States senator from Ohio and a midcentury French Christian mystic have ever been accused of agreeing on ontology.
Weil also speaks of malign nations, which, “instead of serving food, consume souls,” or “provide insufficient food,” by which she means failure to provide the cohesion and purpose that a nation ought. “And lastly,” she writes, “there are dead collectivities that do not devour souls but neither do they nourish them. If it is quite certain that they are dead and not a matter of a temporary fatigue, only then should they be annihilated.”
This, the ranks of dead collectivities, is where the United States finds itself under the present regime. The coup d’état of July 21st is merely a dramatic symptom. Note the artifice of it all, shot through with the cant and strictures of propositionalism. We could list the details at length, from the rapid coordination of the involved elites, each pursuing the fiction of reaction to affairs that they themselves authored, to the overthrow of the expressed will of tens of millions of primary voters. That process now lies exposed not as mass democracy, but as mass theater. One of the minor historical ironies here is that when Joe Biden first assumed elected office — a moment in time closer to the existence of a Habsburg Emperor than to now — the American presidential-selection system was undergoing a convulsive change, from party-elder diktat mostly via caucuses, to truly democratic primaries. What we just saw in the coup was supposed to have been rendered impossible back when our grandfathers were in middle age. Now we know better. We saw, and we know.
Most distressing, however, is the nature of the announcement: a post on X from an account widely known to not actually be controlled by the principal. The principal himself, the actual president of the United States, is nowhere to be seen. There is no reason to disbelieve it at this point, and yet it has all the qualities of a National Salvation Committee announcement that the General Secretary has taken ill at his dacha. The state wishes him good health, and perhaps he will return someday.
Coup Accountability
The Americans deserve better, but we do not escape the abyss of the dead collectivity to which propositionalism and its mechanisms have consigned us until we possess a nation that once again grasps its full capacities, and can act toward the nature of nations and peoples. Right now this means moving past this terminated presidency and refusing to accept the lulling falsehood of its endurance to January 2025. That does not just mean ending it — there are processes for that, although their prudence is debatable — it also means ending the power of those who executed this coup. That is no defense of the Biden regime, and still less the man himself, both meeting a richly deserved end on several fronts. One of the death knells of any free society is elite conspiratorialism — my sentiment here is profoundly affected by witnessing it time and again in my Latin American work — and I do not mean mere belief in conspiracies, but actual formulation and execution of them. The coup plotters are protecting themselves now with rapid closing of ranks, and by advancing the candidacy of the vice president, a classic product of propositionalism, a woman from nowhere in particular so unmoored from the grounding and inheritance of American life that she must lie about youthful commonplaces.
A regime opposition worth the name would focus on this with all the power and apparatus at its disposal. Legislative hearings, state attorneys-general inquiries, and ballot access are some of the tools at hand. This is, after all, a coup — and this is still America. The senator from Ohio agrees. What remains is for the Americans to demand it.