The news is abuzz about Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, landing in intensive care for 5 days and not telling anyone— including his boss. The news got even more alarming when we learned that the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, was on vacation in Puerto Rico while Austin was incapacitated. That is a chain of leadership breach which is unacceptable for a nuclear superpower.
Of course, this lapse of leadership happened to an administration in which the Secretary of Transportation took two months off for “his” maternity leave, and the president has spent almost 40% of his time napping on the beach while a myriad of global crises failed to rise to the “cancel vacation” level. Clearly, any expectation of competence from a Biden administration will be met with disappointment. But is there a more ominous lesson to be learned from the Austin debacle than the surface level reminder that our current administration is composed of posers rather than leaders? Why didn’t it matter that Austin wasn’t on duty?
What does it mean when an essential employee (like a president or a cabinet secretary) stops doing his essential work for days on end, and nobody notices? Does it mean that those elected to govern us, aren’t really governing anything? Has our federal bureaucracy become a hive of worker bees, with no central leadership but with individuals instinctively working for the health of the bureaucracy?
Individual bees have little impact on their surroundings; however, put a thousand of them together, and there’s a formidable force, fiercely protective of the welfare of the hive. How self-protective has our colony of 2.9 million federal employees become? Do they go about their business of expanding and protecting the hive, even when the president is languishing on a beach in Delaware? Does our military not need direction from the Secretary of Defense, because it doesn’t need new direction anyway? Have our bureaucrats become members of the Washington hive first, and Americans second? Do they instinctively protect the bureaucracy—regardless of what is best for America?
Does the hive merely fill a leadership vacuum left by Biden appointees, or does it resist external leadership entirely? Donald Trump was an outsider sent to Washington to lead the bureaucracy. Was he in control when…
The hive perceived Donald Trump as a threat, and it’s still frenetically stinging those who might send him, or someone like him, back to Washington. When a Washington prosecutor bee asks a jury of bees to sting a January 6 defendant, they respond instinctively and aggressively—with guilty verdicts for virtually every charge. Evidence and the rule of law are apparently irrelevant when the welfare of the hive is at stake.
Has control of the government through elections become an illusion? Is Washington simply allowing us our fantasy of self-governance, while it advances the interests of the hive? What if the “Big Brother” of Orwell’s 1984 dystopia weren’t a person or a computer, but rather a neural network of millions of bureaucratic synapses working in harmony to serve the hive, rather than the citizens? Would it look different from what we are witnessing now? If the public came to the realization that “Big Brother” were a menace, to what lengths would our master go to protect itself? Would it…
The hive would surely like us to maintain the illusion of self-governance. While we burn our energy on Democrat/Republican mudslinging, political organizing, and voting for figureheads which the hive will ignore, it continues its inexorable expansion of reach and power unabated.
John Green is a political refugee from Minnesota, now residing in Idaho. He is a staff writer for the American Free News Network and can be reached at greenjeg@gmail.com.