My dear president... now is not the time for fear

The ascent of Alexei Navalny is a long, tenuous story, which will now undoubtedly have the glamour of legend, stamped - finally, perhaps inevitably - by the inerasible seal of martyrdoom. 

The 13th president

 

I believe "The 13th president of Finland. I believe Finland now gets a good president for the republic. Alexander Stubb is an experienced, competent person for the job. No more babble." With these words, perennial loser and finalist Pekka Haavisto conceded the second, his fourth, round in a presidential election closely, but not vitriolically fought amidst the cold marking this most northern of republics - bar Iceland - and the tensions between old Suomi and her longtime neighbour rising to new extremes hardly known since the now almost romantic time of war marked by the defence minister's words, that there is space for hundreds of thousands of more Russians, should they choose (or rather he) to cross this frontier now, by his making (or theirs) one with the very close-chested North Atlantic alliance now reaching both frontiers, quite soon I suspect, of smaller Atlantics. With the last ballots counted, the conclusions already drawn from the oft-supreme first round, and remade from the 2018 tally, that Haavisto had lost, and the candidate of unity or unspoken benefit of being everybody's (or close enough) second choice had won, the presidency was - quite historically - restored with a native Swedish speaker for the first time since the Marshal, an era of old, of post-independence now seemingly resurrected in symbology and word as well as in geopolitics. On that note, his words - although not much more popular than this blog - are well considered and enthusiastic and certainly measured to his benefit, 

Leviathan, uplifted by ballots, unconstrained by law

 

President Bukele, not just the last - or, now and again, one of the relatively recent - of colourful characters emerging as if for a party at the modest Sanchez residence (not the lavish one with the winking fish, whether the people of... not-Panama congregate to cherish the end of its strongman benefactor) but a force, as the . This much was clear after a resounding re-election which was nothing if not that, backed by a Lukashenko-like (starting to become a term in my household, I must admit) tally, which in all probability is also just that, and not Lukashenko-like in its conception, or the (not only Belarusian) tendency for early balloting long resting in those jars (but needless, should be questioned without the call of fascism... please) and deplorable in its acuity and margin leaving no . This was a blowout, pure and simple, and a denigration not just of those candidates put out to best this unlikely (?) two-time runner, not merely of those parties bearing the brunt of history, of blood and heavens within and above those who have governed this small, but not insignificant, nation across the decades of, and following, a difficult civil strife better addressed by another term (or terms, frequently used like lashes regarding the Ukrainian case) and bitterness eventually shared and co-habited in the interdependence of a new constitutional order. It was, as has been said before, well before the first ballot had been cast, the date set, the consideration of a candidate already within the presidential palace allowed (!) to pursue this second course in spite of the one-term limit imposed by so many American constitutions, including that of the short-lived (if it lived) Confederate States, and the relaxation demanded by others more liberally, including that of Chile (shaping the fates not just of would-be tyrants, with Eduardo Frei's non-candidacy in 1970 certainly affecting its course well beyond his, natural or otherwise, death) and Brazil (where Lula's ability to run in 2010 and beyond may have steered the big green country clear of o Bolsonarismo, but unlikely a lifelong constitutional term) since Roman times, when re-election was the supreme effort and crown - bar for the now-archaic censorship. 

The Brains (plural) of the Empire

The question of "who governs", full stop, has been a question in focus for sociologists and, in the realm of political science, for those truly seeking to commit (to) contribution. In its aptly more comical version (or am I indulging the politics of the present day?), Goofy answers the question of "who's driving" the car - and more importantly to them, the eponymous trailer - up the precipice with a resounding, if not too reassuring, answer that he - after all - is the man behind the steering wheel. One quick glance, and the accompanying and more infinitely important internal observation that this cannot be the case, and the social convention that lies at the core of the plot of Mickey's Trailer, is all in tatters, and all that is left is the long and painful plummet back to the restoration of normalcy, post-crisis. (Spoiler: The mouse and duck survive unblemished, although other res within the trailer unimportant to the next instalment does not.) 

Goofy's short reign as führer of the trailer and all within, as the viewers even of the ultra-cut edition airing Christmas Eve on Sweden's Channel 1 (still, or should I say without further cuts) would know, is soon re-established and lost yet again despite his desperate efforts, meaning because of them, and 

Who, then, governs this collection of city-states (New York, Rhode Island, frankly Massachusetts) and peasant republics in the Jeffersonian mold, add latifundia dominated by wealthy landowners, and from whence doth this authority, once vested in the federal (as opposed to a confederal, a notion later resurrected) government? Well, apart from the congress disliked to the point of a sixty-percent turnout (during "presidential" Novembers) seeming unfathomable, and betraying a no small amount of disdain and ick going into the ballot box, and the court once revered... mayhaps... but going through a period of liberal excess, into a broadly libertarian guardrail - advancing varying conservative and liberal causes past the velvet rope of said ballot box - into a conservative resurgence either purveying the process of said ballot against judicial overhaul, or the gavel-enforced long-term, but never sufficiently close desire of a Gilead from sea to shining sea (although sparing Catholics, Jews, gays with knots tied, Kanye and Tim and Larry and many others, under the aegis of a seeming non-believer twice divorced and unable to quote scripture, as compared to Atwood's autocratic, genocidal, puritanical, seemingly both collegial and austere Calvinist dysoutopia of New England Talibanism), the presidency has been unhealthily in the focus of the dreams, desires and above all disdains of critics and lovers within this fifth, or sixth party system, with increasing desire for the excesses of power exercised within, and to capture, this office in a most tribal fashion. This trend, and strife, began perhaps - and ignoring the very special and sordid case of Mr. Johnson, and his usually hapless successors - with the impeachment procedure against the liar and cheat Clinton ("president", lest I offend someone else) partly as an attempt to rein in the powers of an office understandably, if not necessarily, expanded to meet the demands of an ever-expanding empire, from the days of firing at Spaniards in order for the talons to embrace Cuba to Trump promising, in phlegm if not in substance, to turn bullets against hapless immigrants speaking the same language (and others reminiscent also of that era, to whose ancestors President McKinley brought the benefits and bayonets of liberty, now to behold his successor decrying proverbial chickens) to so very defensively "hold the border"? (Note, about the not-so-often-pronounced, but ever-present Hitler analogy, the absence of calls for a German-Polish border wall, which to Nazi troops would genially, if not ferociously, have been the foremost object slated for complete annihilation.) 

Who, then, governs this empire? In the garniture, or garnish, adoring his plate there are the usual suspects: The military, police and security apparatus, equally cancerous in its growth (if perhaps beneficially) to feed various, well, conspiracy theorists varyingly on left and right, and the secretaries having previously . Previously, from the objective hindsight of time, we may decry the likes of Stanton, Daugherty and of course Dulles (need I say which brother, or proclaim through your absence of doubt that we are both a "conspiracy-lover/hater" too?) have exerted tremendous power . If that is enough, throw in the name Hoover, and know I speak not of the philantropist and second nonagenarian to have held the supreme office, but the one he served so briefly under. 

The Decline of Empire

The times, as the poet and laureate had it, are a-changing, and nobody - least of all those most fervently declining the proposition - seem to hold against the fact that as a relative, the United States seems less and less the predominant power, and as an absolut, its might may wane as well. 

But consider then two facts, which should be held against such a development. First, the (again, take naught for granted) inevitable decline of the Chinese empire, or the last in a series of installments inevitably, perhaps unenviably, followed by another. At any rate, the debate and scepticism on the long-term durability of Chinese growth under the red yoke (or while tethered behind it) and the . Second, as a sub-point to this, the opposite growth of the American population, both "natively", and through its continued consumption (some would say naively) of labour forces skilled and merely eager, in spite of existing immigration frameworks.