Watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister to get the British satire of this process. Presidents and politicians in general aren't without agency, but they are at the center of vast machinery that is filled with intelligent and experienced people, people who are basically supposed to be the court advisors of the President, his eyes and ears, but can just as easily manipulate and guide his action. So far I think the Obama book is actually pretty good just because he gives what seem like authentic glimpses into his frustrations with this, even though he also obviously accepted it as indomitable reality a long time ago. He was surrounded by institutions and interests that he clearly felt incapable of realistically fighting because the web of relationships between those institutions and interests, their own spheres of control and power and how they overlapped, constitutes all of American society and government. Somebody like Obama, if you were even to suggest to him the aggressive path out of the insanity of that situation, which in a sense he himself does several times in his book by lapsing into regrets and curses at how powerless he felt, ends up simply feeling vulnerable. I'd guess that even regarding what was past the horizon of that possibility would make someone like Obama see himself as an imposter in his social role, because even as all of society treats his office as though it were the king of America, the uncertainty and isolation of going against the American machine from such a position would suddenly expose exactly how contingent its power is. You could flip from being adored and respected to being treated like Nero in an instant.
So out of self-interest Obama does what every responsible President in America does, what the system expects him to do, he becomes its spokesperson. He becomes the branded image of it, he takes responsibility for its failures and successes for a while. He simplifies the reality of the thing "for the good of the country" or something like that. I'm sure he is a self-conscious asshole too, they all are to some extent, they all must know in a cynical way that a part of the bargain is that in exchange for the prestige and wealth afforded by being a President of the US they have to be secretive and manipulative of the public. I'm sure they all take an amount of pride in being so savvy. But I also think someone like Obama still sees himself as a good person on a certain level, or a well-meaning one, and that he is just a realist. In that sense, being the spokesperson of America is a part of the well-meaning part of it. If he "exposed" the American state for what it was, that would cause chaos, and it would also end his career and maybe his life. He thinks nothing good would come of it. So the responsible thing to do is to pretend and follow the rules of conduct.
The showrunner for Yes, Minister was an adherent to public choice theory, which basically argues that the government can't do anything to improve people's lives because bureaucrats only look out for their own interests and are not responsive to constituents. The response to this observation by proponents of public choice theory is to promote the private sector, which they believe to be responsive to the people through market signals. The politics of Yes, Minister and the Thatcher government were responses to this observation and are driven by similar ideological impulses. Public choice theory is the theoretical basis of austerity. It's unfortunate that an ideology with such pernicious consequences is basically correct at least when it comes to the national security state.
Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.
Watch Yes, Minister or Yes, Prime Minister to get the British satire of this process. Presidents and politicians in general aren't without agency, but they are at the center of vast machinery that is filled with intelligent and experienced people, people who are basically supposed to be the court advisors of the President, his eyes and ears, but can just as easily manipulate and guide his action. So far I think the Obama book is actually pretty good just because he gives what seem like authentic glimpses into his frustrations with this, even though he also obviously accepted it as indomitable reality a long time ago. He was surrounded by institutions and interests that he clearly felt incapable of realistically fighting because the web of relationships between those institutions and interests, their own spheres of control and power and how they overlapped, constitutes all of American society and government. Somebody like Obama, if you were even to suggest to him the aggressive path out of the insanity of that situation, which in a sense he himself does several times in his book by lapsing into regrets and curses at how powerless he felt, ends up simply feeling vulnerable. I'd guess that even regarding what was past the horizon of that possibility would make someone like Obama see himself as an imposter in his social role, because even as all of society treats his office as though it were the king of America, the uncertainty and isolation of going against the American machine from such a position would suddenly expose exactly how contingent its power is. You could flip from being adored and respected to being treated like Nero in an instant.
So out of self-interest Obama does what every responsible President in America does, what the system expects him to do, he becomes its spokesperson. He becomes the branded image of it, he takes responsibility for its failures and successes for a while. He simplifies the reality of the thing "for the good of the country" or something like that. I'm sure he is a self-conscious asshole too, they all are to some extent, they all must know in a cynical way that a part of the bargain is that in exchange for the prestige and wealth afforded by being a President of the US they have to be secretive and manipulative of the public. I'm sure they all take an amount of pride in being so savvy. But I also think someone like Obama still sees himself as a good person on a certain level, or a well-meaning one, and that he is just a realist. In that sense, being the spokesperson of America is a part of the well-meaning part of it. If he "exposed" the American state for what it was, that would cause chaos, and it would also end his career and maybe his life. He thinks nothing good would come of it. So the responsible thing to do is to pretend and follow the rules of conduct.
The showrunner for Yes, Minister was an adherent to public choice theory, which basically argues that the government can't do anything to improve people's lives because bureaucrats only look out for their own interests and are not responsive to constituents. The response to this observation by proponents of public choice theory is to promote the private sector, which they believe to be responsive to the people through market signals. The politics of Yes, Minister and the Thatcher government were responses to this observation and are driven by similar ideological impulses. Public choice theory is the theoretical basis of austerity. It's unfortunate that an ideology with such pernicious consequences is basically correct at least when it comes to the national security state.
Privatization of the state is just one of the many bad solutions you get when you mix "there is no alternative" with bourgeois democracy. I think the whole framing of Yes, Minister, being that politicians and career bureaucrats have a self-interest divorced from the general public, along with the notion that politicians are often kind of bewildered dumbasses who are guided by convenience, is basically correct, but that is just the reality of bourgeois democracy. The problem average people tend to have is that their political imaginations are still constrained by the symbols of the system that exists, so to them "democracy" may as well be roughly equivalent to what we have, if not amenable to some changes. The consequence is that people become politically misanthropic, blaming the sorry state of the country on other average people who are too stupid or vile to vote correctly. But further than that many people begin to feel that, since this is basically what "democracy" is, that government must be fatally flawed in that you can't really trust politicians to not lie to you and cheat you once they get into office for their own benefit. So you come back to neoliberalism/reaganism/thatcherism etc. as an out, because for better or worse it appears that you can't trust the government to actually help you. But of course privatization is no solution, because the market itself is made up of shadowy unaccountable figures out for their self-interest, and their self-interest has no innate moral compass either. More often than not when average people vote for somebody who is shouting about how politicians suck and they want to just leave you alone or whatever, they're voting on the premise that they agree that they don't like politicians much, rather than specifically wanting all the roads to become toll roads. As long as people's ideology is constrained by the state of things now, they'll find themselves confused by (or resigned to) their entrapment in getting toyed with by institutions much bigger than themselves with many motivations to abuse, pilfer and disregard them.