Ben, Thanks for this and for taking the objection seriously enough to change the wording. I'll start with the new version, because part of it settles something.
The parenthetical is a real improvement. If the normal institutions are the ones the bourgeoisie uses to resolve its internal conflicts, then Bonapartism is first a breakdown of that function. The class can no longer settle its own quarrels through its own machinery. I'd sign that sentence as written. Then look at what the definition does with the verb. "Delegated or entrusted," with "surrendered" held in reserve. Those three words cover our whole disagreement. A definition that accepts any of them hasn't answered the question of agency. It has left a blank to be filled in case by case. I think that's actually correct, and I'd rather say so openly than leave it in a slash. Your own examples show how to fill it in. The Italian ruling class could pull the plug on Mussolini in July 1943 because there was still somewhere to pull it from. The Grand Council voted against him, the king dismissed him, and the carabinieri made the arrest. Each of those bodies sat outside Mussolini's person and had kept enough standing to act. By 1944 the only thing left outside Hitler's household was a group of officers with a bomb in a briefcase, and they failed. Entrusted power is power that some surviving body can take back. Surrendered power has no one left to reclaim it. That gives us something concrete to look at here. Which institutions outside the President's circle can still revoke anything, and are they gaining or losing that ability? The list I'd start with is the courts, the Senate, the Fed, the officer corps, and the state election administrations. That's what I meant by what to look for in September. I agree prediction is a fool's game. What I wanted from the category was a place to point the instruments. Now, agency. You make the point I find hardest to answer: indecision is itself a decision. I agree, as far as responsibility goes. Nobody who financed both parties for thirty years gets to plead that events simply happened to them. But responsibility and agency can come apart. A class can be fully culpable for an outcome it didn't choose as a class because the organ it would have chosen had stopped working. I think your nervous-system image cuts my way here. If a class needs institutions to sense, decide, and act, and Bonapartism is by definition the moment those institutions fail, then at that moment the class is an animal whose nerves have been cut. Fragments still move. A network, a camarilla, a group chat. Andreessen's network is a good case. It mattered in 2024. But it is one fraction, with interests of its own: venture capital, crypto, and defense tech. It got its pardons and its regulatory relief. In the same period the Chamber of Commerce and a good part of manufacturing spent months asking for relief from the tariffs and mostly didn't get it. A class able to delegate would not be dispensing favors to one fraction while another fraction's objections go nowhere. That is how a patrimonial regime gets staffed, through access to the household, one grant at a time. I'd call that network the retinue's donor wing. I wouldn't call it class thinking. The debt example makes the same point from the other side. IBGYBG, après moi le déluge. These describe a class that knows the bill is coming and cannot organize itself to pay it, because every individual capital and every officeholder does better by discounting a future they won't be around for. I'm less sure it also shows them building a bigger stick and a bigger carrot on purpose. ICE has its own momentum. DSA's growth has causes of its own too, and I'd need to see more before I called it grooming. On the Democrats, the record is closer to what you describe than the party's defenders admit. But two of your examples point toward miscalculation. The Pied Piper memo wanted Trump elevated because the campaign was sure he was the easiest man to beat. That is nearly Papen's error: a small circle convinced it could use the outsider and then discard him. And Trump was prosecuted over January 6. Jack Smith indicted him in August 2023. The real failure was the two years it took to get there, followed by the Supreme Court's immunity ruling in July 2024, which pushed the trial past the election. I'll grant you that ruling. It's the closest thing in the record to an institution of class rule handing the executive something it didn't have. It came from six justices out of one legal movement, which is again a fraction. But it's the strongest piece of evidence for your verb, and I don't have a clean answer to it. What you've shown about the Democrats, I think, is the thing your Draper quote names. The Kerensky principle is a refusal. It explains why the party would rather lose than mobilize and why No Kings got wound down. It doesn't need anyone to pick the winner. A party apparatus afraid of its own supporters, with its own positions to protect, is mechanism enough. The negative choice is well documented. I can't find the positive one. Where I still part company is the two periods, normal times and extraordinary ones. So far the American case runs the extraordinary through the ordinary. No office has been abolished, and nothing has been formally suspended. What has changed is how the offices are held. They are personal grants, staffed from a retinue, answerable to the household rather than to anybody the bourgeoisie uses to settle its disputes. If we wait for the institutions to be swept away, we may miss that they were emptied while still standing. That's why I keep returning to administration over decree and to the Portal. On building institutions of our own, yes, lay out the ideas. My hesitation is that a list like this is mostly people who write, and I don't know that raising the signal among us gets it closer to a class institution. The ones the class already has are the locals. Last time I asked whether anyone here has a line into an APWU or NALC local before November. I still don't know. If the nervous system you're describing started by connecting to one of those, I'd help build it. Patrimonial Bonapartism as a State-Theoretical Category.docx ( https://1drv.ms/w/c/c3598b38f68269be/IQDMYcPP3tPSSJt2ae3N2dMSAXhd_51cYrQyDjb0rcm5ftE?e=HPYWnR ) Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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