I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long?

Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that. Every word is calculated for political advantage. But the question is, whose advantage? I am not entirely sure. I am confident, though, that Axelrod’s breathtaking admission was part of the next step in resetting the political chess board. It was another stage in the emergency effort at damage control that the shadowy cadre of people who actually run the United States have been undertaking ever since the full magnitude of Joe Biden’s incompetence became manifest.

Back in March, I predicted that the Democrats were prepping to eject Biden. One sign of that, I said, was the fact that elements of the regime-propaganda secretariat — in this case the New York Times — had suddenly gone off the reservation by admitting that Hunter Biden’s “Laptop from Hell” was not “Russian disinformation” as they and all their cohort had insisted, but was, in fact, the real deal. And not just the salacious stuff about Hunter’s “private” life, but also all the possibly criminal stuff about Chinese involvement with the Bidens’ finances and, especially, Joe Biden’s personal involvement with various schemes involving millions of dollars.

Why would the Times admit such a thing? For the same reason that David Axelrod would make his admission about things spinning “out of control” and Biden being “not in command,” i.e., bonkers.

One of the big problems for the Dems is that before they can do something about Biden himself, they will need to do something about his cackling number two, Kamala Harris. It was the same sort of problem they faced when the regime decided to jettison Richard Nixon. The junta could easily mount televised congressional hearings and cashier Nixon. But then Spiro Agnew, his vice president, would slide into the top spot. That was unacceptable. So the first task had to be to nobble Agnew. Agnew made this easy because there were pictures of him accepting paper bags of cash in exchange for political favors. It will not be so easy with Harris. Her corruption is of a more systemic but less obviously criminal sort.

In one sense, alas, it doesn’t really matter who is tapped to star in the roles of chief and adjutant puppets. As things are constituted now, any likely successors to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be just as beholden to the deep-state regime narrative as they are.

We got a little glimpse into the engine room of that operation when Brian Deese, Biden’s director of the National Economic Council, defended the administration’s disastrous energy policy. So gas is $5, $6, $8 a gallon. What’s the administration’s response to that, a CNN reporter asked Deese? “This is about the future of the liberal world order,” Deese replied, “and we have to stand firm.” The “future of the liberal world order”: what would that be? Why, that would be the Davos-approved global world order in which national sovereignty is diluted and the world’s self-appointed elites are in charge of… well, everything.

Yes, the green, sexually fungible, racially-obsessed agenda will hurt a lot of people. Among other things, it will lead to what one of Obama’s chief science advisers called the “de-development” — that’s Newspeak for “impoverishment” — of the United States. But here’s the thing to appreciate. Factota like Deese are not troubled by the suffering of ordinary people. Indeed, they approve of a certain amount of suffering. Suffering produces dependency, and dependency is an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace.

The point, of course, is never to end the dependency. The point is to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great act of political legerdemain. I suspect that Biden has outlived his plausibility and will soon be retired. Maybe Loopy Liz Cheney will switch parties and run for the Democratic nomination. Maybe she will contrive some way to have the January 6 Committee simply appoint her president. After all, she has already told us who cannot, must not, be president: Donald Trump. If she can do that, who’s to say she cannot have herself appointed by acclamation?

You scoff. But just wait: there are a lot of surprises in store.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2022 World edition.