The State of the Union is . . . Alarming

Kevin Williamson, in a recent piece at National Review Online, does not mince words:

The annual State of the Union pageant is a hideous, dispiriting, ugly, monotonous, un-American, un-republican, anti-democratic, dreary, backward, monarchical, retch-inducing, depressing, shameful, crypto-imperial display of official self-aggrandizement and piteous toadying, a black Mass during which every unholy order of teacup totalitarian and cringing courtier gathers under the towering dome of a faux-Roman temple to listen to a speech with no content given by a man with no content, to rise and to be seated as is called for by the order of worship — it is a wonder they have not started genuflecting — with one wretched representative of their number squirreled away in some well-upholstered Washington hidey-hole in order to preserve the illusion that those gathered constitute a special class of humanity without whom we could not live.

It’s the most nauseating display in American public life — and I write that as someone who has just returned from a pornographers’ convention.

That is one way to put it. Now, if it were merely the State of the Union, which most Americans only know is happening because it supplants their typical Tuesday evening programming, this would be a hyperbolic grouse. But the pageantry of the State of the Union is indicative of a much larger problem:

The increasingly ceremonial and quasi-religious aspect of the presidency is unseemly. It is profane. It is unbecoming of us as a people, and it has transformed the presidency into an office that can be truly attractive only to men who are unfit to hold it.

There is, in all of this, an ancient point. It is no coincidence that, according to Plato, democracy degenerates into tyranny. The radical egalitarianism liable to spring up in democracies, gleefully mowing every blade of grass to the same height, also obliterates the hierarchies within a society that resist the rise of an autocrat. Republican (little- “r”) societies possess an inbuilt structural diversity that the monochromatic democracy of the Left eliminates. That drab dream is only a more durable expression of the mass society envisioned by the twentieth century’s most vicious ideologies—Communism, Fascism, Nazism.

Williamson’s point is so important not because the State of the Union is a monarchical bore, though it is, but because the rise of our deified presidency suggests that the degeneration into tyranny might be closer than we care to think.