There's an old joke in the newspaper business, now immortal on the Internet:
“The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don't really understand The New York Times. ... The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country, and they did a far superior job of it ... .”
And so on.
But the joke is on us. You see, no one is running the country.
I don't mean that as a knock on President Obama. No president “runs” America because the government doesn't run America — and the president barely runs the government. He can scarcely tell his own employees what to do. Civil service laws and union rules make it darn near impossible to fire even grossly incompetent employees for anything short of pederasty or murder.
At the federal level there are three branches of government and each one monkey-wrenches the other, all the time. Meanwhile, there are 90,056 local governments in the United States, by the Pew Charitable Trust's count.
What the joke gets right is that lots of groups think they should be running the show. But they all resent the fact that they're not. From Ivy League eggheads to Wall Street fat cats, everyone talks like a backseat driver to a driver who isn't there.
Listening to the Democratic Party or, say, the editors of The New York Times (tomayto-tomahto, I know), you'd think the Koch brothers owned America. Of course, if they did, they wouldn't be spending so much money on elections, would they?
Meanwhile, for every rich conservative out there, there's a rich liberal cutting checks, too. In other words, the 1-percenters who supposedly run everything aren't some homogenized class of economic overlords; they are, in fact, at war with each other.
The notion that there's a class or group of people secretly running things is ancient. It was old when the Roman consul Lucius Cassius famously asked, “ Cui bono?” (“To whose benefit?”). We seem to be hardwired to assume there are no accidents, that the world is the way it is because people — hidden people — want it that way.
Today, on the left, such thinking has become institutionalized. When the champions of social justice can't find an actual culprit, the villain becomes systemic racism or sexism or white privilege. There is always evil intentionality lurking somewhere, like a ghost in the machine.
The right has its bugaboos, too. For instance, there are many who think the mainstream media are biased (they are) and that their bias is somehow centrally orchestrated (it isn't).
I think some people are scared of the idea that nobody is in charge, in part because they want someone to blame for their problems. Others don't like this notion because they have an outsized faith in the power of human will. If villains aren't to blame for our ills, then some problems cease to be problems and simply become facts of life.
Me? I like knowing no one is running things because, for starters, it means I'm free.
Jonah Goldberg is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior editor of National Review.
