An elective monarchy is a good way of thinking about the Republic, in which case the rest of the governing apparatus supports or interferes with the monarch.

Of course, they can interfere in part because he’s elected. (But a strong and effective president goes a long way toward choosing his own successor.)

Congress could only ever act coherently when following the lead of the President. With the partial exception of war and foreign policy, the role Congress plays in the System is to provide funds and grants of authority to the Bureau (and feebly harass the President).

Business operates through the parties. The media is an extension of the Bureau.

The university system, the heart of the Cathedral, sends people and doctrine out into the Bureau, the media, Wall Street and Business and Entertainment (the more literal Show).

In return, all these, with greater or lesser intensity, genuflect and donate back to the University.

So, to recreate elective monarchy, some president would have to lead Congress forcefully.

If Congress is led, the Bureau can be reduced to delegation, and subordinated to the Executive (who can reorganize and restaff with allies in Business and the Clergy).

If the Bureau to media pipeline is choked, the media is reduced to reporting on what appears, so the workings of government could only be reported in their visible effects.

That leaves the University. The University is actually vulnerable at many points, but probably no more than in its reliance on foreign students who pay full tuition.

Cut off the flow of foreign students and the university will be thrown into a crisis—it will have to cut a lot of its own “Bureau” so as to cut costs,

and the monarch can help out by relaxing or executive ordering into irrelevance the various anti-discrimination laws that make HR and other university bureaucracies so plump.

The universities will have to lower tuition drastically and recruit lots of intelligent American kids. They could be restored as institutions of inquiry, in a social order that is increasingly reliant upon inquiry.

But there needs to be a counter-system, controlled by the monarch, to advance all these initiatives and then make them stick.

The counter-system can be drawn from within the existing system, in part, and partly from loyalists within the elective monarch’s private resources and, then, his voting base. All of these bodies—Bureau, Business, Congress, Cathedral—can be infiltrated.

Anyone can join a political party and try to rise up in the ranks. Businesses can’t filter so easily; the media and university might be harder, but in those cases perhaps Judas Goats will be more useful.

Anyone participating imaginatively in the model of the transformative executive (the executive who is invulnerable to the Bureau-Media-Congress scandal-hyping because he has severed or tangled the Bureau-Media link) I have been hypothesizing

as part of my own imaginative participation in the current presidency might be a potential infiltrator. In fact, you are one insofar as you are in any one of them,

ensuring that you don’t matter, while finding ways to make things matter otherwise within the show each institution must maintain. This is a form of intelligence.