ROGER KIMBALL: The Rotten Edifice Revealed: In Afghanistan, the technocratic legitimacy of our administrative masters is being exploded.

Incompetence there has been aplenty, and its display is both depressing and ubiquitous. It turns out that the technocratic elite to which we have entrusted our lives, not to mention the lives of the Afghans, is technically maladroit and incapable of effective governance. Our preposterous and “woke” Secretary of Defense epitomized the incapacity a few days ago when he admitted that the United States does not have the “capability to go out and collect large numbers of people.” Hello?

But incompetence is only a surface presentation of a much deeper malady, which revolves around the question of legitimacy.

I mean this in the deepest sense. It’s not just a matter of whether certain rules have been followed in putting various people in office or securing their government sinecures.

That’s one sort, perhaps an essential but ultimately superficial sort, of legitimacy.

What is happening here is something much deeper, more existential, if you will.

What just happened—what is happening still—in Afghanistan is an unfolding horror for the Afghan people.

For the United States, it is a rude snatching away of the curtain of legitimacy.

That curtain concealed a rotting edifice.

Many people have known this for some time. Some are only now, suddenly, aware or half aware of it.

Two people in the latter category are Kamala Harris, vice president of the United States, and Antony Blinken, secretary of state. They were the two most interesting people to watch during Joe Biden’s remarks on Friday. Sporting identical black masks, they stood behind the president, Blinken on his left, Harris on his right. Both clasped their hands nervously in front. The masks accentuated their eyes, which told a tale of confusion, incomprehension, and terror. “What is happening here? What is Joe saying? What does it all mean?” . . .

In the United States, sovereignty has been under pressure for many decades, at least since the Progressive era. I have written about this on many occasions, perhaps most fully in “The Imperative of Freedom,” my contribution to Vox Populi: The Perils and Promises of Populism, and my introduction to Who Rules: Sovereignty, Nationalism, and the Fate of Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. The Constitution vests sovereignty in “We the People” and all legislative power in our duly elected representatives in Congress. But many forces have been eating away at that arrangement. Philip Hamburger, in The Administrative Threat, shows how the abandonment of legislative responsibility by Congress, and its subsequent occupation by the alphabet soup of governmental administrative agencies, decisively undermined the idea of sovereignty envisioned by the founders.

One of the most disturbing aspects of Hamburger’s analysis is the historical connection he exposes between the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century and the growth of administrative, that is to say, extra-legal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. As Woodrow Wilson noted sadly, “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do?

The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson.

How’s that working out?