The Permanent Class: Why Your Vote Doesn't Really Matter
Let’s be honest for a second.
You walk into a voting booth every couple of years. You pull the lever, fill in the bubble, or press the screen. For a moment, you feel a spark of possibility. Maybe this time, things will be different. Maybe this candidate will finally be the one to shake things up.
Then, the confetti settles. The news cycle moves on. And nothing of substance changes.
The wars continue. The national debt gets bigger. The same old policies, the ones that never seem to work for regular people, chug along like a train on a fixed track. It doesn’t matter which party holds the fancy title in the White House. The destination is always the same.
Why?
Because elections are not about changing who holds power. They are about making you think you can change who holds power.
The real game is run by a different group entirely.
The People Who Never Leave
Think of Washington not as a city of politicians, but as a giant company. The President and the members of Congress are like the board of directors and the flashy CEO. They get all the media attention. They give the speeches. They take the heat when things go wrong.
But the day-to-day operations? The long-term strategy? The real work is done by the managers and the senior employees who have been there for decades. They don’t leave when a new CEO comes in. They outlast every boss.
This is the Permanent Class.
It’s a dense network of lifers you’ve probably never heard of. They are the senior staffers who actually write the laws. They are the appointed officials who run the three-letter agencies, shifting from a role in an administration to a lucrative lobbying job and back again. They are the think-tank intellectuals and the consultants who provide the intellectual wallpaper for whatever the establishment wants to do.
They all went to the same handful of schools. They live in the same few neighborhoods. Their kids go to the same private schools. They attend the same cocktail parties. They are not loyal to a party, or to an idea, or to you.
They are loyal to the system itself.
The Bureaucratic Machine
The most powerful part of this Permanent Class is the one we talk about the least: the federal bureaucracy.
These are the people who aren’t elected. You can’t vote them out. They are protected by a system that makes it nearly impossible to fire them. And they have the power to create, interpret, and enforce rules that have the force of law.
When a new law is passed, it’s often just a vague set of ideas. It might be a few hundred pages long. Then, it’s handed over to the agencies. They get to write the real rules—the regulations that determine how the law actually works in practice. This process can generate thousands of pages of fine print.
The real laws aren’t passed by Congress; they are written in quiet offices by people you did not elect and cannot hold accountable.
Who are these rule-writers? They are career government employees. And when the political appointee who is nominally their boss leaves town, they stay. They were there before he arrived, and they’ll be there long after he’s gone, cashing his own lobbying checks.
They have one main goal: to protect and expand the power and budget of their own agency. Their entire incentive structure is to make their department bigger, more involved, and more intrusive, regardless of which party is in power.
The Golden Door
So why does nothing ever change, even when a so-called “outsider” manages to win an election?
It’s simple. The system is designed to co-opt or crush any real threat.
A new president arrives in Washington, full of promises. He brings with him a few hundred people he thinks he can trust to run the government. These people are immediately surrounded by tens of thousands of career bureaucrats who see them as temporary visitors. The resistance is instant and invisible.
The new appointees are told, “That’s not how things are done here.” They are buried in paperwork. Their initiatives are slowed to a crawl by “process.” They are lectured about “norms.”
Most eventually give up. They realize that to get anything done, even a small thing, they have to play ball with the Permanent Class. They absorb the culture. They start to see things from the inside perspective.
Then, when their short time in “public service” is over, they walk through the golden door.
They leave their $160,000-a-year government job and step into a million-dollar-a-year job as a lobbyist, consultant, or board member for the very industries they were supposed to be regulating. Their value isn’t their brilliance; it’s their little black book of contacts back in the agencies they just left.
This is the real reward for playing the game. It’s a cycle that guarantees the status quo. The people who are supposed to be reforming the system are bought off with the promise of a future payday that depends on the system staying exactly as it is.
The Illusion of Choice
This brings us back to the elections themselves.
The two parties work very hard to make you believe the stakes could not be higher. They want you to be terrified of the other side. They use fear to get your vote, your money, and your attention.
But behind the scenes, on the things that truly matter, there is a quiet consensus.
War and military spending. Bailing out large banks and corporations. Eroding personal privacy. Expanding the national debt. On these core issues, the leadership of both parties largely agrees. The debates are about the details—about a 1% difference in a budget or the specific wording of a provision. They fight viciously over cultural issues to distract you from the economic and power structures that they all benefit from.
It’s a brilliant magic trick. They keep you focused on the left hand, waving dramatically, while the right hand is quietly picking your pocket. You’re so busy arguing about the magician’s personality that you never see how the trick is done.
What Can You Actually Do?
If voting for a different politician doesn’t change the system, what does?
First, you have to see the system for what it is. Stop believing the fairy tale. Stop getting emotionally invested in the political sports team you’ve been told to support. This doesn’t mean you stop voting. It means you vote without the illusion that it’s the main event. It’s a gesture, not a lever of power.
The real work happens offline.
Stop looking to Washington for solutions. The people in charge have no incentive to solve the problems that give them their power. Instead, focus on building your own life, your own family, and your own community.
Build a business they can’t control. Learn skills they can’t tax away. Create a network of people you trust. Protect your privacy. Put your time and energy into things that are real and local—your health, your finances, your relationships.
The Permanent Class depends on your belief in their system. When you withdraw your faith, your emotional energy, and your dependence, you take away their power.
They want you to feel helpless. They want you to believe that only they can fix the complex problems of the world.
Don’t believe it. The most powerful rebellion is to build a life so independent and so resilient that their decisions in Washington become irrelevant background noise to your own world.
That is how you opt out of their game. And that is something they can never control.