Why do Americans care so much about the president?

This is just my opinion, but people need a hero. Or a villain. That’s why we craft stories. We invest presidents with the symbolic significance that we require to be able to address life on comprehensible terms. We don’t have a king or queen or anyone who stands as a human representation of the state in America. We have our parade of rotating elected leaders. They’re avatars of ourselves, ostensibly, but they’re also avatars of the unknowable and unseeable complexity that is the state itself. They represent us to the government, but they also represent government back to us. They are the human face of something vast and inhuman.

We need something we can understand. Government is this massive conglomerate of rules and structures and hierarchies and programs and funding and lobbying and administration. All of it built at a scale we can scarcely fathom. It’s a rats nest built out of the collective work of millions of people and trillions of dollars over hundreds of years. It’s simply too big to effectively comprehend or interact with in human terms.

We need something to interact with, something to stand as a proxy for us, that is on human terms. The President does that for us. Especially as the federal government has grown and centralization has increased the amount of government that exists at the most abstracted and distant level, having a human touchstone at that level has become more and more psychologically important. As the Empire grows, Caesar becomes more important as its imperial symbol, not less.

People are looking for something in the President. There’s a real need there, a story they’re looking for. That’s why both of our previous two presidents were more like media stars than they were seasoned technical or political experts. It was the story that mattered, not the expertise or even the person, really. Your job as President is to play a role more than it is to do a job. A role in a great drama, as a key figure in a struggle over the identity of the state. The President is the avatar of whatever story we wish to see embodied or not embodied in the vast abstract landscape of our national structure. He has become, by necessity, a kind of sacred place, where man can meet and see and touch the transcendent.

It is too much a pity that he is only a man.