They're just figurants

I'd argue the opposite tbh.

These people often present themselves as bumbling idiots and "the everyday man" but if you look at their credentials, it's pretty obvious that they are about as every day man as Eton-alumni Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg, who had his nanny drive him around in the family Bentley while he was campaigning.

I think this is the central conceit of liberal democracies in the western world - every interface that you have with the government is slow, clumsy, bureaucratic and ultimately borderline incompetent. Politicians have learned to play into this charade as well. This is partly to make you feel as disempowered as possible - what good is lodging a complaint when it's probably going to filter its way to a petty bureaucrat in 6 months who will respond with a proforma letter, misspelling your name and sending the letter to your neighbour instead of your home address only for your complaint to end up in a yearly report that gets presented to a middle manager who will do nothing about it? Why strive for anything better in any way? This is the best we've got, this is the best it will ever be - this is the end of history. Even if we achieved what those radical college students want it would all go straight to hell because every government is just as incompetent as the other, right?

Except forget to file your taxes or start doing something sketchy that I'm not going to mention and you'll quickly learn that there's two faces to the government - the DoD, the State Department, the IRS, the ATF, of course the FBI and CIA... all of these kinds of parts of the government are brutally efficient in what they set about achieving, although sometimes that means the FBI is incompetent at prosecuting Epstein or the DoD is incompetent at basic bookkeeping and I'd argue that's them being ruthlessly efficient at not doing what they're supposed to be doing because it serves a higher purpose of the state. (I guess it's worth noting here that the US Armed Forces also use the same strategy of inculcating a sense of incompetence and powerlessness in the lower ranks of their cannon fodder so just because you've heard serious, reputable complaints about the DoD doesn't mean that it's not playing this same game.)

Anyway, blah blah blah... I just wanted to point out that there's zero chance that Obama wasn't aware of the ways that he, a Harvard-qualified constitutional lawyer, was directly violating the constitution and so on.

I think that there's an exception here that leaders like Biden and Reagan are obviously Weekend-At-Bernies'ed by more influential caretakers of government and that someone like Trump was almost certainly manipulated by these same figures or people in the same sorts of roles. But I'm deeply skeptical about this impression of the bumbling politician or the government which is only capable of lurching from one seeming failure to the next when we see the ruthless efficiency from the same government when it comes to imperialism, stripping people of their rights, foreign meddling, oppressing minorities, and the whole neoliberal agenda.

Sorry for ranting and I don't mean this reply to drag you in any way, but I feel like I hear these two messages from progressive liberals the most - that capitalism is broken and the government is incompetent - and I am of the opinion that these two key messages are a few of the fundamental myths that liberalism deploys to curtail people who would otherwise become radicalised. It's super easy to adopt these messages unconsciously because they are the background radiation of bourgeois democracy but I think that just like how capitalism is working just the way it's supposed to, so too is government incredibly efficient - even when it's using the guise of incompetence to achieve its ends.