Marathe and Steeply on choosing (pp. 319–320)
Someone who had authority, or should have had authority and did not exercise authority. I do not know. But someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what.
Context
Marathe builds his indictment of the U.S. on an image of paternal abdication. The nation didn't fall to an outside enemy; someone with authority — someone who "should have had authority and did not exercise" it — let the people forget how to choose, and the forgetting is the death. It's the father-wound transposed to a whole culture: not cruelty but a failure to guide, an authority that declined to be one. The state that results, "l'état protecteur," is the substitute that steps into the vacuum a real father would have filled — the same structural move the theme tracks in Schtitt and the coaches, argued here at the scale of a country that raised itself.