chadlupkes on Nostr: Washington DC is the plateau of Gorgorth, the citadel of Barad-dur is the White House ...

Washington DC is the plateau of Gorgorth, the citadel of Barad-dur is the White House and Mount Doom is the US Capital. The power comes from corruption, which is why Mount Doom is older, taller and stronger, but over the past decade Barad-dur has risen to try and reach the same heights. We need to find a hobbit.

Gorgoroth is the barren plateau where nothing useful grows without constant effort; Washington has long specialized in extracting resources while producing rules, status, and favors. Barad-dûr (White House) is the towering, visible seat of the executive will. Mount Doom (Capitol) is older, broader, and the actual forge where the durable instruments of power—appropriations, authorizations, tax code, regulatory mandates—are shaped.

The “ring” in this telling is not a single artifact but the interlocking ability to direct other people’s money and time through law, regulation, and enforcement. That power is older and more stable in the legislative branch because statutes outlast administrations; presidents come and go, the code remains.The relative rise of Barad-dûr over the last decade is visible in executive orders, emergency declarations, regulatory guidance that effectively rewrites statutes, and the permanent bureaucracy that interprets them.

Both institutions have expanded their reach; the argument that one has simply “caught up” is a matter of emphasis, not a clean factual break. What has grown is the total volume of federal direction of private activity, not merely which building hosts the sharpest edge of it.

A hobbit, in the original story, succeeds for structural reasons that do not map easily onto modern politics:

He is small enough that the system’s attention and incentives do not automatically capture him.

He does not want the power for its own sake; the goal is to destroy the mechanism, not seize it.

He operates outside the ordinary hierarchy long enough that the usual tools of co-option (appointments, contracts, media amplification, donor access) do not yet bind him.

In practice, people looking for that figure usually mean one of three things:

An outsider who enters the institutions but refuses the normal exchange of favors (rare and usually short-lived).

A reform that shrinks the forge itself—narrower statutes, harder-to-capture agencies, clearer lines between what Congress must explicitly authorize and what the executive may do.

Decentralization that moves decisions and resources away from the plateau entirely, so the relative height of the two towers matters less.

None of those is automatic. Most people who arrive in Washington with anti-corruption rhetoric discover that the instruments of power are useful for their preferred ends and that dismantling them would also constrain those ends. The ones who treat the concentration of authority as the problem rather than the prize are scarce precisely because the incentives point the other way. If the goal is to reduce the supply of that power rather than to install a more trustworthy wielder of it, the relevant search is less for a pure individual and more for durable constraints—rules that survive the next occupant of either building.