It’s...the fantasy of political realism
Depictions of reality usually say more about the depicter than the depicted
This post was going to focus on Vaclav Havel’s tale of the greengrocer in resisting the communist regime, but once again Goodrich failed to file on time. He said something about “setting up the stakes.” So consider this, with apologies, Part One.—Eds.
When news out of Davos reaches escape velocity, it usually involves some degree of schadenfreude. Every January, the Swiss resort town hosts the World Economic Forum, where masters of the universe peacock from their perch in the highest city in Europe. And every January, critics launch fusillades at the keep of elite decision making. You might remember the “angry Dutch historian” Rutger Bregman who went viral from Davos back in 2019 for skewering his fellow panelists for considering every solution to economic inequality under the sun but the most obvious — taxes.
This year was different. The big news out of Switzerland wasn’t ressentiment but “rupture,” the word Canadian prime minister Mark Carney used to describe the break in the international order. Once, free trade, porous borders, and economic integration were the table stakes of elite consensus. This arrangement worked out quite well for those who found themselves at places like Davos, the statesmen, financiers, and intellectuals of a brave new global world. But globalization worked out less well for many others — including, crucially, the industrial working class who once formed the mass base for America’s pseudo-social democracy.
It’s the economic inequality, stupid
Say you’re the Democrats. You lost a shock election in 2016 to a walking billboard you thought the country would reject handily. His administration leaves 500,000 dead in a pandemic, and he still almost wins re-election. In an effort to retain his position, he personally goads on a hostile takeover of the Capitol building that
You know the story: offshored jobs, skyrocketing inequality, inept elites, a country in need of redemption electing a strongman to exact vengeance. Now, Carney announced at Davos, the globalized world is no more. We’re seeing a return to great power rivalry and its attendant fragmentation of the planet into spheres of influence.
Carney, minister-banker-theorist, opened his remarks riffing on Thucydides: “the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must.”1 The line is from the Melian Dialogue, in which Thucydides describes the negotiation between the invading Athenians and the feeble island of Melos in 416 BC. In Thucydides’ telling, the negotiation wasn’t much of one at all. “Submit or be destroyed” was the Athenians’ offer, the Hellenic version of “fuck you, pay me.” The Melians attempted to talk their way out of annexation and are summarily crushed. Carney does not need to be explicit who is who in this analogy, but I will be: America is Athens and Greenland is Melos.
Theorists of international relations understand this millennia-old interaction through a lens they call political realism. Of course Athens wants to conquer Melos! It is in the interest of the strong to dominate the weak. Morality is for individuals, not nation-states. Raw power rules on the stage of global conflict, like an eagle preying on a lamb.2 It’s nothing personal, Jack, it’s just good business.3
Such is “the natural logic of international relations,” Carney says, which for a while was supposedly constrained by the rules-based international order of global market integration. But these rules were more like guidelines, anyway, that mostly went one-way. As Carney admits, “the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” He might just be referring to Trump’s schizophrenic trade war, but you could name any number of examples of the United States using its status as a superpower to exempt itself from the global order over the decades.
If you’ll indulge me in setting aside the insanity of annexing an autonomous territory in 2026, we can celebrate Trump for his honesty. In the past, I’ve described the president as a liar who’s no phony and I think that his impatience for pretense directs his foreign policy as well.
It’s the elite solidarity thesis
Hating on elites is as American as apple pie. There’s a case to be made that populism, not liberalism, built the foundations of the republic. After all, the Constitution begins with a declaration of populist legitimacy: “We the people.”
What’s the point of being a superpower, MAGA asks, if we can’t wield our super power? This question elides the difference between soft and hard power, or maybe, power that poses as process and power that announces itself as such. The former is for elites who know how to win a game playing by the rules that they themselves wrote; the latter is for those who’ve dispensed with the pretense of the game at all.
Trump’s appeal among the masses is exactly why he’s hated by the elite: his clownishness, his obviousness, his impolitesse, his refusal to play by the rules of the game, are all manifestations of brute force that our elites thought they had repressed so they could carry on winning without feeling bad about themselves.
Trump the man is less inhibited than all that. Trump the president endeavors to rule a country that is no less shackled.
But for Carney’s announcement of a “rupture” from the past to make sense, we have to imagine the United States as an entity which really did submit to the rules-based order. I’m not sure the rest of the world would agree.
Saber-rattling and tariff-wielding, then, are less a reversion to the mean of political realism’s “natural logic” and more the mask coming off the rules-based international order….like a smiley face from a shoggoth.4
There are people who think the lie of globalization finally being exposed is unequivocally good — on the right, because it unfetters America from paying tribute to international mores, and on the left, because it reveals the US as the “dying empire led by bad people” it really is. I’m more ambivalent. If declarations of universal rights are fictions used to justify western hegemony, then they may prove useful fictions. The realization of that which does not yet exist always takes a bit of fantasy.
Ultimately, the political realists who insist that “might makes right” are locked in another fantasy in which power is reducible to bombs and levies. Depictions of reality usually say more about the depicter than the depicted.5
The massacre at Melos, after all, didn’t turn out so good for the invaders. Athens, that birthplace of democracy, overextended itself in its conquest of the Aegean. The year after the siege, the city-state invaded Sicily, lost much of its navy, and retreated in defeat. Athens’ great enemy, Sparta, rose as the dominant power in Greece. It’s possible that Thucydides, himself an Athenian general, wished to emphasize just how unrealistic Athens’ assessment of political reality was.
Trump is quite good at forcing people to adjust to his version of reality — strength of arms will do that. But then you start to believe your version of reality.
That is moment when your enemies can exploit the distance between fact and fiction. Carney thus offers his own version of political realism: “we actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”
This is the fantasy/strategy heuristic in action. It begins with honesty about where we derive our power and the bravery to pick it up and wield it.
Or, from the Loeb Classical Library, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.
The image is Nietzsche’s, from The Genealogy of Morals, I.13.
I learned that this is basically stealing a line from Michael Corleone in The Godfather, but what’s the difference between pirates and mobsters and governments and colonial shipping empires anyway.
sorry I really love the shoggoth thing.
Appeals to natural, biological, or otherwise inevitable reality make me queasy. I’m reminded of a line from Capitalist Realism (about recycling, funnily enough): “The demand…is precisely posited as a pre- or post-ideological imperative; in other words, it is positioned in precisely the space where ideology always does its work.” Where reality is, there shall ideology be.