A recent security comprimise of the theme we used to style our site has forced us to makes temporary changes that unfortunately left our site unstyled. As there is no regular management of this site, we are currently deciding how to move forward.
shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner
Elliot Ackerman contributing writer for the New York Timeswrotein a June 4, 2020 opinion piece:
“In Flint, Mich., last week, Sheriff Christopher R. Swanson captured national attention when he made an impassioned statement of support to demonstrators and asked what he could do to help. They chanted for Mr. Swanson and his officers to “walk with us” in protest. They did.”
“In cities across the country — New York, Savannah, Ga., Coral Gables, Fla., Santa Cruz, Calif., and elsewhere — groups of police officers took the opportunity to march, kneel or otherwise express the conviction they shared with the protesters, that brutality should have no place in policing. More examples are being documented at #WalkWithUs on Twitter.”
Police officers like those with the moral courage to kneel and walk with protesters will be part of the solution, writes @ElliotAckermanhttps://t.co/n3brr46L5D
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) June 7, 2020
This is how Miami police met crowds protesting the death of George Floyd and the scourge of racism in America.
This is how you bridge the divide between police and the community it fails to serve. Recognizing that there is a problem and CALLING FOR STRUCTURAL CHANGE. pic.twitter.com/h00ZVjQLl5
In New Jersey the police officers are protesting with the people shouting “no justice no peace”.
This is how it should be, every police station should be walking with their community. #WalkWithUs ???? pic.twitter.com/uzyuRgPcR0
shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner
On Wednesday, June 03, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter adding his voice to the sentiments shared by past leaders by releasing a statement expressing his “great sorrow and disappointment” at having to repeat a declaration he made during his 1971 inaugural, gubernatorial address: “the time for racial discrimination is over.”
With deep respect to those involved and those affected, we share his thoughtful and important message with our readers…
Jimmy Carter’s June 03, 2020 message:
Rosalynn and I are pained by the tragic racial injustices and consequent backlash across our nation in recent weeks. Our hearts are with the victims’ families and all who feel hopeless in the face of pervasive racial discrimination and outright cruelty. We all must shine a spotlight on the immorality of racial discrimination. But violence, whether spontaneous or consciously incited, is not a solution.
As a white male of the South, I know all too well the impact of segregation and injustice to African Americans. As a politician, I felt a responsibility to bring equity to my state and our country. In my 1971 inaugural address as Georgia’s governor, I said: “The time for racial discrimination is over.” With great sorrow and disappointment, I repeat those words today, nearly five decades later. Dehumanizing people debases us all; humanity is beautifully and almost infinitely diverse. The bonds of our common humanity must overcome the divisiveness of our fears and prejudices.
Since leaving the White House in 1981, Rosalynn and I have strived to advance human rights in countries around the world. In this quest, we have seen that silence can be as deadly as violence. People of power, privilege, and moral conscience must stand up and say “no more” to a racially discriminatory police and justice system, immoral economic disparities between whites and blacks, and government actions that undermine our unified democracy. We are responsible for creating a world of peace and equality for ourselves and future generations.
We need a government as good as its people, and we are better than this.
shared by A. Lawrence Chickering and James S. Turner
On Tuesday, June 02, former U.S. President George W. Bush released a statement expressing his, and his wife Laura’s, “anguish” at the “injustice and fear” witnessed in our cities’ streets – calling on “America to examine our tragic failures”.
With deep respect to those involved and those affected, we share his thoughtful and important message with our readers…
George W. Bush’s June 02, 2020 message:
Laura and I are anguished by the brutal suffocation of George Floyd and disturbed by the injustice and fear that suffocate our country. Yet we have resisted the urge to speak out, because this is not the time for us to lecture. It is time for us to listen. It is time for America to examine our tragic failures – and as we do, we will also see some of our redeeming strengths.
It remains a shocking failure that many African Americans, especially young African American men, are harassed and threatened in their own country. It is a strength when protesters, protected by responsible law enforcement, march for a better future. This tragedy — in a long series of similar tragedies — raises a long overdue question: How do we end systemic racism in our society? The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving. Those who set out to silence those voices do not understand the meaning of America — or how it becomes a better place.
America’s greatest challenge has long been to unite people of very different backgrounds into a single nation of justice and opportunity. The doctrine and habits of racial superiority, which once nearly split our country, still threaten our Union. The answers to American problems are found by living up to American ideals — to the fundamental truth that all human beings are created equal and endowed by God with certain rights. We have often underestimated how radical that quest really is, and how our cherished principles challenge systems of intended or assumed injustice. The heroes of America — from Frederick Douglass, to Harriet Tubman, to Abraham Lincoln, to Martin Luther King, Jr. — are heroes of unity. Their calling has never been for the fainthearted. They often revealed the nation’s disturbing bigotry and exploitation — stains on our character sometimes difficult for the American majority to examine. We can only see the reality of America’s need by seeing it through the eyes of the threatened, oppressed, and disenfranchised.
That is exactly where we now stand. Many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason. Black people see the repeated violation of their rights without an urgent and adequate response from American institutions. We know that lasting justice will only come by peaceful means. Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress. But we also know that lasting peace in our communities requires truly equal justice. The rule of law ultimately depends on the fairness and legitimacy of the legal system. And achieving justice for all is the duty of all.
This will require a consistent, courageous, and creative effort. We serve our neighbors best when we try to understand their experience. We love our neighbors as ourselves when we treat them as equals, in both protection and compassion. There is a better way — the way of empathy, and shared commitment, and bold action, and a peace rooted in justice. I am confident that together, Americans will choose the better way.
Billionaire donors and political adversaries are laying down arms and joining forces
by A. Lawrence Chickering & James S. Turner
On April 24, the day the U.S. death toll from coronavirus topped 50,000, a dozen billionaire political donors gathered by video with business leaders, foundation chiefs, scientists, advocates, and political strategists, and laid out a bold plan called IN THIS TOGETHER, to transform the business of politics in post-COVID America.
The group was convened by Dallas real estate scion Trammell S. Crow to bring together major donors to both parties, in a rare effort to reduce political polarization and work across partisan lines to solve problems like climate change. These donors and their peers are expected to contribute $30 billion to presidential campaigns this year, often against each other, in a political arms race that shows no signs of abating. Crow’s objective: to reduce the spend on political warfare, and redirect billions toward solutions that can unite a governing majority of Americans from the left to right.
“We can’t meet this crisis or any future one as a divided nation,” Crow reminded his guests. “We’re not enemies. We’re a family with differences to work through. Polarization is our real enemy.”
For ten years, Crow and other high net worth donors in the virtual room had independently invested well over $100 million to help reunite Americans on issues like the environment, education, and democracy reform. Most of the time, they failed – polarization and gridlock are built too deep in today’s politics and media. Sometimes they succeed – spectacularly.
But at this April 24 meeting, two sets of donors reported on successful models they had separately developed to win elections and advance causes, not by dividing Americans into polarized silos on the far left and right, but by helping them unite across the broad mainstream where 70%+ of the Constitutionally defined American electorate resides.
Their strategies mark a departure from politics-as-usual, where strategists target easy-to-trigger voters at the extreme ends of the spectrum, then add on less strident supporters who are more repelled by the other side’s extremists than their own.
Digital media and big data have intensified the divide. By identifying the biggest fears and deepest prejudices of specific voter segments, strategists can trigger such repulsion at one candidate that voters will readily support the lesser of two evils. That drives turnout among hardened ideologues. But it divides and marginalizes the 70% broad middle – the 7 in 10 voters who are partisan but pragmatic. Most strategists discount them because they are less dogmatic and harder to trigger than those with fixed opinions. It’s simply more cost-effective to motivate the hard-core left to vote down the hard-core right, and vice-versa. Even if they’re frustrated with their own standard-bearers, there’s no question which party’s candidate they’ll vote for.
That strategy drives revenue for pollsters, messagers, and strategists on both sides. But it accelerates a political arms race that is driving campaign costs to astronomical heights.
More worrisome, it undermines those who would rather solve problems than sow discord. It elects candidates beholden to vested interests for dollars and true-believers for votes. Constrained by these two forces, it’s practically impossible for them to legislate. Bipartisan agreements are mostly off the table. Politicians must speak to a base that demands change, while they act to protect a status quo that likes things much as they are.
That makes genuine problem-solving difficult. Evidence-based reform – say, protecting climate, improving schools, or preventing pandemics – requires massive investments by foundations and individual donors willing to outbid the interest groups and offset the ideologues just to get a fair hearing.
But in California, one set of donors has taken a different approach. In campaigns for candidates and ballot measures, they don’t use trigger language or fear tactics to activate a narrow ideological base. Instead, they reach out to eight definable voter segments they call Solution Voters and focus on linking them together on common ground. In highly competitive races, the approach consistently draws at least 15% of once-partisan voters across party lines to elect problem-solvers over polarizers – an almost unheard-of shift.
The strategy helped pass ballot measures to end gerrymandering and open primaries in California, and was essential to the bipartisan agreement that renewed the state’s cap-and-trade climate law, despite intense opposition from ideologues on both sides.
At more than twice the cost of triggering ideologues, Solution Voters used to be expensive to identify and mobilize. But “big data” is changing that. With sophisticated predictive modeling, strategists can identify Solution Voters with 87% accuracy. By reaching a few thousand in a competitive district, they have defeated better-funded but more polarizing candidates.
To take that capacity national, a second set of donors have built a database platform to mobilize voters they call “bridge-builders” and “problem-solvers.” Called Citizen, the database platform includes 270 million Americans, including all 240 million eligible voters, plus 30 million additional influencers. Citizen’s funders plan to mobilize Solution Voters to swing primaries away from polarizers so that when voters mark their ballots in the general election they have at least two problem-solving candidates to choose from.
At the April 24 roundtable, these two donor communities and others joined forces to take their approach national. This Fourth of July, they will launch a cross-partisan recruitment campaign called In This Together. Their audience includes 98 million voters dissatisfied with both parties – especially 45 million bridge-builders and 14 million problem-solvers. By growing a new base of Solution Citizens resistant to ideological litmus tests and interest group manipulation, they hope this new business model will elevate politics and shift influence to the broad 70% base of voters ready to get things done.
Crow doesn’t fit the stereotype for a wealthy Texas political donor. He calls himself an “endangered species:” a Republican environmentalist. His biggest passion is EarthX. Now the world’s largest environmental exhibition on the planet, EarthX is held each Earth Day in Dallas. Crow had planned his biggest EarthX yet this year for the fiftieth Earth Day. He wanted to prove that conservative middle Americans love the planet just as much as coastal progressives.
Then came COVID-19.
Crow sees the pandemic through an ecological lens, as a warning sign of what happens when the planet’s life support systems are strained by the global economy that is too uniform, tightly-connected, and consumptive. Without the diversity to stop global contagions – biological, environmental, and digital – humanity can’t last long.
“The virus is a lesson from nature,” Crow and his coauthor, Bill Shireman, write in their book, In This Together. “If we ignore the lesson and double-down on mass global consumerism, we will lose our prosperity and miss our chance to step forward into a richer, more diverse, resilient, and lasting civilization.”
In This Together launches on Independence Day July 4, with the book, online videos, social media campaign, and a Declaration of Interdependence that recognizes the importance of combining the best qualities of the political right and left to tackle causes ranging from COVID and climate change, to education and justice reform, to prosperity and job creation.
The 70% that do not register as either Democrats or Republicans make their political statement in a voice so scattered that political leaders do not, or pretend to not, hear it. In This Together offers an opportunity for that voice to be focused and heard.
We see In This Together as a powerful transpartisan initiative with a significant possibility to influence events. We plan to watch it carefully and report on its progress between now and inauguration day 2021.
To mask or not to mask, that is the question. The current public debate on the Coronavirus Pandemic features two conflicting narratives: 1) Minimize infections to prevent as many deaths as possible; 2) Let infections spread to build “herd immunity”. This narratives-clash makes it difficult to know how to think about the virus – how to fight it. How we might manage our concerns about it. What ‘public policy’ makes the most sense.
The two narratives, now politicized into partisan cudgels, run in absolutely opposite directions. Before summarizing the clash we note that there appears to be significant agreement (hope) that when (if) we discover a vaccine the problem ends.
President Trump says we will have a vaccine by the end of the year. Public health experts widely agree that this is extremely optimistic. The polio vaccine took five years from recognition of need to creation. Any serious strategy on the Pandemic must move forward without counting on a vaccine anytime soon.
Experts suggest a second intervention – a quick test for infection – might be nearly as effective as a vaccine. Such test might largely overcome the major impediment to re-opening major industries, like sports venues, airlines, restaurants, etc.
If everyone seeking to enter a restaurant, airplane, or ball game is tested, the argument goes, and only those testing negative for the virus are admitted, the problem vanishes in those industries. The discriminatory potential in this approach looms ominously.
The political tension in the conflicting narratives becomes obvious in the current environment. Minimize infections – close, wear a mask. Free access to the virus, build herd immunity – open, no mask. In current polls 80% of the public supports a managed opening – back to work with masks?
The partisans appear something like this:
Minimizing infections. This is the dominant narrative on, e.g., CNN. The touchstone of success is the focus on minimizing the deaths caused by the virus.
‘Herd immunity’. This approach is based on the widely-accepted theory that infected people build up antibodies to fight the virus. In the covid-19 pandemic, it is best known as the Swedish solution – voluntary lockdown. [1]
So, we have two narratives, one to minimize infections to maximize prevention of individual deaths from the virus and the other to increase infections so that we can more quickly reach the 70% infected that some projections estimate will allow herd immunity to solve the problem.
David L. Katz founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, entered the national debate with a third way in a March 20 New York Times Op-ed “Is Our Fight Against Coronavirus Worse Than the Disease?” He argued the U.S. should adopt a milder strategy than total lockdown to preserve the economy while stopping deaths from COVID-19. Katz sparked opposition from current Yale University epidemiologists – some of whom were quick to refute what they saw as his suggestion that the US lockdown was an overreaction to the pandemic.
Katz and others propose that serious research focus on who is dying from the virus. Vulnerable people include the elderly, people with serious health issues, and people with high blood pressure (one study shows 75% of deaths in this group). The proposal here is to protect these vulnerable groups and open the economy for less vulnerable populations. This proposal moves closer to a controlled opening strategy favored in polls by 80% of the public.
Our point here is less about what is the “right” policy than to suggest a more transpartisan way of thinking about the problem. To imagine any controlled opening strategy will require less pious certainty and more pragmatic honesty about the public policy trade-offs of death and disability between mortality created by the virus and mortality created by a closed economy.
While doctors committed to the Hippocratic Oath protect every life as sacred, many policies favor ‘efficiency’ and work to reduce the resulting increase in deaths. Highway speed is an example. No one seriously advocates reducing speed limits to 20 miles-an-hour even though it would enormously reduce traffic deaths. Still over the last fifty years public policy has helped reduce auto accident deaths from 5.21 per hundred million miles driven in 1968 to 1.22 in 2018—a more than 75% reduction. [2]
We have no proposed “right” answer to the pandemic. We do suggest a form of thinking about an issue that integrates clashing narratives rather than forcing people to choose sides. A controlled opening may mean targeted pragmatic policy that risks lives from the virus in order to save lives from a dead economy.
One integration might be to wear a mask, go to work. Could it even mean choosing to go to a ball game once in a while?
This note suggests a form for thinking about the pandemic problem, or any problem, in a transpartisan way. Another important part of the issue lies in changing the language we use to discuss the trade-offs. We will address this language issue in another Note.
Launched on Inauguration Day 2017, the first volume of The Transpartisan Review series invited transpartisan writers, educators, and leaders to share their perspectives on a wide variety of issues and topics.
From Executive Editors A. Lawrence Chickering & James S. Turner
The Transpartisan Review is a digital journal of politics, society, and culture, exploring the apparent disintegration of the traditional political order and the emergence of a new, transpartisan perspective.
The Transpartisan Review, Issue One
The first issue of The Transpartisan Review focuses on a distinct transpartisan moment of change — Inauguration Day 2017 — and the issues dominating so many conversations across the United States. (more details)
In the second issue of The Transpartisan Review, we explore how broad ideas and social forces are shaping our political institutions and our choice of leaders, including President Donald Trump. (more details)
The third issue of The Transpartisan Review visits the word “transpartisan” with a few of the key figures behind this publication. John Steiner and Joan Blades join the editors in sharing what transpartisan means to them. (more details)
You can read each in your browser by clicking on its link. If you would like to download the collection to your desktop to read offline or to transfer to another device, right-click on the link and select the download option.
On February 26, The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft cohosted (with Foreign Policy magazine) a foreign policy event in Washington, D.C. focused on ‘A New Vision for America in the World’. (Featured in Transpartisan Note #122.) Co-sponsored by Charles Koch and George Soros, the Quincy Institute proclaims itself a new, transpartisan voice searching for an engaged, internationalist foreign policy that does not depend on fighting endless wars.
General David H. Petraeus, former Commander of the U.S. Central Command and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, led the discussion by describing the military’s role in what is sometimes called a ‘strategic concept of peace’. The conference, following Quincy’s mission, aimed at presenting an alternative to this vision, based on ‘military restraint and vigorous diplomacy’ and the pursuit of peace.
Transpartisans seeing political relationships through the Four-Quadrant Matrix believe that solutions are strongest when they integrate values from all quadrants, bringing together all ideologies. Integrating the quadrants first depends on avoiding binary (‘either-or’) views, while seeking common ground in apparently opposing positions.
Gen. Petraeus is an ideal subject on which to built a transpartisan dialogue. Although he presented a case for a strong military role, his widely-read 2006 article on the fourteen principles of counterinsurgency warfare explored important non-military activities, which he noted in his talk are essential to ‘military’ victories in irregular warfare.[i]
His first principle relies on a widely-quoted statement by T.E. Lawrence, writing in 1917:
‘Do not try to do too much with your own hands,’ Lawrence wrote about the Arabs. ‘Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. . . . [T]he work . . . may take them longer and it may not be as good as you think, but if it is theirs, it will be better.’
The idea here is that what they do is more important than what you do. This insight is crucial for promoting empowerment of people, especially in traditional societies, to play an active – even primary role – in promoting democracy, development, and especially security.
It is widely believed, even in ‘difficult’ places like Afghanistan, that when a community owns a school or a well, people will protect it from terrorists and insurgents. The central element is ownership – ownership of what they do and also from deciding what to do.
The importance of ownership is evident in Hernando de Soto’s pioneering work on property rights for the ‘informal sector’ and also in the work of Educate Girls Globally, promoting shared community ownership of government schools. Both experiences promote empowerment of passive, preconscious traditional people to become active, self-determined community citizens.
Where people are strongly influenced by traditional cultures, their passivity makes them vulnerable targets for insurgents, thus creating ‘vacuums’ for military force to fill. When people are passive, diplomacy, even if ‘vigorous’, is a weak instrument for promoting peace. When they become active citizens, protecting what they own, they present no targets, thus greatly reducing the need for military action.
We believe Quincy will succeed in its transpartisan mission by focusing attention on empowering citizens for nation-building, democracy, and security. Pursuing this objective, their greatest challenge will not be to change the attitudes of military leaders like Gen. Petraeus, but to promote development of capacity in our governmental institutions, both military and civilian, to promote citizen empowerment as a major objective of foreign policy.
[i] LTG David Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq”, Military Review, January/February 2006.
(Feature image of Gen. Petraeus taken from the Twitter feed of the Quincy Institute.)
This week the Quincy Institute, in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine, will share their transpartisan vision with the world during a one day “peace forum” at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington D.C.
Focusing on issues of national security, world peace, and U.S. foreign policy from a transpartisan matrix view of managed order without suppressed freedom with leaders from left and right, their February 26th one-day event will explore topics like ending the endless wars in the Middle East; the impact of the Sino-American antagonism; democratizing foreign policy; and international cooperation in an era of American restraint.
This leadership forum brings together voices from across the Transpartisan Matrix, featuring speakers including retired General David H. Petraeus; Matt Duss, Senator Bernie Sanders’ Foreign-Policy Advisor; retired Ambassador Gerald Feierstein; and Foreign Policy magazine Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Tepperman. Congress members conservative Arizona Representative Andy Biggs and progressive Representatives Pramila Jayapal from Washington and Ro Khanna from California will also speak.
We are delighted to see that General Petraeus is one of the speakers at the conference because he wrote in a powerful way about one transpartisan principle having to do with the empowerment of citizens to promote social and political development and reduce conflict. In a widely-cited article in 2006, he laid out fourteen basic principles of counterinsurgency warfare.* His first principle relied on T. E. Lawrence (in 1917) writing about empowerment of the Arabs. His principal strategy for doing this was to give them authority in making and implementing plans. This would in turn encourage them to take leadership in promoting social and political development, thus promoting solidarity against external enemies. A common mechanism for thus motivating them is by sharing ownership of schools, wells, and other resources important for local welfare. Such empowerment would add significantly to local assets supporting economic and political development, following examples of successful civil society empowerment programs in many areas.
Most importantly, this event signals growing awareness of the “Transpartisan” impulse and the transpartisan vision toward which it points. The Quincy Institute announcement of this forum says “Volatility in the Middle East and tensions between the U.S. and Iran have reached a new high, while public frustration with U.S. military involvements, and transpartisan calls for restraint, suggest a historic opening for a new mode of American foreign policy.”
The transpartisan impulse points to historic openings on every issue throughout the American Political Matrix. The Foreign Policy – Quincy Institute Forum opens the door to transpartisan foreign policy. We will be there reporting on the forum’s events.
* LTG David Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency: Observations from Soldiering in Iraq”, Military Review, January/February 2006.
Godzilla vs King Kong, Trump vs. the Left’s Leviathan?
by Ralph Benko
Hollywood is remaking King Kong vs Godzilla. It’s scheduled for release soon after election day. Per the studios’ breathless teaser:
In a time when monsters walk the Earth, humanity’s fight for its future sets Godzilla and Kong on a collision course that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.
Could there be a better metaphor for Politics 2020?
There’s a rich antecedent to Godzilla. The Bible names the Sea Monster Leviathan.
There’s a political history as well. Thomas Hobbes gave us Leviathan.
We also find Leviathan rhapsodized at the heart of Herman Melville’sMoby Dick, the great American novel. Melville:
Here Saturn’s grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those Polar eternities; when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world’s circumference, not an inhabitable hand’s breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale’s; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himmalehs. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan?
Leviathan.
Breathless then.
Breathless now.
Our politicos and pundits now set their phasers to “kill” rather than “stun.” Why? Because the stakes are high.
Yet our pundits are failing to convincingly elucidate why.
Let’s help them out.
Michael Bloomberg justified his entry into the 2020 presidential race by calling Donald Trump an “existential threat.”
Trump indeed is just that!
But for which of two diametrically opposed reasons?
From the day that America declared itself independent it embraced one political philosophy. It rejected another.
Is Trump an existential threat to our charter of liberty?
Or is he an existential threat to the enemies of liberty?
Jefferson, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, held among the self-evident truths, “that … Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….”
“The consent of the governed.”
This holds that we have rights derived from Nature (or Nature’s God).
Not privileges bestowed (or withheld) by a ruler.
The “consent of the governed” alludes to the philosophy of John Locke, the founding father of the philosophy of classical liberal (as in liberty) republicanism. America’s founders uniformly embraced the kind of liberal republicanism pioneered by Locke.
Among Locke’s political works he is most famous for The Second Treatise of Government in which he argues that sovereignty resides in the people and explains the nature of legitimate government in terms of natural rights.
So. What was the other, the spurned, path?
Absolutism.
The 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes … is infamous for having used the social contract method to arrive at the astonishing conclusion that we ought to submit to the authority of an absolute—undivided and unlimited—sovereign power.
The frontispiece of the book Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes; engraving by Abraham Bosse.
In Leviathan, Hobbes declaimed nature to be “no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Hobbes’s dyspeptic view called for absolute obedience to a supreme ruler to avoid dystopia.
President Trump seems to cheerfully assume his political supremacy is right and natural. He reacts as if any show of independence from his will or whim is an act of lèse-majesté.
Trump thus presents as a manifestation of a Hobbesian absolutism.
If so, yes, that could be an existential threat to the country.
But there’s a twist.
Trump presents not as an existential threat to liberty. (Serious absolutism requires a greater attention span than is in evidence.) Trump presents as, more likely, an antidote to the challenge to liberal republicanism by the older, sinister, Leviathanic force:
Leninism now d/b/a “progressives.”
We observe a battle for existential legitimacy between two implacably opposed political philosophies. One is small government liberal republicanism. The other is Big Government absolutism.
Legitimacy is the strongest force in politics. The Democrats sensing an existential threat to their own political legitimacy have been determined to delegitimize Trump by any means possible.
The fight now under way – in the capital and the media – as a battle for legitimacy trumps the otherwise trivial wrangle over the president’s disposition, competence, and overblown charges of misbehavior and collusion. And better explains the intensity.
The existential battle appears to be between liberal republicanism and absolutism. The highest of stakes. The prevailing erudite hypothesis, that it’s about the Outsiders vs. the Insiders, populism vs. elitism, is penny ante by comparison.
How could it be that Trump could be a force for liberty? Isn’t Trump’s attitude of personal supremacy antithetical to the ideal of a liberal republic? Classical liberal republicanism had a great, vast, worldwide run especially from 1945 until fairly recently. It worked brilliantly as a force for human flourishing.
Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? (Hobbes portrait by J.M. Wright.)
Is it over? Is there a resurgence of Hobbesian absolutism from both left and right? Is this a pause in the course of America’s exporting the “Empire of Liberty”? Or are we encountering a secular reversal of the liberal republicanism tide and an incoming tide of absolutism?
I believe that the rise of absolutist forces is a reaction to the coy totalitarianism of the left. The left’s relentless push for the primacy of “government at every level” has grown more virulent since the days of the dreadful Woodrow Wilson or the rascally FDR.
Add to the forces of Big Government social media thought-policing, cancel culture, and the bigotry that is leading to the persecution of bakers and florists for their religious creed. The left was out to stamp out liberal republicanism and replace it with a strange new, totalitarian, cultural hegemony. Trump confounded them.
Progressives have carried on a sustained and alarmingly successful “long march through the institutions.” The left’s purpose is to impose its brave new, totalitarian cultural hegemony on us.
The left desires to replace the extant Judeo-Christian classical liberal republicanism cultural hegemony. It made big gains.
Then the electorate fielded a wildly improbable Leviathan of its own, Donald Trump, to fight fire with fire.
Trump proved improbably effective, if not consistently dignified, in thwarting the left’s grab for absolute power. As TIME covered him, “a wrecking ball.” Trump taking down the monstrous state.
This seems to me analogous to how the United States of America grew its tiny federal government to gargantuan proportions a century ago. Big Government was not as an end unto itself. Our citizens conjured a Leviathan to fight even more gargantuan, grotesque, regimes: imperialistic, fascist, communist. We won.
Upon winning, Hobbes’s sly apostles, who had taken up residence in government agencies — Democrats on the civilian side, Republicans on the military side — kept this new Leviathan central government well fed. And then….
How will this epic epoch end?
The emergence of a seemingly Hobbesian force in the cradle of classical liberty seems a paradoxical counterpunch to the left’s relentless, veiled, quest for absolute power. And a good strong counterpunch it proved although esthetically marred by irritability and dodgy etiquette.
Trump’s Hobbesian quality thus presents as neither interregnum nor trend. It is, rather, a political counterfire set by a determined electorate to cancel out the political forest fire threatening to burn liberal republicanism to the ground.
So. Which of the two existential threats is Donald Trump?
Must we send a scout to check St. John the Baptist cemetery in Derbyshire, England where Hobbes’s remains are interred. Spinning in his grave? That would augur that Trump is an anti-absolutist force.
To save plane fare we could instead judge Trump by his enemies.
Once Trump-as-Leviathan has served the electorate’s purpose — countering the left’s far more pernicious Leviathan — politics will settle down. The American electorate remains classical liberal republican.
Absolutists of various stripes, left and right, are always with us. They are a malcontent minority. Not a dominant faction.
Thus, I predict that America will return to its vital liberal republican roots.
On November 3rd we will be shown a spectacle “that will see the two most powerful forces of nature on the planet collide in a spectacular battle for the ages.” Pass the popcorn!
Then, a little over two weeks later, we’ll go out to watch Godzilla vs.King Kong.
Ralph Benko, a Reagan White House junior official, Kemp-era supply-sider, founder of the Prosperity Caucus and the Prosperity Coalition, and editor-in-chief of the Supply Side Blog, is the co-founder and chairman of The Capitalist League and co-author of The Capitalist Manifesto. Ralph is an advisor and regular contributor to The Transpartisan Review.
(Featured Image (CC BY-SA 2.0) – Wikimedia Commons. Other images sourced from the public domain.)
“The virus is a lesson from nature,” Crow and his coauthor, Bill Shireman, write in their book, 
The Transpartisan Review, Issue One
The Transpartisan Review, Issue Two
The Transpartisan Review, Issue Three
