Thomas Hobbes, one of the first modern political thinkers, argued in “The Leviathan” (1651) that people need a strong ruler to save them from a “state of nature” where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Without an all-powerful government, he argued, humans would exist amid savage anarchy — a “war of all against all.”
The first rule in this perpetual battle of every one against his neighbor is do whatever is expedient for your own survival. But the logic of survival pushes people to accept the authority of an absolutely sovereign power. They enter this social contract out of fear, either of their fellows or of an external conqueror.
Political legitimacy depends on whether the sovereign can protect those who have consented to obey him. Their obligation ends when that protection ceases. To avoid governmental collapse and a return to the state of nature, people obey their sovereign as the absolute authority. God will not hold them responsible for wrongful actions done at the sovereign’s command. Mere subjects, they cannot anticipate or control the sovereign’s actions.
President Trump agrees with Hobbes that the sovereign must have absolute authority — his powers neither divided nor limited. Trump acts as though he is an all-knowing and omnipotent sovereign — untrammeled by the Constitution, the legislature or courts. Whatever he does is legal and justified.
Trumpism and the Department of Government Efficiency are returning American society to a primitive state of nature. With no wise and benevolent authority, chaos prevails. As Hobbes warned, without order there is “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; no Society; and … continual Fear, and danger of violent death.”
For Americans and Europeans, government is supposed to promote not only life but also liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The founder of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln, added that “the legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but can not do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves — in their separate, and individual capacities.”
Since the Civil War, the U.S. government has struggled to foster what is now called diversity, equity and inclusion as frameworks for fair treatment and full participation of all people, In 1865, for example, laws called for preferential hiring for veterans and their widows. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, ratified after the Civil War, addressed slavery, citizenship and voting rights.
Human rights in the U.S. have advanced and regressed, but markedly improved under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1936, for example, he signed the Randolph-Sheppard Act requiring that federal government purchasing give preference to products made by the blind.
Instead of boosting public wellbeing, however, Trump and his unelected lieutenant, Elon Musk, are lowering it. Of course every human institution can be improved, but any change in a complex organization needs to be carefully designed and implemented — not castrated with a chainsaw.
“Who will tell Trump he’s naked?” Catherine Rampell asked in the Washington Post last week. After Trump launched his multifront trade war — leading to one of the worst market massacres since World War II — his closest confidants and aides have been unwilling to call him out or rein him in.
A constructive if imperfect equilibrium has been replaced by chaotic uncertainty. Life has become “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage … a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”
The idiot now is the U.S. sovereign, plus the incompetent aides he has implanted around him to execute his whims.
Walter Clemens is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Boston University and associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of “The Republican War on America: Dangers of Trump and Trumpism.”
