The acquisition, exercise, and preservation of state power is the end of all politics. To hold “state power” is to possess the ability to coerce compliance with your will. It is control of the armed forces, the intelligence services, and the police power of the state. With it, one can do anything. Without it, one can do nothing. One is defenseless. Those who control men with guns and badges can compel obedience. Without it you cannot resist. Indeed, those who control the state, can do anything they want to you. The state can seize your property, arrest you, throw you in jail, or torture you. It can exile you to a slave labor camp, starve you, or execute you. This is true everywhere and always.
The only real limits on the exercise of arbitrary power are those voluntarily accepted restraints imposed by courts, constitutions, and bills of rights. Law is the only defense protecting the rights of ordinary citizens. When “law and order” break down, or when government is lawless, the citizen is defenseless. Law becomes tyranny and one must submit.
Marxists understand this intuitively, because Marxism originated in states such as Prussia, Germany, and Russia, where the struggle for power and its use, was raw and unadulterated. Machiavelli understood it because the Renaissance city states of Italy were engaged in such struggle daily. One could not miss it. The United States is not immune to the sorts of upheavals that have tormented countries such as France, Germany, Russia, China, Cambodia, and others.
But the United States is different, it is exceptional. In the United States the struggle for state power has been camouflaged, subordinated to private pursuits for most of two hundred years by its division of power between the states, localities, and the national government and by the so-called “checks and balances” contrived by the founders, along with its constitutional system of individual rights, protected by law—equally applied. In short, law, respected by all parties has carved out the space for the liberty that we enjoy. It did not have to turn out this way.
During the infancy of American politics, two major factions formed in contention for power with one another. The Federalists coalesced around the political vision of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, while the Republicans formed in opposition, around the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. During the late 1790s the Federalists in office led by John Adams regarded Jefferson’s Republicans as dangerous radicals who would destroy the country if they took power. Accordingly, a Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts designed to suppress their opposition. The Federalists used their control of embryonic state power to jail some of their critics. They regarded opposition to government policy as illegitimate. The law was turned against one party by the other. In short, the law was “weaponized” by the party that held state power against the party that was out of power. It was an American experiment with tyranny.
Thomas Jefferson’s victory in the election of 1800 precipitated a crisis which might have destroyed the American experiment in popular government right then and there because it meant that Federalists would have to give up power to their arch enemies—men they regarded as Godless anarchists. Many leading Federalists considered using the army to prevent Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801. Leading Republicans considered calling up the state militia to enforce his inauguration. Civil war was in the offing. It was averted because each side recoiled from the possibility of a bloody conflict among fellow Americans and because leading Republicans reassured the Federalists that their rights would not be abridged by a vengeful new administration—and that the laws would be applied equally to each party.
Jefferson then used his Inaugural Address to warn the nation against “political intolerance . . . despotic . . . , wicked, and capable of . . . bitter and bloody persecutions.” He went on to remind Americans of “this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.”
It was the beginning of the growth a tradition of political toleration which has allowed liberty and democracy to endure in the United States for two and a quarter centuries. What has been unique about the United States is that since the crisis of 1801, the political parties have played by informal rules holding that neither side will use the power of the state that it holds while in office to demolish its opponent. Thus, politics in the United States have traditionally taken place within a set of rules respected by each party. Each party refrained from using its temporary hold on power to eliminate its opposition because of the prospect of civil war, and the possibility that should they lose, the opposition might in turn use that power to eliminate them.
In short, politics have remained peaceful, with the notable exception of the Civil War, because each party was deterred by the potential power of the other, and by a growing trust in the system when the stakes were low. Both sides treated each electoral campaign like a baseball game. Today’s loser will have a chance to come back tomorrow, and if not then, next season. The struggle for raw power has been masked for over two hundred years in America—lulling many into a dangerous complacency. But recently the stakes have risen dramatically as one party stands on the brink of “radically transforming” America and seems willing to use any means to do it, including censorship of political opinions and even prosecution of leading opposition figures, while the other feels that its back is to the precipice, on the brink of losing everything it holds dear. Political toleration is on the brink of collapse.
The party in power is supposed to restrain its exercise of that power in accordance with the inviolable rights of citizens. It is this tradition, this “democratic norm,” that the unprecedented political persecution of former President Donald Trump and his associates and supporters threatens to destroy. Should these political prosecutions, disguised as “no one is above the law” succeed it will spell the end of political toleration in America. Might will make right. The Democratic Party will make use of its command of state power, through a partisan Justice Department, FBI, and court system, to destroy legitimate opposition and enforce its power permanently. It is happening now.
This will not end well. What follows is Orwellian tyranny, revolution, or civil war. It need not be this way, but time is running short.
Elections in the United States have often precipitated great crises and dramatic change. The election of 1800 was one of the most consequential in American history. The election of 1860 triggered the onset of the Civil War, the most sanguinary and revolutionary struggle the nation has endured. The tainted election of 2020 conducted during the pandemic panic of COVID and the BLM insurrection of that year has brought the nation to the brink of a crisis from which liberty may not recover. The election of 2024 may prove to be the last chance to preserve what Lincoln called, “the last best hope of man.”
You are absolutely spot on in this piece, and thanks the history around the election of 1800, which I did not know about. This putsch by the Democrats I thought was basically unprecedented and in many ways I think it is. They are using lawfare instead of threat of warfare but as Lenin said, "politics is war by other means" and we all now should be aware of Clausewitz's earlier statement that "war is politics by other means". The line between the two is not as clear as some might think.
The demonization of Trump has been profound and sustained for 8 long years. The populist right will not take this lying down and while I have always been a leftist I am on their side in this.