Columnist William Galston describes Donald Trump’s worldview as seeing “foreign policy (as) amoral—a relentless pursuit of self-interest,” in which “Strength and weakness replace right and wrong.” Which is to say that Donald Trump sees the world as a classic Realist.
“Realism,” while its view of power as determinative captures its point, is carried in different ways by different people. The analytical Realist articulates an outlook on human nature. In the arena of policy, power and politics, Realism can serve as aa proxy for pragmatism, an understanding that hard interests must be dealt with to gain any point or interest, moral or material. Some exploit the real interests to defeat or displace others. Overall, Realism is an acknowledgement of human moral frailty, and applied as warning and method to protect one’s own interests and precious things.
Donald Trump’s Realism look a bit different. He doesn’t seem to deal in real interests and tools out of necessity; he revels in boiling every question down to leverage, as Galston says, and coercive power. Berating Zelensky for “having no cards” serves in part to demand policy acquiescence; it also cuts any case for morals or principles out of the discussion. Trump’s Realism essentially asserts Realism as a value in itself.
America’s bipolar politics is also, now, a contest of Realists. Many look at Trump’s flood of executive orders, Elon Musk’s unilateral spending freezes, layoffs and mandates, and the demands to arrest and deport more illegal immigrants, as immoral in their use of state power. But both sides of the political trench lines use coercive power for political purposes. Most blatant on the progressive side are the “cancel culture” firings, laws, and mob blockages of events and even law enforcement. But mechanistic use of anti-trust power to pre-empt large firms’ mergers, and particularly an arbitrary and strained idea of “national security” to block a Japanese firm from acquiring US Steel, apply state force in partisan ideological templates. Indeed, before it became a derided cliché, progressives would tout the use of “law as a tool for social change.”
As always, law is coercive, and in the early days of the modern left, there were unjust practices, some in the form of laws such as segregation codes, that required the force of state to undo. But while the early actions clearly enforced justice, the devolution to cancel culture also included a debasement of claims for justice to partisan rhetoric, over power increasingly dedicated to partisan interests. These contests of coercive power were largely conducted in courts and through police. Actual kinetic violence, whether of Weathermen or Proud Boys, is still on the fringes. But when Realists oppose each other, any restraint rests only on the fear of retribution by credible, impartial, civic government.
When Realists clash, the question for any given Realist actor is where her or his self interest resides. The most hard-boiled Realpolitician has something he wants, or wants to save or gain or protect.
Donald Trump appears to have no conception of any purpose to further the needs of any person or entity other than himself, in his personal grievances and ambitions. Heather Cox Richardson, a Trump antagonist to be sure, is still credible in her telling report of Trump citing the 2016 “Russian hoax” while berating Zelensky. Trump seems to live only to defeat others in bitter contention, rub it in on them if he wins, find the next fight to win and glorify himself whenever possible, ad infinitum. And this makes sense – the Realist for Realism’s sake can have, at heart, no other goal.
When this Realist wins all the prizes that anyone covets, how to grow even greater presents a problem. Further, for a politician, electoral triumph still leaves approval ratings rising and falling. So perhaps you have to reign in an Elon Musk; perhaps you pivot to dilute or delay tariffs; perhaps you need to recycle a prior animus, for instance against a particular university. You cannot risk getting stale, so you become trapped in combat mode, escalating the stakes where possible, and keeping up a vituperative tone.
Those who want to call this evil might then contemplate how the political methods of the left have spurred a response-in-kind on the right, embodied in Trump, the one politician who would call them out openly. Those who celebrate Trump’s moves against the left’s iconic rules and offices might themselves contemplate what the equal and opposite reaction will be as the political cycle turns. Both can protest at the other’s violation of values, fairness, etc etc, but both have turned politics into zero-sum war. By its nature, this kind of contest is a Realist one: no one in it holds any purpose sincerely, aside from outmuscling the other side.
The only escape from the vicious cycles of Realpolitik cannot come from compromise, which is inherently temporary in Realism’s zero-sum world. Escape only comes when factions are overwhelmed by a higher ethos based on underlying bedrock, one that no one could deny. Much ancient lore – of Richard the Lion Heart returning to England, or Chinese emperors gaining the mandate of heaven, to name two versions, and even historical accounts such as General Monk restoring Charles II – invokes this kind of resolution.
America has such a higher ethos based on underlying bedrock. Like ancient kings and emperors, it defines the wider polity that the contestants fight over. But ours resides in our historically new sovereign, “we the people.” That sovereign is named in our act of national self-conception, as “we” who hold the self-evident truths, that all humans are equally endowed with unalienable rights and that government exists to secure those rights. Certainly all sides in our political trench warfare mouth these words of the Declaration, but they only point to them as “support” for their interests. In fact the creed is more fundamental than these bespoke interpretations. Those only serve interests which are, at best, means to nurture our society’s greater ends – and are often canards for ambition and greed.
Absent our sovereign renewal in the Declaration’s identity, our polarized politics, and the Realpolitik that drives both sides, will continue. As polarization endures, divisions deepen. Commonalities, as they devolve into lip service, eventually lose meaning. When two sides assert nothing in common, they have no reason to consider themselves a nation. America needs, urgently, to start reviving the founding, overarching, bedrock, common ethos of the Declaration, not as words to be co-opted to “my” side, but as a standard, to which all sides shape not only their interests, but also their methods. Revival need not renounce Realism. We can pursue this ethos in many ways, and the creed’s own terms acknowledge the need for government – it is not a creation of fantasyland. But the creed does furnish the ends to which our Realist drives, means, and powers must be dedicated.
Our creed allows individuals, in their pursuits, to set the real means that matter – people’s ability to live by their own lights. That idea may or may not be an ideal, and the society that such people make in their freedom may or may not be virtuous in all eyes. But that is our end, to nurture the rights to these pursuits, in the vessel of our state, in our best faith, for all of us.
Common Conviction 