Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for winning the presidential election is fueled by a widespread perception that American democracy is disintegrating, descending into conflict and chaos. But Trump himself is both a primary cause and a primary beneficiary of this chaos. It’s highly unlikely that he’s ever read Thomas Hobbes, but the 17th-century English philosopher is our best guide to understanding the underlying logic of current American politics: why and how extreme civil unrest leads to tyranny.
After experiencing the violence and chaos of the English Civil War, Hobbes imagined a “state of nature” in which humanity would be left alone to engage in “war of all against all,” resulting in life being “solitary, … nasty, brutish, and short.” The way to escape this horror, according to Hobbes, was for societies to enter into a “social contract” and create a nearly omnipotent “monarch” to keep the peace. Logically, given humanity’s innate aggressiveness, the most effective monarch in Hobbes’ time would have been a king. In the 21st century, the equivalent “peacekeeper” would be a dictator, either self-appointed or selling himself as a savior who rules with an iron fist to the electorate of a seemingly chaotic democracy.
Such authoritarian leaders are already on the rise in many countries: Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Hungary, many parts of Africa and Central Asia, and more in Western Europe. They all benefit from portraying liberal democracy as violent and corrupt, and convincing their people that there are no good alternatives to dictatorship. In the United States, as Anne Applebaum recently wrote in The Atlantic, “The MAGA Right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is decadent, their elections are illegitimate, and their civilization is dying. Leaders of the MAGA movement are also interested in injecting nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, convincing them that nothing they see is real.”
The main mouthpiece for this message in the US is Trump. With his help, US politics have become extremely polarised and violent. Thankfully, it is not yet a “war of all against all”, but what Trump calls “American holocaust”. But Trump himself has incited the holocaust and won over supporters by boasting that “only I can fix it”.
He has shouted endlessly that elections, central to our democracy, are “rigged,” that the 2020 election was “stolen,” that his rivals for the presidency are “cheating,” that America’s primary law enforcement agencies have been “weaponized” against him, that the country’s former top military leader (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley) is a “traitor,” and, as Trump put it after his recent trial in which he was convicted of 34 felony counts of attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election, that the United States is a “fascist state.” His repeated lies have led many Americans to believe that no truth exists.
Trump’s own first administration, when it wasn’t resembling a Mafia clan, was chaotic and disorganized: he promised to reject the results of the next election if it was “rigged,” promised to “retaliate” against his rivals if re-elected, vowed to round up millions of would-be immigrants in detention camps and deport them for “poisoning the blood of our country,” and promised to get along well with fellow strongmen like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
Compared to the relatively peaceful politics of the United States, international relations are moving closer to a Hobbesian “state of nature.” With no global sovereignty and severely limited influence of international law and the United Nations, countries must maintain peace by their own efforts. But Trump’s America First foreign policy has had the effect of making international relations even more dangerous. Trump has threatened to destroy the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a key US ally. His isolationism has encouraged countries in Asia and the Middle East to develop their own nuclear weapons.
You don’t have to hail the United States as an “indispensable nation,” as some have, to appreciate the relatively peaceful world order it has fostered since the end of World War II, or to worry that a second Trump administration would bring about more war, if not more of all against all, than the world has seen in many years.
Trump is the most charismatic devotee of Hobbesian logic and the most powerful driver of his movement to change the American political system, skillfully preaching the anti-democratic idea that America needs an authoritarian ruler. Few American voters are familiar with Thomas Hobbes, but Hobbesian logic serves as a warning to us all.
William Taubman is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Amherst College and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography “Khrushchev: the man and his times,” and “Gorbachev: his life and times. “
