What Does It Mean to Be Politically Strong?

Not what most people think

There is an image of political power that I suspect sits firmly in the consciousness of many American voters. It looks like this:

We could take Trump out of the picture and portray instead Joe Biden or Barack Obama. The point here is not the precise person, but the image of political power. It’s the image of the man by himself at a desk signing an order. This, it seems, represents the height of political power. But it’s not anywhere close.

I am a political realist. Civic Fields, because it evokes the “civic,” may seem to some a pollyanna project, another liberal do-gooder doing little good but doing what they can to make themselves feel good. Such assumptions are hard to overcome, but if it helps, my liberal credentials are suspect: I am a constitutional originalist; I believe that without virtue a republic cannot stand; I think social liberalism has lost its way; I think universities (where I work) have been too culturally powerful; I go to church, and not because it’s cool. And I am a political realist—I believe in power and politics.

Does all this make me a conservative? My constitutional originalism includes a frank acknowledgment of the ways in which the original constitution was organized to protect exploitative and violent commercial and slave-holding interests; I do not think we live in a functioning republic anymore; social liberalism has lost its way because it has become the tool of class privilege; universities have been the main cultural agent of that class-privilege project; my church is getting kicked out of its denomination because we chose to welcome non-straight people into our congregation. And I am a political realist because I think political power is entirely dependent upon democratic modes of political engagement.

If there’s some whiplash there, good. A big part of what Civic Fields is about is fracturing the pervasive mental schemas of our hypermediated partisan age to reconnect with a reality that poses to us each and every day a basic question: What does it mean to live in time, place, and virtual space with people who are different than we are?

A fiction has taken hold of the country recently and it is a very dangerous fiction. It is that President Trump is a political powerhouse. One expects such fiction to be propagated on pro-Trump media channels, but I have recently seen it repeated, as though it were true, in center-left venues like NPR and The New York Times. And, given the alarm bells they’re sounding, some far-left folk seem to agree.

Trump is strong, but he is not politically strong. He is strong because he is the President of the United States, the chief executive officer of the country, and the Constitution gives great powers and privileges to the president (especially with recent addition to the Constitution of the extra-constitutional language of “official” and “unofficial” executive actions by the Roberts Supreme Court). But anybody who was president would have the same powers. They may not use them in the same ways, but the powers would be there.

Trump is also culturally powerful. He has been an extraordinarily successful marketer. He has tremendous “brand strength.” He’s always been very good at this, as TRUMP-emblazoned hotels (and now Bibles!) and The Apprentice attest. I would venture to say that he understands the power of a brand better than anyone in U.S. political history. And pro- and anti-Trump media channels readily serve him in this regard because they, too, understand the power a brand can bring to their profits. A profit-driven media system depends, as in a symbiotic relationship, on the masters of branding.

Finally, Trump believes in domination. What is often portrayed in the media as his “transactional” approach to negotiations is in fact a cover for what he clearly prefers: threats, extortion, and bribery (witness Eric Adams and Ukraine). In this, he has a certain kind of amoral strength that allows him to be quite ruthless and heartless in the pursuit of his own power as long as it does not cost him too much financially. Little stands in his way. Laws, decency, people, facts, God—where they will not cooperate, they can be dispensed with. As far as I can tell, Trump has no long-term friendships.

But for all this, Trump is not politically strong. There are different kinds of strength, just as there are different kinds of restaurants, vehicles, or neighborhoods. Political strength is a particular kind of strength.

What does it mean to be politically strong? The answer to this question is the core of the political realism that undergirds this little project called Civic Fields.

It was a question that another patron saint of Civic Fields, Hannah Arendt, asked in the aftermath of World War II. Arendt, a German Jew, escaped Nazi Germany and eventually made her way to New York City, where she joined a thriving literary culture and began writing about all that had gone wrong in her homeland of Germany. The product was The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951.

There’s a good chance I will return to The Origins of Totalitarianism in the future, if only because it’s a book I have spent a lot of time with. But the reason I am mentioning it here is because it offered, in a footnote of all places, a definition of politics that has stayed with me ever since I first read it. In fact, it’s a definition so powerful that I ended up writing a whole book to elaborate on it, Politics for Everybody: Reading Hannah Arendt in Uncertain Times.

The definition? “Authentic politics,” Arendt said, is “different people getting along in the full force of their power.”

I love this definition and for a number of reasons.

First, it names the fundamental problem politics was invented to solve: difference. Somehow (and I think I know how) we’ve gotten the impression that politics is about identity, affinity, likeness, tribe, party, “us” versus “them.” Identity and likeness are arguably the role of culture, but it is not the job of politics. Politics is there to step in when and where cultural identification inevitably breaks down. Politics is the art of negotiating differences.

Second, Arendt’s definition of politics is quite humble in its aspiration. There’s no hint of a grandiloquent “To the stars!” Rather, it's simply about getting along, managing, and even muddling through. Hooray for the inchworm! We, too, don’t know toward what undreamt condition inch by inch we go.

Third, and finally, Arendt draws our attention to the role of power in politics that flies in the face of everything the other political realists have taught us. Power, at least political power, is not something an individual “holds,” as on an island, by virtue of their office, oath, or oratorical genius. Political power is relational and interpersonal: it emerges between and among people, people in the plural. It depends for its strength on different people being empowered. It grows like a chorus, not a leech. In this sense, it is democratic to the core, even where democracies don’t exist.

What does it mean to be politically strong? It means to have the communicative and relational capacity to bring people along that, counterintuitively, empowers them as well as yourself. Political power is additive, not zero-sum.

The U.S. Constitution (and here’s my originalism) was written and amended to privilege and center such political power. Moreover, it was explicitly designed to bracket less political modes of governing power, especially authoritarianism and identitarian partisanship. It was made, that is, to foster a robust political culture, a culture where people had to rely on their communicative and relational capacities amid differences to get things done by distributing power. You could argue that the Constitution has failed (this is a topic for another day), but even if this is so, it can stand as another root to remind us what political strength actually looks like.

I recently visited the new White House website to examine its vocabulary. How is the Trump administration talking about Trump’s power? What I noticed was how much it centers on unilateral actions: Trump ordered, ended, proclaimed, instructed, approved, restored, and, of course, signed an executive order. This is the language of not just a unitary executive, but a king.

By contrast, if we were looking at a president with genuine political power, we’d expect to see a preponderance of words and phrases like negotiated, reached an agreement with, mediated between, held talks with, debated with, and, lo and behold, signed a piece of legislation. This political vocabulary is what the writers and ratifiers of the Constitution intended to foster in the republic.

We could look at the ins and outs of the relative political success in the governing of different presidents in modern US history: how many laws were passed, how many diplomatic agreements, etc. If we did, we’d see Trump 1.0, relatively speaking, was not a very powerful president in a political sense. I expect the same for Trump 2.0. All these executive orders are not a sign of political strength. If anything, in as much as they are used to bypass or replace actual legislation they are a tacit admission of political weakness.

But here’s what worries me. Even if Trump were politically strong, even if he really could bring different constituencies together—even just constituencies in his own party—to negotiate a variety of deals and laws that were mutually empowering, I doubt this would register as great strength in the public realm. Democracy depends on more than laws. It depends on a public appetite, and we have lost an appetite for authentic politics.

When I wrote about Hannah Arendt in Politics for Everybody several years ago, I concluded,

At present we are suffering from something like an autoimmune disease: in attacking the very real sickness of the political system, we have also been attacking the principal means of its health. Or perhaps the better analogy is psychological: we are projecting onto politics the causes for problems that are a result, in essence, of the weakening of politics, and this can only be addressed through strengthening it.

I worry about this even more now than I did then. It’s not just that I don’t know that we’d recognize political strength when we saw it, it’s that we are actively misrecognizing it. The reckoning could be severe.

So, what to do? I know it sounds silly, but I think we need to start by celebrating authentic political power when and where we see it, even if that power serves an interest other than our own. It’s about retraining the appetite. Read of a negotiation, hooray! Learn that Party X and Party Y reached an agreement, rejoice! See that A debated with B about C, good golly miss molly! And, get news that President Trump signed a piece of legislation, lo and behold!