Donald Trump's Anti-Leviathan

What if we abandoned the social contract for the state of nature?

The problem, right now, of being a political scientist writing a Substack trying to make sense of the world is that there are also other political scientists writing a Substack trying to make sense of the world. Even worse, sometimes they make an argument that fleshes out something you had been turning over in your head, thereby producing that most disastrous of academic outcomes - getting scooped. Or to adapt the meme “I worked on this Substack… for a week… and… he just… he tweeted it out”.

The post I’m obliquely referring to is one from earlier this week by Henry Farrell, who writes the fantastic Programmable Mutter, also the author, with Abe Newman, of Underground Empire, and a recent guest on Rethink. He’s a smart cookie. And the piece Henry wrote gets to a core question many of us, not just political scientists, have been thinking about - can Donald Trump just get what he wants, and who can stop him?

For Henry, the question is an age-old one about coordination problems. Most people are probably familiar with the coordination problems that face oppositions in dictatorships - how can you get over the obvious threat you face from rebelling as an individual if there aren’t enough other people also opposing? This is why scholars of rebellion from Jack Goldstone to Timur Kuran have emphasised the unexpected nature of rebellion and its cascading effect.

Henry also highlights a less well-known coordination problem - the one that faces the would-be authoritarian. As he notes, a would-be tyrant is still only one man (and yes, it usually is a man). He cannot on his own repress the world - he is not Doctor Manhattan. So there is a coordination problem among supportive elites that he needs to solve - to keep them all on side and in his debt. To get a picture of what it is like when this glue falls apart think about the shenanigans in Death of Stalin - fear and power can dissolve very fast - just ask Laventriy Beria.

I absolutely think these coordination problems are important - and indeed they are a major theme of the work of the Yale political scientist Milan Svolik, whose seminal work shows the challenges authoritarian leaders face when they have to balance controlling threats from below (the masses) with threats from their side (the elites).

But you will notice an assumption I and Henry have been making - that Trump is like any other authoritarian leader. I suspect that in lots of ways Trump does wish to behave like one - certainly the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his current refusal to follow court judgments meets that mark.

But Trump is attempting this in an otherwise democratic system and I think there is a risk that we overstate the degree to which that system has already deteriorated by assuming that the language and logic that we use to describe authoritarianism fits his case. Part of the risk is we give up on democracy while it’s still here. But the other danger is that we think Trump behaves like a rational authoritarian leader, a la Svolik, when it’s all just bluntly a lot dumber than that. Or as Benoit Blanc put it…

In an earlier post I referred to Donald Trump as a ‘chaotic authoritarian’. I don’t think it’s implausible that a democracy could have such a figure as a leader, though I do think it’s unlikely that it would remain democratic indefinitely under such leadership.

But in the absence of already having subverted elections, stymied courts, shut down the media, banned opponents and the other types of effective institutional backsliding that are the tell-tale signs of a democracy dying, I think we might do better to think about how such a figure operates in, what for now, is a democracy.

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Leviathan versus Anti-Leviathan

The temptation when talking about dictators is to reach for Thomas Hobbes. We depict them as the Leviathan - imposing order on the body politic to prevent chaos but also any rivals. Hobbes’ vision was after all a painstaking justification for monarchical absolutism.

If you are not familiar with Leviathan, well do read it, it’s a banger. But the very basic gist is a theory of government built from the ground up. Hobbes even starts with a slightly rococo account of how we process sensations. But his core mechanism is to imagine a world without government - his famous state of nature - in which every individual was essentially on their own. A self-help system if you will, but not the kind in the woo-woo psychology section of the bookstore - the kind where if you don’t look after number one, you’ll get an axe in the back of the head.

The Hobbesian state of nature is anarchy and life in it is - say it with me - ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. And so anyone living in this state would seek to escape this ceaseless terror and have some entity that could guarantee security. Hobbes is a social contract theorist, and the contract upon which we could all be presumed to agree is a third party that can ruthlessly crush insecurity. An absolute sovereign power that would protect its subjects.

Hobbes finished Leviathan in 1651 in the middle of the English Civil War, as a supporter of Charles I and the tutor of the future Charles II, though he also made his peace with Cromwell’s Protectorate in the mid 1650s. But long story short what he advocated was order, guaranteed in the hands of an absolute ruler.

The Hobbesian vision of the state is draconian of course and in… err… pretty sharp contrast with the social contract theories of John Locke or Jean Jacques Rousseau. But one way it has come down to us is in how we think about authoritanism. As about order and control, crushing dissent mercilessly, but also preventing anarchy, rebellion, and so forth. It is governing with an iron fist. Rational authoritarianism if you will.

Whatever Trump is trying to achieve, it’s not hitting this mark. Instead of authoritarianism containing chaos, it is chaos personified. Instead of quelling the anarchic state of nature, it is spreading anarchy and confusion. Hobbes’ frontispiece Leviathan is a steady ruler, holding sword and staff, made up out of their ordered subjects. My AI-aided interpretation above is a disintegrating Leviathan. Side note: ChatGPT was a bit leery of allowing too much bodily mutilation of a seventeenth century etching, which is an intriguing piece of censorship to have coded.

Hence, it’s not clear to me that the standard tools we use to think about authoritarianism accordingly make that much sense with Trump. Is he really thinking about how to coordinate among the elites to keep his support base? Because he’s not doing a brilliant job here having already lost the support of the Wall Street journal editorial board, a litany of very conservative judges, and increasingly corporate elites.

Henry of course discusses this. He notes that authoritarian leaders are much less effective at securing their ruling coalition if they can’t make credible promises. And that part of the problem comes from the temptations of absolutism itself to engage in entirely arbitrary behaviour (incidentally, a problem when you are thinking through the logic of Hobbes’ own Leviathan). Trump is behaving, in Mancur Olson’s terms, more like a roving bandit than a stationary one.

But what I find most interesting about Trump’s anti-Leviathan is that his rule is creating anarchy everywhere else too. And that means not only are his promises not credible but nor are his threats.

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The Lord of Chaos

Let’s start with an example close to my heart since it’s my PhD alma mater - Harvard. After first going after Columbia, and creating a lengthy enemies of list of universities to be investigated for anti-semitism (as the Trump administration defines it), last weekend the administration went after the big kahuna - America’s oldest and richest university.

The letter that they sent Harvard was, bluntly, insane. I do encourage you to read it but make sure to remember to close your mouth while you gasp, lest a spider climb in. It was a grab-bag of every critique that Chris Rufo-adjacent alt-right anti-university advocates have ever raised.

It included a series of demands that no university could ever accept - including having the administration audit every single department for ‘viewpoint diversity’, requiring any that did not meet whatever this made-up target actually meant to hire a ‘critical mass’ of new faculty to achieve that goal. This was, as many wags put it - MAGA DEI.

And it wasn’t just faculty this should apply to - MAGA students as well should be admitted to create the ‘critical mass’. At the same time, of course, the university should end all DEI. You know, the bad DEI, not the DEI the administration just demanded Harvard introduce. Oh, and on top of this, all foreign student behavioural infractions should be reported to the government; faculty governance dismantled, and whole schools in the university be annually audited by an external body.

This is a level of interference that, bluntly, one only normally associates with dictatorships and would completely deep-six intellectual freedom and autonomy. And, to note, Harvard is a private university, so one can only imagine what it might imply for public universities. In a world of draconian, rational authoritarianism - in a Hobbesian world, this would be scary indeed.

But in Trump’s anti-Leviathan, the letter did not have the intended outcome. Harvard simply said NO. The response of the Trump administration was to threaten to remove Harvard’s tax exempt status as a non-profit, which is both likely illegal (or at least pushing the IRS to do this is) and likely counterproductive given how many right-wing think tanks and of course churches are also tax-exempt non-profits. Kristi Noem, the DHS Secretary, upped the ante a few days later by threatening to ban Harvard from admitting foreign students - things have gone quiet on that one, but I suspect it will fail.

And most entertainingly, the administration now appears to be claiming that the initial letter that set off the firestorm was accidentally sent out. They have even gaslighted Harvard for the ‘malpractice’ of responding to the letter rather than calling the government’s lawyers back. Harvard’s response, as reported in the NYT, is worth quoting:

The letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised,” Harvard said in a statement on Friday. “Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government — even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach — do not question its authenticity or seriousness.”

The statement added: “It remains unclear to us exactly what, among the government’s recent words and deeds, were mistakes or what the government actually meant to do and say. But even if the letter was a mistake, the actions the government took this week have real-life consequences” on students and employees and “the standing of American higher education in the world.”

So, the anti-Leviathan outcome in full. Instead of using absolute power to compel obedience, the government was told no, responded with a flailing series of likely illegal escalations, then claimed it didn't mean to send the letter in the first place. Obviously this is a good example of why it’s important to stand up to bullies. But more than that, it is an exemplar of ‘chaotic authoritarianism’ and the anarchy in which universities now to have make decisions.

And then there’s the tariffs. Memba’ them? Couple of weeks back, when the global economy almost melted down? I covered the execrable ‘formula’ that the Trump administration came up with last time. But let’s imagine they had stuck to this formula as robust absolutists charting a new authoritarian path to re-industrialisation. We could have had Trumpian Five Year Plans.

You will, of course, recall that is not what happened. Despite claiming the tariffs were non-negotiable and America was charting a new course, the entire framework broke down over the next few days. Most of the mad ‘reciprocal’ tariffs were removed, putting almost everyone back onto the ten percent baseline (thereby limiting Britain’s Brexit bonus to a couple of days duration, which to be honest isn’t bad by Brexit standards).

Except then a whole new series of tariffs were thrown onto China, raising the tariff rate above 100%. But then, as it became clear that iPhones would now cost over $2000, new exceptions were introduced for smartphones and other consumer tech. But then new tariffs were mentioned to apply to pharmaceuticals. But also Trump was negotiating new deals with over 70 countries before the reciprocal tariffs were due to be reimposed and then…

We know now that the reason Trump backed off the reciprocal tariffs was literally because his trade advisor Peter Navarro was somewhere else in the White House and Commerce and Treasury Secretaries Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent grabbed Trump in Navarro’s absence and forced him to type out a new Truth Social post. People had been concerned about whether there might have been a leak of Trump’s intentions and the possibility of insider trading. But in fact it was much more stupid, and hence untradable, than that. America’s entire economic policy depended on one advisor being out of the room for a few minutes. It’s like The Death of Stalin if the main character had not in fact died.

The anti-Leviathan of trade policy means that out in the private sector it’s every man for himself. Tim Cook was lobbying hard for Apple’s supply chain, and lo and behold an exception appeared. American businessmen who proudly declared they were home producers unaffected by the tariffs discovered that in fact their suppliers were now charging them double. This week. Who knows about next week? In the economic state of nature, profitable weeks are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.

Then we have the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. Here is where the Trump administration are trying to flex hardest their willingness to ignore the law and exert absolute authority. But even here, their chaotic administration is making things harder - by having already admitted that they made a mistake in sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, they have got themselves wrapped in knots - redefining what ‘facilitate’ and ‘effectuate’ mean. The decision to invite Nayib Bukele to the White House was meant to underline their authoritarian resoluteness but it then led to Trump being caught telling Bukele he wanted to expand the deportation program to ‘homegrowns’, which then produced legal pushback from the 4th Court of Appeals and now the Supreme Court. The chaos once again undermines the authoritarianism.

And out in the wider world, complete confusion reigns about who is a target for deportation. Students with misdemeanours on their record? People with tattoos of Real Madrid? German tattoo artists who want to tattoo a friend? Now in some ways, this state of panic and immigration status anarchy is probably what someone like Steven Miller wants. On the other hand the lack of focus means that ICE is flailing around and unable to actually deport remotely as many people as Trump promised during the election. And at the same time, tourists numbers are collapsing. Even Steven Miller doesn’t hate tourists. Right? Right?

And finally we have foreign affairs. Again, Trump, Vance and Rubio came into their first international meetings with an authoritarian sneer. Treaties were trifling constraints that needed to be shrugged off. Pete Hegseth’s military was going to focus solely on its ‘fighting force’. China was going to be boxed in. And Trump was going to end the Russia-Ukraine War - and presumably receive his much deserved Nobel Peace Prize.

Instead, in about three whole months, this crew has managed to almost entirely disable America’s leading global position. The worst are indeed full of passionate intensity. Mere anarchy has been loosed upon the world. And the American centre cannot hold.

European leaders following Friedrich Merz have seen the American Leviathan collapse in self-induced chaos and decided Europe needs to guarantee its own security. Putin has merrily ignored any request to negotiate over the war in Ukraine. China has started to develop closer ties to neighbouring rivals over economic cooperation in the wake of Trump’s tariffs. And America’s closest allies have started to wonder if the Five Eyes intelligence sharing program can still function.

International Relations theorists have long told us that the world of nation-states is anarchic. But that’s been an empty statement during the era of bipolarity during the Cold War and the American hegemony that followed it. But it’s back baby - grab your Thucydides and strap in.

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We will spend a lot of time over the next few years trying to figure out if Trump’s America remains a democracy. Already the main indices we use are starting to downgrade the USA. I struggle as to whether that coding is premature or not - we will of course know much more by the midterms about the stability and freedom of elections, though by then it could be too late.

It is very clear that Trump wishes to act as an authoritarian. But it is not yet obvious to me that analysing him using the logic of dictatorship makes sense. Because he lacks the control, the ruthlessness, and the rationality of normal authoritarian leaders. As Henry says in his post, ‘absolute power can be a terrible weakness’. True. However, for many - perhaps most - dictators, absolute power is a terrible (in the original sense of that word) strength. Think to the horrors of the twentieth century.

That, however, is not Donald Trump. He may be the master of chaos. But he is not the Leviathan.