More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him there—the people who want to be fed fantasies and lies, the people who set themselves apart from and above their compatriots. So the question is not who Trump was, but who we are
Facts, as we are using the term, are true propositions, abstract objects without causal powers. It is not, strictly speaking, the fact that some plums are ripe that causes them to fall from the tree; it is their ripeness itself or, to be more precise, it is the chemical and physical changes that define ripeness. Objective reasons, being facts, are themselves without causal powers. From our empirical point of view, it doesn’t matter whether objective reasons exist in the world independently of human interests and what well-defined criterion of objectivity they meet, if any. If we talk about objective reasons at all, it is because they are represented both in what people think and in what they say and, unlike facts, representations of facts do have causal powers.
At one point I was going to call this book There Are No Things. I changed my mind when I saw that it might align me with a nihilistic trend in post-modernism that I deplore. It also gave the impression that I was arguing for ‘truth-as-correctness’ rather than ‘truth-as-unconcealing’. My aim is to clear away the assumptions that cloud our vision: and the assumption of a materialist world composed of ‘things’ is the greatest impediment we face.
...ἡμεῖς δέ – τίνες δὲ ἡμεῖς; But we – who are we? —Plotinus
Morgenthau may have been the philosopher of power politics, but he was also at pains to explain what power was not. The crucial point, often forgotten even by his own Realist disciples, was that violence was not political power. The threat of force might be necessary in international relations, but its use signaled the failure of political power and its displacement by military power, which was a very different thing.
Very near the thinking of Morgenthau's friend, Hannah Arendt.
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