Folks on MSNOW are talking about the comment from Peewee German, aka Stephen Miller, that power is all that matters, and drawing analogies to Hobbes’s Leviathan. What’s lacking from the discussions is the central issue of Hobbes’s book, namely that it’s the agreement of the people, or for my purposes of nations, that they will cede their power to do whatever they want, and hand that power over to the “leviathan,” “that mortal god to which we owe, under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”
The agreement is a contract among the people/nations to cede their own authority and power to the leviathan. But the contract is not between the people/nations and the leviathan. That means that the leviathan is not bound by the terms of the contract, by the law, and so can exercise its power without any limitation at all. From the perspective of the people/nations, the contract binds them absolutely not to exercise any power that they have ceded to the leviathan. If any person/nation does so, the consequence is to suffer the exercise of leviathan’s power.
In theory, at any rate, the US is a Hobbesian nation in the sense that there is a contract, the Constitution, that assigns power to the federal government in more or less clearly stated terms. To challenge those terms is to provoke the power of the federal government and suffer the consequences. Obviously Hobbes’s notion that the leviathan is not part of the contract and therefore not subject to the terms of the contract doesn’t apply to the US—at least so far.
In effect, thanks to Marbury v. Madison, the SCOTUS functions as a sort of Hobbesian leviathan in the sense that it’s the SCOTUS that determines to what extent the federal government, in its legislative and executive guises, is bound by the law. The SCOTUS itself, it seems, is unbound by any law. Whatever the court decides is absolutely within its power to determine, but there is no obverse to that—in other words, short of impeachment of individual members of the court, no one can tell the SCOTUS how to behave or what to decide.
The problem that the world faces is that there is no global counterpart to the SCOTUS. There is no leviathan whose power can be exercised without restraint in order to maintain the contract among the people/nations. Presumably there is a sort of contract—say the charter of the UN, or of the International Court of Justice. But there is no agency that can impose consequences for violating the terms of that contract. In the absence of such a leviathan, then, Hobbes tells us that we actually live in what he calls a state of nature, in which there is a constant and perpetual war of each against all. Peewee German—I mean Stephen Miller is therefore right when he says that the only thing that matters is power.
Unfortunately Peewee does not contemplate what Hobbes says are the consequences of living in a state of nature. Such a life, says Hobbes, is “nasty, brutish, and short.” That is the world we live in. From the perspective of the rest of the world, that miserable existence has been obvious all along. Thanks to the cockwomble now in the White House, we in the US are now seeing that we are not exempt.
