Defending the Leviathan on Twitter
Kneejerk defense of any status quo regime seeks to halt human rights progress
When students learn about Thomas Hobbes, his views on government often elicit laughter or disbelief because he seems so hopelessly out of touch. He is one of the few philosophers whose writing lives up to the caricature – his Leviathan lays out in great detail form first principles why human societies need strong leaders, and the myriad sins of any attempt to weaken or change that leadership. He is crucial to the understanding of Liberalism primarily because the proto-liberals, John Locke in particular, had to first explain their objection to Hobbes before they could set out any manner of alternative government system, or even justify why an seeking alternative was morally acceptable.
Given this, one might be surprised to see ‘Neo-Hobbesian’ as a descriptor – who could seek to resurrect such an archaic worldview? However, in practice it is increasingly popular position, even if I’ve never heard it as a self-descriptor. Spurred on by an admittedly healthy mistrust of US regime change tactics, commentators from the authoritarian left and right become indistinguishable on the point of defending extant regimes from any criticism.
Esha Kung, of the podcast historic.ly , is a good example of this ideology. Her infamy on the internet probably exceeds her personal reach, but the Historic.ly Substack has, apparently, well over 30,000 subscribers and purports to offer a corrective to the ‘whitewashed’ history taught in the US. It would seem the primary method for doing so is to dramatically distort the records of communist leaders, with Kung going so far as to accuse every Crimean Tatar in the 1940s of being a Nazi. Nonetheless, this hasn’t stopped her from defending a truly bizarre list of leaders, going so far as to make a list of ‘Juan Guaidos’ (presumably meaning US puppets?) in the world. These included not only predictable ones like Belarussian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya but also the opposition in Thailand, Myanmar, and the Philippines. Asked why Rodrigo Duterte, a famously anti-communist authoritarian, deserves even qualified support, Kung responded that “Sovereignty rules.. so Americans need to STFU.”
Kung’s idea of the social contract is certainly less rigorous than Hobbes’s, but some of the ideas are the same. Since the sovereign rules in the name of the people, he cannot be subject to criticism by the same:
“because every Subject is by this Institution Author of all the Actions, and Judgements of the Soveraigne Instituted; it followes, that whatsoever he doth, it can be no injury to any of his Subjects; nor ought he to be by any of them accused of Injustice”
This may be kneejerk anti-Americanism, but it leads to some truly odd places, especially when pursued by the left. Aaron Mate, whose work for Grayzone grants him a much larger platform than Kung, has gone so far as to imply that USAID is going to kick off regime change in…Hungary, of all places. Now of course, Viktor Orban’s Hungary is a NATO member and favorite of the far right wing in the US and Western Europe, but according to these commentators it is Hungary’s recalcitrance towards sanctioning Russia and arming Ukraine, not its worsening human rights situation, that is getting attention from the US State Department. Author Margaret Kimberly agreed, arguing that the US was planning a “Color Revolution” in Hungary. A ‘Color Revolution’ of course refers to the various pro-western movements in places like Ukraine and Georgia that occurred in the past couple of decades. To this way of thinking, such movements are inherently suspect. Many such movements grew precisely because of the police repression used against them, but to a certain mindset this repression was warranted because, as Hobbes puts it, ‘if he that attempteth to depose his Soveraign, be killed, or punished by him for such attempt, he is author of his own punishment, as being by the Institution, Author of all his Soveraign shall do”. The use of water cannons or rubber bullets on crowds, as we are seeing in Georgia as a write this, or even the killing of protestors as was seen in Ukraine in 2014, is fully justified because the people (at least, non-westerners) do not have a will and existence separate from their sovereign.
Of course, obsession with color revolutions and authority is hardly an exclusively leftist phenomenon. Stew Peters, a conspiracy theorist with a podcast on Rumble and a quarter million Twitter followers, believes that the Maidan protests in Ukraine were in fact funded by George Soros and the Deep State (no surprise there), but also that they were practice for antifa led color revolutions in the United States, presumably including the Black Lives Matter movement.
The reality is that this mindset can be used to dispute any claim to any rights, whatsoever. This is key to the mindset – while an individual can’t be blamed for defending themselves, any collective action to defend rights is fundamentally unjust. As Hobbes claims, “To resist the Sword of the Common-wealth, in defence of another man, guilty, or innocent, no man hath Liberty; because such Liberty, takes away from the Soveraign” – and here Hobbes finds plenty of agreement. Alan MacLeod, a journalist for Mint Press, has used his sizeable Twitter platform to pre-emptively imply that any concern for democracy or human rights in countries as diverse as Mexico, Iran, or Uganda is simply performative, an effort to seize natural resources. MacLeod doesn’t bother to explain any specifics, leaving his prognostications vague enough that any effort by the people of Uganda to protect the rights of LGBTQ people there, or by Iranian women to assert their equality, is somehow tainted, part of a sinister imperial project.
Liberals may feel such a tactic is difficult to respond to. After all, it is true that a foreign policy that hinges on removing unfriendly regimes makes liberal international relations impossible. And those of us within liberal democracies generally do not have the lived experience of needing to extralegally defend liberal freedoms. Seeing past Neo-Hobbesian arguments that seek to justify the existence of tyranny requires a couple of mental habits. The first is remembering the agency of people involved – even the most powerful intelligence agencies can rarely spark a popular uprising without deep problems in material conditions, and it is very often the case that even when the US is involved in some way, its interests and actions are peripheral to what is happening locally. The second is to recall that every constitutional order exists, or should exist, to maximize the practical liberty and well-being of its people. An order that does not do so, or a set of leaders ruling under that order, runs the risk of losing the right to rule – and if it does so, it may be run out of power by a people that does not adhere to it’s the constitutional order they are trying to replace. Judging such cases is challenging, and often it is best to suspend judgement for a moment until one can better understand the situation. But reflexive defense of the status quo has never been a liberal value, and it should not be the immediate response when the status quo is in a foreign country, either. At the close of his seminal speech “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”, Frederick Douglass promised a world in which
“No nation can now shut itself up from the surrounding world, and trot round in the same old path of its fathers without interference….Space is comparatively annihilated…No abuse, no outrage…can now hide itself from the all-pervading light”.
The revolutions in transport and intelligence have surpassed what Douglass could have dreamt of – to continue to defend or turn a blind eye to illiberalism simply because it occupies the position of status quo is to prove ourselves unworthy to opportunities only dreamed about in past eras.
Knee-jerk ant-Americanism, combined with an intense anti-liberalism, creates a rigid ideology that creates all sort of demented positions.