In 1651, Thomas Hobbes posed a philosophical problem that would take 300 years to answer. If a man wanted something, and he thought there was a risk that someone else wanted the same thing, there was no natural authority—might or some such—that could easily settle the matter between them. Without any sort of authority governing society, men were compelled to seize the things they wanted. If they did not, someone else could. So Hobbes believed that men, in the absence of authority, would simply go around seizing what things they needed or desired, leading them inevitably to a state of war—“all against all.”
Hobbes called this the problem of “diffidence.” Philosophers often recast it in terms of the prisoner’s dilemma. Two men desire the same thing. Call it a knife. There is only one knife. If neither man reaches for the knife, both get to walk away unharmed. But if one man reaches for the knife, and the other does not, then the man with the knife has significant power over his fellow. He might, for instance, kill or enslave him. If both men reach for the knife, a scuffle ensues and someone will emerge on top—but that is a matter of mere coincidence, as no man is naturally or obviously stronger than the other. Since neither man knows what the other will do, the best choice is always to reach for the knife. The consequences of deciding to trust your fellow man are simply too dire.
Hobbes believed there was a way to avoid this state of war: men could agree to introduce between themselves a source of absolute and unquestionable authority, a “Leviathan” whose superior strength over others would dispel diffidence. His laws, backed by the absolute authority of his sword, would reestablish and preserve civil society by allocating between men the goods over which they fought. Hobbes’s rather severe picture of civil society did not discount the possibility that men could be moral and capable of beneficence, as a classic line of criticism suggests. Instead, since men could not read one another’s minds, and were naturally inclined to seek their own preservation, they were drawn by a simple calculation to preempt their fellows. The possibility of ill intention, rather than the fact of it, brought men into conditions of diffidence. As one student of Hobbes put it, “What makes his argument frightening and gives it significance and dramatic power is that he thinks that normal, even quite nice, people can be put in this sort of situation, and it will degenerate into a state of war.”
That student was John Rawls. His great answer to Thomas Hobbes, 1971’s A Theory of Justice, took for its object of investigation the “well-ordered society,” one “designed to advance the good of its members and effectively regulated by a public conception of justice.” In a certain sense, Hobbes’s absolutist state was a well-ordered society. It was, Hobbes thought, the only society that could advance the good of all its members. It also enjoyed a public conception of justice: namely, the necessity of the absolute and independent Leviathan. Such a conception of justice was threadbare, but Hobbes thought that it was the only one possible.
One advantage of Hobbes’s conception of justice was that it was designed to furnish society with stability over time. “Other things equal,” Rawls wrote, men “will adopt the more stable scheme of principles. However attractive a conception of justice might be on other grounds, it is seriously defective if the principles of moral psychology are such that it fails to engender in human beings the requisite desire to act upon it.” Other things equal, Hobbes thought, absolutism was the only stable scheme which always tended to value itself over others, once we properly recognized that moral psychology of human beings tended toward diffidence.
Rawls disagreed. He did not necessarily question that, push come to shove, men tended to value themselves first. However, he thought that men could understand that they stood to gain more by cooperation than by competition. If a certain set of rules and principles were clearly established in a society, then men could come to recognize the benefits they received from those rules and the cooperation that they enabled. A good set of rules, motivated by a proper conception of justice, would “generate its own support.” The society which put them into place would be self-perpetuating.But how would such principles “generate” in the first place? On the assumption that men have not yet come to appreciate the benefits of a liberal set of rules, and that there is no authority yet set up to enforce those rules, it seems difficult to imagine what could ever make them set aside their mutual distrust. Men in such a position have not yet been given a reason to believe that their fellow man will walk away from the knife. The same problem applied to Hobbes’s theory. When men come together to set up the Leviathan, how could they trust one another to back that new source of authority?
Luckily, a conqueror could emerge from Hobbes’s state of war—a perfectly reasonable sovereign, already capable of enforcing his own rule at the time that civil society was established. Rawls, for obvious reasons, could not resort to the argument that society was best secured by a conqueror. Rules and principles do not conquer. At one point, Rawls writes that mere promises between men are to bring them out of diffidence and into observation of the rules of society. But the point, Rawls must have known, was timorous. It depended on the assumption that men were, in fact, not inclined in the last instance to their self-preservation, a point Rawls elsewhere wants to deny. It seems that, for Rawls, the real answer was that something or someone would have to put forward and enforce the liberal conceptions of society before they would become publicly accepted and self-perpetuating. And it was possible that such an action could only be accomplished by illiberal means.
For the first time in history, elections in 2024 saw incumbent parties lose vote share in every developed country. American Democrats were merely the last to join what the Financial Times called a “graveyard of incumbents.” Although headlines highlighted the gains of far-right parties in Germany and Austria, among the biggest losers in global elections were British Conservatives, who lost 19.9 percent of their vote share (American Democrats lost just 3.7 percent). In Japan the Liberal-Democrats, which had governed as a de facto single party for decades, lost 7.9 percent of their vote share. Startling as the rise of the far-right might be in America, Germany, and elsewhere, it was a global tide of anti-incumbency—not reactionary ideology—that carried these and other parties into elected office.
One way to understand the wave of anti-incumbency that has struck Western and other liberal-style democracies is as the reemergence of Hobbesian diffidence. The two diffident parties are governments and their citizens. Citizens are essentially dissatisfied and distrusting of their governments. They look at their ballots and think, “Well, I know the current guy is screwing me; I might as well give the other guy a chance.” That or they don’t cast their ballots at all. The point is that the rationally dominant option, to vote for the opposition or not vote at all, is also a bad option. It is like reaching for the knife. It is not the sort of choice you make when you understand yourself to be in a basically good position.
Few Americans understand themselves to be in a good position. Through 2024, public trust in government in the United States remained stuck at historic lows: just one in five Americans trust their government, a figure that has remained more or less steady for two decades. Two-thirds of Americans say the government does not do enough to address issues affecting middle- and lower-income Americans; about the same number believe that the government does too much to address higher-income concerns. More than half of Americans agree that retirees, rural communities, disabled persons, and children all do not receive enough support from the federal government. Another two-thirds majority favors the government playing a “major role” in stemming climate change; 85 percent believe the government needs to play a major role in handling immigration.
On the issues, Americans remain united around common-sense principles. But in recent years there has been little hope that the shift from one party to another would do much to change this status quo. Trump was reelected in November because the Biden administration, whatever efforts it made to the contrary, could not convince Americans that it stood for their underlying interests. Democrats have failed to present themselves as a serious alternative to Trump’s demagoguery. But Biden’s biggest problem has been his image. He has pledged himself to the defense of institutions that most Americans do not trust. With a congressional majority he staged show trials for January 6, an insurrection that did not insurrect much. As his health collapsed, his aides shielded him from the public eye, so that when he ambled onto the debate stage in June, his total incoherence was proof of the one thing his administration had tried to disprove: that Americans could not trust their government. Harris was too much of the same, too little, and too late. Nobody, outside a handful of moneyed supporters, cared that Trump was “a threat to democracy.” Democracy—the masses—swept Trump back into office. What was the good of the institutions we were trying to defend if no one was convinced that they provided what they were intended to?
Not since 2014—not in a decade—has an election maintained the incumbent in the White House or the incumbent majority on Capitol Hill. Perhaps the largest consequence of this anti-incumbency is that no party has had much time, or much leeway, to rule at all. They cannot demonstrate what they would provide for the American people. And so the people throw them out in favor of the next crew; and so on and so on. Nobody has the time or resources to build a stable majority. We are trapped in diffidence and there is no one to lift us out.
What would it look like to escape distrust and diffidence? To make or remake American institutions so that they work for the people? The first and most candid thing that a politician or a movement would have to recognize is that democracy as we now practice it—as a periodic exercise in casting one-vote ballots for an established political party—is both incapable of changing the institutional structure of our country, and often works to defeat the establishment of a lasting majority. That is not the fault of the voters. It is the fault of the circumstances of our society as we find them, within which any set of rules or principles of justice must operate. The circumstances of our present society are such that men are intensely distrustful and dissatisfied with their government. Institutional democracy, as well-intentioned as it is, is ill-equipped to handle such circumstances.
The theory of justice Rawls advanced in his book of that name is comprised of two separate principles. The first principle was that “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive scheme of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar scheme of liberties of others.” Such basic liberties include freedom of speech, of the press, of conscience, of suffrage, and so on. The second principle held that “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are … to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged.” The second principle applied, in a certain sense, to the first. If the circumstances of society were such that it was extremely difficult to guarantee equal basic liberties for everyone, a “less extensive liberty” for some would be justified insofar as it “strengthen[ed] the total system of liberties shared by all.”
This was the sort of society Hobbes imagined. The circumstances of society, as he understood them, were dire. The only way to preserve the most basic liberties—of survival and the stability of society—was to sign away every other right to the sovereign. Thus the “total system of liberties shared by all” was strengthened against the state of war. There was never any way for everyone to enjoy “equal basic liberties” given men’s tendency toward competition and diffidence. Social and economic inequality was arranged so that the least advantaged—all citizens—were in the best possible condition. Hobbes carried the Rawlsian argument to its extreme.
Democratic participation was one of Rawls’s fundamental liberties, but there were other liberties too, like the ability to form and pursue a stable plan of life. In certain circumstances, a less democratic regime should be preferred to a more democratic one if it secured more extensive basic liberties. By furnishing the people with these liberties, a new regime could transform the circumstances in which it had been established. A new regime might, for instance, prove capable of restoring lapsed trust in government, at which point more extensive democratic institutions could be reintroduced. There was no need to recourse back to the total absolutism Hobbes had proposed. It was only then, Rawls wrote, that it was sometimes necessary to “forgo” freedoms like political participation “when this is required to transform a less fortunate society into one in which all the basic liberties can be fully enjoyed.”
Great American leaders have recognized when the circumstances of society no longer permit a perfectly democratic system. Roosevelt understood that it would take a wildly new institutional structure to lift the United States out of the Depression—of social insurance, employment programs, and organized labor, all backed by the firm hand of the federal government. If the restoration of American prosperity came at the cost of the Supreme Court or Congress, then so be it. It was only through war that Lincoln knew he could restore the principles of justice and the democratic institutions of the United States; it was only through the military occupation of the South and the disenfranchisement of the former Confederacy that his Republicans could abolish the fundamental evil of slavery. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” But such a nation did not sustain itself. It would sometimes take extreme measures—a “great civil war”—to decide “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The brilliance of Rawls’s two principles of justice is that they accord very closely with the common-sense moral principles shared by most Americans. In arithmetic terms they lay out the sentiment behind Americans’ dissatisfaction with class inequalities, with structural inequalities that disadvantage children and disabled persons, with institutional apathy towards climate change. In all these cases over the past few decades, the American government—whatever the party—has failed to act in accordance with the basic principles of justice.
When Trump, his allies, and his successors are swept out of office in 2028, and Democrats are swept in, they will be presented with an unparalleled opportunity to prove that they represent the interests of the American people. Four years of Trump rule will have massively destabilized American institutions. The executive branch will have assumed more authority than ever—authority that Democrats can wield to push through major executive attacks on corporations, to put partisans at the head of executive agencies, and to exercise tremendous amounts of administrative authority over labor, climate, and public welfare. The Supreme Court will probably sit at a 6–3 or 7–2 conservative majority ripe for court-packing. A staunchly liberal court would restore reproductive rights and shore up the executive agenda against attack through the law. All this the new administration would do publicly and defiantly: it would celebrate its attack on the old way of doing things. It would castigate its own dissidents. It would offer the spectacle that Americans crave and that a major realignment of public expectations requires.
Trump’s petty abuses have cracked open the door to real, revolutionary change. Over the next four years that crack will widen. The fact that Democrats should not forget is that, somewhere, buried beneath their institutional pearl-clutching, they might just have principles that are basically popular with the American people. Rules and principals do not conquer like a Hobbesian sovereign. But someone can carry their standard and execute their mandates. That standard-bearer must not think that the present institutional order serves their ends. They must remember that for the circumstances of society to change, for American institutions to once again work toward the preservation of liberty, equality, and justice, the people must be shown that the principles of justice that they believe in once again regulate public and political life. They must have their liberties and their faith restored. From there, just institutions generate their own support. The conditions of diffidence will fade and trust will return. We will prove that the nation of liberty is always an experiment. That from time to time, it corrects itself. And that, as Lincoln said, it will long endure.
Image: William O. Fletcher, Civil War Soldier & Tree Trunk Bank, watercolor, gouache, and pen and ink on paper, 1937 (National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.).