With the Israeli election this week and America’s midterms next Tuesday, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have reportedly spent weeks debating not whether to restart their war with Iran, but when they should do it.
Netanyahu reportedly wanted to renew the bombing before Israeli or American voters went to the polls. He has officially denied that, but it fits his well-documented strategy of using an ongoing war to shield himself from political and legal accountability.
Trump, meanwhile, has publicly ruled out another US attack until after November 3. But, according to several recent reports, the two governments are genuinely preparing for another major round of strikes once the American election is over.
Already, this episode has made the narrative put forward by both leaders even more ridiculous. After all, if renewed attacks on Iran are as necessary to protect the American people, as both have claimed, why would that necessity depend on whether those people have already voted?
The truth is, as I laid out here earlier this year, that the war on Iran is not a drastic but necessary measure to thwart an imminent threat from a rogue regime. It’s just another military action, on top of all the others our government is carrying out, that is beneficial for a coalition of unique, well-connected interest groups—from the Israeli politicians who want to direct American power towards weakening their main regional rival to the domestic weapons companies getting paid to restock America’s dwindling munitions stockpiles.
The narrative that Iran is months or even weeks away from starting a nuclear war with two far more heavily-armed nuclear powers; that they are not just willing but are actively trying as hard as they can to sacrifice their entire country to take out a few Israeli and American cities; and that this will be carried out with weapons and weapons-delivery technology that they do not possess and are not close to getting is obviously not the truth. But it is the most effective way the pro-war coalition has discovered so far for getting a sufficient portion of the public to at least passively accept a war they all want for reasons they’re not as willing to publicize.
That effectiveness, however, has clearly waned in recent months. Today, around two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump’s Iran policy, with widespread concerns growing about the impact on energy prices and all the terrible consequences that brings. This is a deeply unpopular war. And yet, it is set not only to continue but to escalate in the coming weeks.
This also highlights another, even more important aspect of this story that is getting far less attention than the war’s unpopularity: the sheer inadequacy of democratic elections as constraints on political power.
According to the standard narrative that most of us are taught growing up, for most of human history people have suffered under kings, oligarchs, and rulers of all kinds who used political power selfishly. Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small sliver of society, while everyone else was forced to live in either literal servitude or material conditions no better than servitude. However, this was supposed to have changed with the invention of democracy.
At first there were only a few flickers—such as in ancient Athens—but then, especially with the so-called liberal revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the people rose up, threw off their despotic rulers, and instituted democracies where governments acted on behalf of the people.
And this “innovation” brought about our modern enlightened world where the public decides what it wants the government to do, politicians compete for the opportunity to represent those preferences, and then recurring elections provide a mechanism for holding them accountable—preventing those with political power from returning to the expropriative ways of pre-democratic rulers.
This basic formula is so ingrained in us through government and government-accredited school curricula and much of the news we consume from the legacy press that many consider recurring democratic elections to be the only meaningful constraint on governments and societal elites of all kinds.
The political establishment is very purposeful when they break the whole world up into two camps: the democracies and the authoritarians. Those are, to them, not even the two sides of a spectrum but the only two alternatives. Either a government is held accountable by the public through free democratic elections, or it isn’t.
And yet, by all indications, we see Trump bypassing this supposedly supreme constraint on their ability to do things like wage unpopular wars by simply waiting a few weeks. Once next Wednesday comes around, Trump and his party will have plenty of time—years in most cases—until the next election, giving him plenty of room to keep pushing his unpopular policy without needing to worry about the political consequences.
Now, the establishment wants us to think Trump is only willing to do this because he’s an aspiring authoritarian who hates democracy and doesn’t respect how the system is supposed to work. But this is a remarkably common thing for presidents to do.
George W. Bush delayed the “surge” in Iraq until after the 2006 midterms. Barack Obama waited to enact his second-term immigration reforms until after the 2014 midterms and had earlier delayed controversial regulations until after the 2012 election. George Bush Sr. waited until two days after the 1990 midterms to announce the military buildup he had ordered in the Gulf weeks earlier. And then, of course, there was Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ who all campaigned and won their elections on staying out of wars, only to change course later, after the election was over.
Each of those cases is unique, and the policies that later got enacted vary in unpopularity, but the point is that Trump isn’t some anomaly for timing his actions around an election. And yet, if democratic elections were really the powerful constraint we’re taught they are, we’d expect these kinds of actions to be extremely uncommon and difficult to pull off. But they aren’t. They’re a common feature of our democratic system.
Now, once one comes to really understand this, it can be easy to become jaded. Once you internalize that—as I often touch on here—even in our current age of democracy, the government has never really been led or directed by public opinion, it can be tempting to see public opinion as meaningless. Campaign promises are broken far more often than they’re enacted. All parts of the government show no real interest in what the people want, and seem to face no real consequences for that.
However, this democratic nihilism (as we might call it) falls into the same basic trap as the naïve democratic idealists. Both rely on a fundamental misunderstanding of how public opinion affects government.
States aren’t led or steered by public opinion. They are, and have always been, entities that act in their own interest. However, they also have never been able to do whatever they want. States do what they can get away with.
In other words, public opinion does not steer the state, but it can constrain it.
Because every state, proto-state, and group within society that survives on legalized plunder has faced the same basic issue: they are vastly outnumbered by the population they’re expropriating. If a state is going to survive as a state, it must convince a sufficient portion of the population that it is justified in doing things that would be a crime for anyone else to do—or, more precisely, that the public itself is not justified in resisting the state’s aggression because of some divine right, written constitution, or democratic process.
In a lot of ways, you could look at the history of political thought and institutions as a history of states searching for, adopting, abandoning, and pivoting to whatever intellectual or emotional excuse proves most effective for convincing the population that their expropriations are good and just.
Through that lens, the Soviet Union fell because the excuse for state power stopped working. And the liberal revolutions can best be understood as the collapse of the old justification for state rule that had enabled the states taking the form of parliamentary monarchies. The states that developed and survived that revolution in the minds of the people were the ones who adopted a new effective excuse for state power. In that case, it was the illusion of popular sovereignty through a democratic process.
And that is still the main legitimizing myth that justifies everything modern states do to us. The idea that we the people are the ones steering the federal government is hammered into our heads at every turn so that we really believe it to be true. And so that we believe that all the evidence to the contrary is simply a momentary diversion that will disappear with the offending individual.
But recognizing that this is how the system actually works is not a reason for pessimism or despair. There is an important reason for hope in all this. Because the state’s constant need to justify itself reveals an important weakness. If public opinion really were powerless, those in government would not devote so much effort to shaping it.
The Trump administration’s hesitation to restart the war before the election provides some evidence of that power. Unfortunately, Americans have been taught to exercise that power almost exclusively through a mechanism that politicians have become remarkably adept at navigating and controlling.
But if we want to meaningfully constrain the state, we cannot keep sitting around waiting for those in power to start acting like we want them to because we voted for it. There is a lot more power in us recognizing how our system actually works, pointing it out to others, and, overall, in refusing to let them get away with the excuses that make their actions possible.
The more those justifications lose their hold on the public, the harder it becomes for the state to act on them. They know their power depends on what the public will accept. The public needs to understand that too.
