How are the mighty fallen

Successful crime is dignified with the name of virtue; the good become the slaves of the wicked; might makes right; fear silences the power of the law. — Ancient Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger’s description of a dystopian state in his first-century tragedy Hercules Furens Earl Fowler

In an interview last month with CNN’s Jake Tapper — before U.S. President Donald Trump beat a humiliating retreat on his call for American ownership of Greenland in the face of strong international and domestic opposition — top White House adviser Stephen Miller asserted that the U.S. had an “obvious” right to seize the autonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark for one simple reason: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Certainly, that simple argument, grounded in realpolitik, has been around since Cain offed Abel with the jawbone of an ass (iron would come later).

As writer David Adler noted in an opinion column published by the Idaho Statesman:

It reflects the singular assertion and projection of raw, brutal power — might makes right — which dominated the Old World before the desire among nations to create a civilized order led to the establishment of international law which, among other things, sought to restrain warfare and promote peace and stability.

Miller is hardly an outlier in the Trump administration in holding this view, which was immediately endorsed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before her boss’s volte-face on Greenland. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is the very definition of “rye and mighty.”

And in a show of bravado after backing off, Trump himself told The New York Times last month that his actions are not bound by traditional international norms or laws: “I don’t need international law.”

When asked what could stop him from undertaking any action, Trump replied, “Yeah, there’s one thing: my own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

The president’s arrogant posture — a species of brazen, vulgar eloquence that has proved so seductive to a particular class of Americans (the ignorant, the xenophobic, the white supremacist tech bros suckled as teens at the breast of Ayn Rand’s inane philosophy of “objectivism”) — was enunciated far more articulately by Plato in The Republic, four centuries before Christ.

In the best known of the philosopher’s Socratic dialogues, the sophist Thrasymachus argues that “justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger,” a position that could have landed him a spot as the Secretary of Homeland Security if he were alive today and looked like a shampoo commercial under a cowboy hat.

But as reassuring as you may or may not find the president’s commitment to always acting ethically and rationally — that is, in what he perceives to be his own self-interest within the Orwellian nightmare he has inflicted on the rest of us where War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength — an inconvenient question has to be asked: Can a “might is right” philosophy be reconciled with the Christian or Jewish faiths to which members of the Trump administration and their supporters in Congress claim to so fervently adhere?

Now, granted. There is certainly an adolescent muscularity to the phrase might is right, the kind you can imagine being scrawled on the inside cover of a notebook by someone who has just discovered both weightlifting and cynicism and believes — briefly, passionately — that the universe has just revealed its eternal operating system.

It sounds bracing, honest, undeceived by sentiment. No insincerity, no gauze of ideals: just power, naked and declarative, arranging the world as power always has. The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must. Survival of the fittest. Nature red in tooth and claw.

Roll credits.

And yet — this is where things start to itch — the mere fact that the slogan has a surprisingly long pedigree should already make us suspicious, because ideas that survive for twenty-five centuries tend to do so not because they are obviously true but because they are endlessly useful to someone. The genealogy of might is right reads like a greatest-hits album of hardheaded realism.

In the Platonic dialogue Gorgias, the sophist Callicles goes even further than Thrasymachus, suggesting that morality itself is a conspiracy of the weak, a social muzzle clamped onto the naturally superior. Ayn Randism in a nutshell, if you throw in the corollary that laissez-faire capitalism is the only moral social system because property rights are sacred.

The ancient Greek historian Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian War with the chill precision of a mortician, gave us The Melian Dialogue, in which imperial Athens calmly explained that morality only applies among equals, and that power, regrettably but inexorably, decides everything else. Trump’s willingness to recognize a revanchist Russia and expansionist China more or less as equals with their own spheres of influence, while he claims hegemony over the Americas, conforms to this idea.

Fast-forward to the 16th century and the tune keeps playing, with variations. Niccolò Machiavelli counselled princes to stop pretending that virtue governs politics, since power is maintained by calculation, fear and well-timed cruelty. ICE ICE, Baby.

A century later, Thomas Hobbes imagined a state of nature where concepts like justice don’t even get off the ground until a sovereign strong enough to enforce order appears — right emerging not as a moral sunrise but as an administrative aftereffect of might.

In the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, more diagnostician than cheerleader, pronounced Christian morality a “slave morality,” born of resentment, valourizing weakness precisely because weakness needed a way to win without winning.

In 1896, Ragnar Redbeard (already sounding like a cartoon villain but likely the pen name of Arthur Desmond) dispensed with subtlety altogether in the Social Darwinist political treatise Might Is Right, declaring physical power the only real source of value and dismissing rights-talk as sentimental vassalage.

By the 1920s, when American philosopher William Pepperell Montague coined the term kratocracy — rule by those strong enough to seize control through force or deceit — the idea had acquired a pseudo-academic polish that played into the bloody hands of the Hitlers and the Stalins of the world.

In short, “realist international relations theory” has always shrugged its shoulders and said yes, obviously, this is how states behave. It’s just the way of the world.

More than a century ago, German sociologist Max Weber coolly analyzed the uneasy marriage between violence and legitimacy. The totalitarian regimes that followed adopted the creed with all the subtlety of a marching band. History, it seems, always sides with the strong.

Except — and this is the part that tends to get waved away by the notebook-scribblers — there is another historical current running just as long and just as stubborn, one that insists, sometimes to the point of absurdity, that power is not self-justifying. And here is where Christianity and Judaism enter the room, not quietly, not apologetically, but carrying with them a set of claims so at odds with kratocracy that trying to hold both at once produces something like cognitive whiplash.

The Tanakh, aka the Hebrew Bible, written in a world no less brutal than the one described by Thucydides, repeatedly aligns God not with the winners but with widows, orphans, resident aliens — the structurally weak.

The prophets do not scold Israel for insufficient power but for using power incorrectly: for trampling the poor, for grinding the faces of the needy, for mistaking military success for moral approval. The Book of Wisdom, with almost eerie relevance, puts might is right rhetoric directly into the mouths of the wicked: “Let our might be our law of right, for what is weak proves itself to be useless.” This is not endorsement; it is indictment.

Christianity, far from correcting this alleged weakness, doubles down. Its central image is not the conqueror but the crucified — a public execution reserved for the powerless. Jesus’s teachings read like a sustained assault on natural hierarchies: blessed are the poor, the meek, the persecuted; the last shall be first; whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me. Power, in this schema, is not denied but inverted, redefined as service. Greatness is measured downward.

This is why attempts to baptize might is right into Christian or Jewish thought always end up performing rhetorical gymnastics that would shame P.T. Barnum, Charles Ponzi and the entire batting order of the 1919 Chicago White Sox. You can, of course, point out that biblical history includes wars, kings and empires, or that churches have often cozied up to power.

You can praise the Lord to the church rafters on Sunday and “call for a travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches and entitlement junkies” on a Monday, as Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did ahead of her ongoing effort to repatriate 350,000 Haitians to an impoverished home island racked by acute gang and sexual violence, severe food insecurity and a near total collapse of health and education services. But this is an argument from hypocrisy, not from coherence. That inconvenient truth, again (I mean, for anyone claiming to be a Christian):

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.

The internal logic of both religious traditions relentlessly undercuts the idea that strength confers moral entitlement. When Abraham Lincoln, standing on the brink of civil war in the country Trump is now ripping apart, reversed the aphorism — “Let us have faith that right makes might” — he was not inventing a novelty so much as restating a theological intuition: Moral truth precedes and judges power, rather than the other way around.

To believe simultaneously that might is right and that God sides with the poor is to believe that God sides with whoever wins, except when He doesn’t, and that justice is whatever prevails, except when it is condemned by prophets, apostles and the incarnate Logos Himself.

It is to read “love your neighbour as yourself” as a nice metaphor until it interferes with domination. One can do this, obviously; history is full of people who have. But one cannot do it consistently without hollowing out the religious claims until they are decorative, ethical wallpaper pasted over a fundamentally Darwinian world that exists through a looking-glass and down a rabbit hole. “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many things.”

Unlike homosexuality, a subject that continues to raise the wrathful ire of such right-thinking Christians today as the eminent theologian Nicki Minaj but which Jesus never once mentions in the Bible, the Christian saviour was very big on condemning hypocrisy (Mark 7:6, Matthew 23: 27-28).

What a better world this would be if Christian powers had historically put hypocrites to death instead of burning “sodomites” at the stake or persecuting transgender people today for using washrooms or playing sports.

The persistence of might is right is understandable. It flatters the powerful, terrifies the weak into compliance and offers the weary the consolation of inevitability. What Judaism and Christianity (and Islam, for that matter) offer instead is something far more destabilizing: the claim that power is accountable to a standard it did not create, and that history’s apparent winners may, in the end, be wrong.

Not weak, not naïve — just wrong.

Which is exactly what Plato argues in The Republic, where his mentor and mouthpiece Socrates gives three arguments in favour of living a life centring on wisdom, harmony and a just soul rather than an angst-filled existence like Trump’s, where seemingly no amount of money and power can fill the manifest void at his megalomaniacal core.

Which is exactly why the “might is right” canard keeps needing to be rediscovered, renamed and defended by splenetic, apoplectic fascists like Miller. And why, despite its surface realism, it always sounds faintly defensive, as if insisting — too loudly — that the way things are must also be the way things ought to be.

They aren’t. As British historian Lord Acton wrote in that famous 1887 letter to Bishop Creighton, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” From within as well as without.

If you’re ruled by greed and blinded by a lust for power, you’re not even in charge of your own emotions. You’re a ravenous man-child, an unappeasable sociopath, an insatiate sinkhole of gluttony and grievance who will never be happy no matter what you acquire.

And as God warned Cain (Genesis, 4:7), lo those many years ago, before the young man opted for Eternal Miller Time: “… if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”