A Marxist science of politics (audio recording)

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel, “A Marxist science of politics?,” with Atiya Khan-Singh on “Decolonization in the Age of Anti-Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,” moderated by Edward Remus, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 24, 2025.

What is politics? It is the art of constituting the community. What is a science? A form of knowledge aware of its own conditions of possibility. What is Marxism as a science of politics? It is knowledge of the constitution of modern capitalist society, and how this knowledge of society is made possible by capitalism itself.

Modern capitalism is, according to Marxism, defined, as a mode of production, by the contradiction of bourgeois social relations by the industrial forces of production.

Bourgeois society is the community of labor. Politics in capitalism is the art of constituting the community of labor in the industrial age.

The industrial age is that of the Industrial Revolution: the process of automation. We are still living in capitalism insofar as we are in the community of labor contradicted by the process of automation.

This is a specific society with a specific condition, task and form of politics. To achieve adequate knowledge of this society and its politics requires a specific kind of science. Namely, a conception of contradiction is necessary. Moreover, what is needed is a conception of how a contradiction points to a potential change from within itself: a dialectical conception of contradiction. But such a knowledge — self-consciousness — is peculiar to capitalism and how it points beyond itself to socialism.

Political science as a discipline is a fairly late phenomenon. It is from the end of the 19th century at the earliest, but really from the 20th century. James Burnham in The Machiavellians dated the birth of political science to Machiavelli, but really to Italian Elite Theory of the turn of the 20th century. What is remarkable, then, is the birth of modern political science as a contemporary response to Marxism — and its 20th century efflorescence as a response to the failure of Marxism.

Marxism is commonly accused of lacking a political theory — lacking an account, let alone a science of politics. Specifically, it is said to have a deficient understanding of politics as such, instead attributing politics to economics.

But what about Marxism as a social science — a science of society? Is society reducible to economics? The bourgeois social relations of production are not merely economic: they are legal-juridical.

Marx’s critique of political economy was a critique of the self-consciousness of bourgeois society: political economy was social theory: a theory of social relations. Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, for instance, were moral philosophers — neither economists nor political philosophers.

Moral philosophy was descended from theology, as part of the broader descent of philosophy from religious thought.

What is the history of science — of knowledge? What is the history of our consciousness of society? The first form of knowledge of society was through religion: our community in and with the Divine; our Divine community.

The first state or polis was that of a religious community. It was understood to have been created by a Divine act, creating a fundamental and originary relation between the community and Divinity. The ruling class was the priestly caste, called the First Estate in European Christendom. In this way our first knowledge of society was through our knowledge of the Divine character of the polis.

The other ruling class of traditional civilization, the Second Estate, was the warrior caste. Often the Divine act that established the community was a war, whether a human war on Earth or a war of God or the gods in Heaven, or a combination of both. God aided the humans or humans aided God in their victory. If a community or a people or a god perished, this was itself understood as a Divinely preordained fate. As such the Divine act that established or abolished a community was outside of time, standing either at the beginning or the end.

What was the “rational kernel within the mystical shell,” in Marx’s language, of such a conception? That history itself was identical with the time of the community, defined throughout its course by its origin and telos.

The modern world of bourgeois society overthrew the gods and secularized time, making history identical with this process of revolution. The American conservative thinker Eric Voegelin criticized Marxism for seeking to “immanentize the Eschaton” or trying to make Heaven on Earth. But this was not Marxism’s doing but that of bourgeois society itself.

Bourgeois society’s social relations of labor humanized the Divine act of creating community, placing it in social cooperation itself. Rather than a singular Divine act, this Divine character of community became the unfolding process of history itself through human action.

Not Carl Schmitt’s “Divine violence” of political theology that identifies the community with God and deifies politics itself, but rather Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “vita active” of the “human condition.” Both were contemporaries of the apocalypse of modern society in the 20th century, in which the action of politics became deeply uncertain. How can we know the truth of political action? This is the fundamental question of political science as a modern knowledge of society and its self-conscious direction — not human secular action merely as the unconscious phenomenon of the Divine acting through it.

James Burnham in The Managerial Revolution tried to summarize the lessons of Italian Elite Theory of the early 20th century, synthesizing Mosca, Sorel, Michels and Pareto to grasp the dynamics of modern politics as a “managerial revolution” as the latest of Pareto’s “cycle of elites.” Burnham borrowed from Marxism the idea of history as succession of modes of production, but eliminated the dialectical character of capitalism in Marx’s view, which made it very different from other historical phenomena.

Gaetano Mosca supposedly innovated from Marxism’s focus on the subaltern’s revolutionary class struggle, turning instead to the issue of the reproduction of the ruling class. 

If the bourgeois Third Estate of Commoners had overthrown the Divine violence of the gods and the ruling castes, replacing them with the constitution of society by labor, then Burnham took from Mosca a reinterpretation of the ruling class as the organizers and managers of production, with changes driven by military or technical developments. —The gods were replaced by the Divine force of technology, and entrepreneurs as the new priests and warriors, bringing about an apocalyptic change of social production and its community. 

The industrial forces contradicting the bourgeois social relations of production in Marx’s view became instead a deus ex machina of the Divine force of nature on the stage of history victimizing the poor laboring humans. 

Far from bringing about Heaven on Earth, Hell had descended upon Creation instead. 

The struggle of elites in capitalism reverted back to more or less civilized or barbaric wars over the interpretation of the will of the gods between rival warrior-priests — as history had always been, the revelation of the inscrutable and mysterious Divine, to which we had to submit and bear witness. 

Was “science,” then, merely what it had always been, the religious veneration of the Divine, led by holy men, who might turn out not to be Saints but doing the Devil’s work, leading us astray from the proper reverence we owed our Creator as Lord, Savior and Redeemer? 

Marx called this the “fetishism” of the last stage of prehistory. Burnham’s Marxist contemporaries Adorno and Horkheimer called it the “veil of technology” that was so visibly thin it demanded to be pierced through. 

But what made such consciousness — as opposed to Burnham’s reification of alienated technology, society and politics — possible? 

According to Marxism, it was contradiction itself that produced consciousness — that made knowledge possible. This followed from Hegel’s discovery that knowledge itself — Absolute Knowing — was borne of the struggle for freedom in and through a condition of self-contradiction and its recognition. “Class struggle” was not against an evil Master — who was merely the character-mask of conditions, and not their cause or responsible actor — but a process of self-recognition borne of contradiction. 

Such contradiction was not a Divine force — which would amount to a fetishization and mystification or deification of the dialectic itself — but actually the specific knowledge of a specific society in a certain era of history. 

Dialectical and historical materialism was the adequate consciousness produced by the self-contradiction of the bourgeois social relations of labor in the industrial era of production at the moment of its revelation. It was the necessary consciousness of the proletarianized working class in its struggle to overcome capitalism — where capitalism itself was not the evil magical spell conjured by the ruling class — perverse priests heretically violating Divine Creation in the Satanic Mills of their devices — but the alienated society produced and reproduced by cooperative labor, contradicting and demanding overcoming itself. 

Political science was not meant to be yet another iteration of pondering the Divine, but the consciousness of revolution in history. 

This recognition, already nearly 200 years old, is the meaning of Marxism as a science of politics, called for by capitalism. | §

Chris Cutrone

Chris Cutrone is a college educator, writer, and media artist, committed to critical thinking and artistic practice and the politics of social emancipation. ( . . . )

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Lenin on the 1912 U.S. Presidential election (audio recording)

Chris Cutrone

Presented on a panel, “The radicality of the American project,” with James Vaughn, moderated by Spencer Leonard, held at the 4th Biennial conference of the Caucus for a Critical Political Science, South Padre Island, Texas, February 23, 2025.

Let me begin by reading a short article written by the Russian revolutionary social democratic Marxist Vladimir Lenin on the 1912 general election in the U.S. and its results:

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections

Published: Pravda 164, November 9, 1912

Wilson, a “Democrat”, has been elected President of the United States of America. He has polled over six million votes, Roosevelt (the new National Progressive Party) over four million, Taft (Republican Party) over three million, and the Socialist Eugene Debs 800,000 votes.

The world significance of the U.S. elections lies not so much in the great increase in the number of Socialist votes as in the far-reaching crisis of the bourgeois parties, in the amazing force with which their decay has been revealed. Lastly, the significance of the elections lies in the unusually clear and striking revelation of bourgeois reformism as a means of combating socialism.

In all bourgeois countries, the parties which stand for capitalism, i.e., the bourgeois parties, came into being a long time ago, and the greater the extent of political liberty, the more solid they are.

Freedom in the U.S.A. is most complete. And for a whole half-century — since the Civil War over slavery in 1860–65 — two bourgeois parties have been distinguished there by remarkable solidity and strength. The party of the former slave-owners is the so-called Democratic Party. The capitalist party, which favoured the emancipation of the Negroes, has developed into the Republican Party.

Since the emancipation of the Negroes, the distinction between the two parties has been diminishing. The fight between these two parties has been mainly over the height of customs duties. Their fight has not had any serious importance for the mass of the people. The people have been deceived and diverted from their vital interests by means of   spectacular and meaningless duels between the two bourgeois parties.

This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.

And now the bipartisan system has suffered a fiasco in America, the country boasting the most advanced capitalism! What caused this fiasco?

The strength of the working-class movement, the growth of socialism.

The old bourgeois parties (the “Democratic” and the “Republican” parties) have been facing towards the past, the period of the emancipation of the Negroes. The new bourgeois party, the National Progressive Party, is facing towards the future. Its programme turns entirely on the question whether capitalism is to be or not to be, on the issues, to be specific, of protection for the workers and of “trusts”, as the capitalist associations are called in the U.S.A.

The old parties are products of an epoch whose task was to develop capitalism as speedily as possible. The struggle between the parties was over the question [of] how best to expedite and facilitate this development.

The new party is a product of the present epoch, which raises the issue of the very existence of capitalism. In the U.S.A., the freest and most advanced country, this issue is coming to the fore more clearly and broadly than anywhere else.

The entire programme and entire agitation of Roosevelt and the Progressives turn on how to save capitalism by means of bourgeois reforms.

The bourgeois reformism which in old Europe manifests itself in the chatter of liberal professors has all at once come forward in the free American republic as a party four million strong. This is American style.

We shall save capitalism by reforms, says that party. We shall grant the most progressive factory legislation. We shall establish state control over all the trusts (in the U.S.A. that means over all industries!). We shall establish state control over them to eliminate poverty and enable everybody to earn a “decent” wage. We shall establish “social and industrial justice”. We revere all reforms — the only “reform” we don’t want is expropriation of the capitalists!

The national wealth of the U.S.A. is now reckoned to be 120 billion (thousand million) dollars, i.e., about 240 billion rubles. Approximately one-third of it, or about 80 billion rubles, belongs to two trusts, those of Rockefeller and Morgan, or is subordinated to these trusts! Not more than 40,000 families making up these two trusts are the masters of 80 million wage slaves.

Obviously, so long as these modern slave-owners are there, all “reforms” will be nothing but a deception. Roosevelt has been deliberately hired by the astute multimillionaires to preach this deception. The “state control” they promise will become — if the capitalists keep their capital — a means of combating and crushing strikes.

But the American proletarian has already awakened and has taken up his post. He greets Roosevelt’s success with cheerful irony, as if to say: You lured four million people with your promises of reform, dear impostor Roosevelt. Very well! Tomorrow those four million will see that your promises were a fraud, and don’t forget that they are following you only because they feel that it is impossible to go on living in the old way.

As usual, the dialectic of Lenin’s argument is subtle and easily overlooked but unmistakable once noticed. It is the contradiction of freedom and capitalist political domination.

It is important to note how Lenin regarded Progressivism — in this case, that of Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party in the 1912 election — as expression of the depth of the crisis of capitalist politics and as a response to the proletarian socialist movement and its political parties. Indeed, for Lenin, the crisis of capitalist politics was itself a result of the rise of socialism as a political force.

Lenin understood the electoral results for Debs’s Presidential candidacy as at least potentially representing far more than the actual vote tally — which, was proportionally the highest percentage the Socialist Party of America ever received, although it received a greater raw number of votes later. It was not necessary an indication of civil-social organizing strength, in labor unions and other formations of working class power “on the ground” outside the formal political sphere. The Socialist Party called for workers to vote their interests and conscience, which according to local as well as national issues might vary from the more symbolic expression of voting for the Socialist candidates in any given electoral contest. The Socialists did not aim to achieve governing power, especially at the national level, through election, but rather used voting as a suggestive measure of potential popular support as well as electoral campaigns as platforms for propagandizing the cause of socialism.

Outside the U.S., it is significant that 1912 was generally a high water-mark of socialist electoral strength, for instance in Germany when the SPD became the largest single political party in the national Reichstag elections. Indeed, it was in response to this electoral triumph that the Prussian Imperial government began considering launching a war to potentially divide and thus stem the growth and possibly even smash completely the SPD– eventually a factor helping lead to the outbreak of WWI two years later in 1914.

For Lenin, political events in such disparate places as the U.S. and Germany were integral aspects of a world-historical situation of capitalism in which the working class’s movement for socialism was not merely responding to but actively shaping developments. This has not been the case in the same ways during the last hundred years, despite the Cold War and other phenomena of the 20th century. The reason is simply that the socialist movement in the core advanced capitalist countries has bever been as strong as during this era leading up to WWI, as expressed in the parties of the Socialist International.

While it is familiar and indeed a banal commonplace now for the Left to claim credit for any and all actions in capitalist politics as somehow a response and attempt to counteract or block its own efforts, this is a gross abuse of the kind of judgment Lenin exercised in his interpretations of contemporary political events.

So what was the basis for Lenin’s analysis of American politics in its moment? I would like to address what Lenin had to say about Eugene Debs as exemplar of American socialism, in order to try to understand Lenin’s criteria for socialist politics more generally. I will move backwards historically, from how Lenin evaluated prospects for socialist politics in the U.S. through the figure of Debs as this developed towards the crisis of the Marxist movement that unfolded in the first world war and the revolutions that broke out in its aftermath, in Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy, and threatened to spread beyond.

Lenin considered Debs and the tendency he represented in American socialism as potential participants in the fledgling Third or Communist International that arose from the crisis of the Second or Socialist International in the war but was polarized definitively in the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.

In 1919, at the time of the formation of the new Communist International, in response to the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the famous leaders of German Marxism, Debs wrote, in “The day of the people” that,

In Russia and Germany our valiant comrades are leading the proletarian revolution, which knows no race, no color, no sex, and no boundary lines. They are setting the heroic example for worldwide emulation. Let us, like them, scorn and repudiate the cowardly compromisers within our own ranks, challenge and defy the robber-class power, and fight it out on that line to victory or death!

From the crown of my head to the soles of my feet I am Bolshevik, and proud of it.

“The Day of the People has arrived!”

Several years earlier, in 1915, the first year of the World War, Lenin had written to Alexandra Kollontai to instruct her investigation of American socialists, before the U.S. had entered the war and was still officially neutral. To Kollontai he wrote,

As regards the New York Volkszeitung, Grimm assured me today that they are quite Kautskian! Is that the case? I think our German pamphlet might help you to determine the “strength” of their internationalism. . . .

In a few days we are publishing here . . . a little pamphlet on behalf of the Zimmerwald Left. Under this name we should like to launch into international circulation, as widely as possible, our Left group at Zimmerwald (. . . [including Luxemburg’s] Polish Social–Democrats) . . . with its draft resolution and manifesto. . . . We rely on you to publish it in America in English too (for it is hopeless to do this in England: it has to be brought there from America) and, if possible, in other languages. This is to be the first publication by the nucleus of Left Social-Democrats of all countries, who have a clear, exact and full reply to the question of what is to be done and in which direction to go. It would be most important if you could succeed in publishing this in America, circulating it as widely as possible and establishing firm publishing links (Charles Kerr [in] Chicago; the Appeal to Reason [in] Kansas, etc.). . . .

Try establishing contact with them — if only in writing, should you not get to Kansas. Their little paper is sometimes not bad. Be sure to sound them out with our resolution of the “Zimmerwald Left”. And what is Eugene Debs? He sometimes writes in a revolutionary way. Or is he also a wet-rag à la Kautsky?

I never doubted that [Morris] Hillquit would be for Kautsky and even to the right of him, because I saw him at Stuttgart (1907) and heard how afterwards he defended the prohibition against bringing yellow people into America (an “internationalist”!).

When assessing the prospects for the formation of the Communist international in 1918, Lenin had written that he included Debs among those “groups and currents within the social-patriotic parties more or less close to Bolshevism”: “the ‘League’ in the United States (or followers of Debs?).”

Lenin had read Debs’s declaration of opposition to the war:

Look at America — apart from everything else a neutral country. Haven’t we the beginnings of a split there, too: Eugene Debs, the “American Bebel” [analogue to the leader of the German SPD prior to WWI], declares in the socialist press that he recognises only one type of war, civil war for the victory of socialism, and that he would sooner be shot than vote a single cent for American war expenditure

Debs had written:

I am not a capitalist soldier; I am a proletarian revolutionist. I do not belong to the regular army of rite plutocracy, but to the irregular army of the people. I refuse to obey any command to fight for the ruling class. . . . I am opposed to every war but one; I am for that war with heart and soul, and that is the world-wide war of the social revolution. In that war I am prepared to fight in any way the ruling class may make it necessary. . . .

To which Lenin responded:

This is what Eugene Debs, the American Bebel, the beloved leader of the American workers, writes to them.

This again shows you, comrades, that in all countries of the world real preparations are being made to rally the forces of the working class. The horrors of war and the sufferings of the people are incredible. But we must not, and we have no reason whatever, to view the future with despair.

Lenin considered the revolutionary tradition strong in America. In his “Letter to American workers” in 1918, he wrote that,

The history of modern, civilised America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilised” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human endeavour, in the utilisation of machinery and of all the wonders of modern engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them.

Lenin continued:

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

Lenin recognized Woodrow Wilson, today considered a “progressive,” as an entirely conservative-reactionary political figure, representative of the Democrats as the conservative party in U.S. politics of the time, by contrast with the Republicans who had dominated American national politics since the Civil War. Indeed, if the Republican vote had not been split between Roosevelt and his former Vice President Taft, divided on the level and pace of progressive reforms of capitalism to be effected, then Wilson would never have won the Presidency in 1912. Wilson used his victory to racially segregate Washington DC and the U.S. military, in a bitter triumph for the Jim Crow Redeemer party at the national level.

As regards the 1912 election itself, when the world crisis of war and revolution was visible emerging on the horizon but not yet dawned, for his part, Debs considered Roosevelt’s reform effort to rationalize capitalism in 1912 to be “psychotic” — he considered its prospects not only dim but delusional. The fact that what Roosevelt proposed in 1912 was implemented 20 years later by his nephew-in-law FDR’s Administration, in a massive realignment of American politics that reversed the roles of its capitalist parties, should not be assumed to retrospectively validate Roosevelt’s perspective in 1912, since it was a very different moment, especially politically: not yet the Great Depression-era  crisis that led to fascism and world war. Indeed, Roosevelt did not necessarily anticipate world war in 1912 as, by contrast, the socialists of the Second International certainly did, in their understanding of the crescendo building of the imperialist height of world capitalism. | §

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February 7, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

U.S. apologist?

Chris Cutrone

Letter published in the CPGB Weekly Worker 1522 (January 23, 2025).

Paul Demarty’s article, “Rise of lifeboat imperialism” (Weekly Worker 1521, January 16, 2025) cites my essay published in Compact Magazine (January 9, 2025) on the prospects of U.S. expansion into Greenland, disputing my assertion that the U.S. has treated its opponents as “Slave States”: repetitions of the fight against the Confederacy in the Civil War. 

Demarty raises Cambodia as a disproving counterexample. But the U.S. did not simply “carpet-bomb Cambodia” but targeted Vietnamese Communist forces operating there during a larger war. The Cambodian government was not the opponent of the U.S., nor of course were the people of Cambodia — or of Vietnam: certainly, they were not the enemies of the people of America. The U.S. did not demand “unconditional surrender” of them but a negotiated settlement. That says something. 

Even so, the U.S. war in Southeast Asia was a crime, and one that was opposed by many people and for many good reasons — including vociferously and notably by the original “containment” Cold War strategist himself, George F. Kennan. Still, the Communists committed many crimes of their own against the people of Vietnam, Laos and, needless to say, Cambodia. 

It’s long past time for us to remember this history differently, and no longer somehow as still a live issue when it is not. The Cold War is over, for over a generation now. After suffering millions of deaths and the permanent poisoning of its territory to last through the generations as effect of its war, Vietnam now depends for security on a military and economic alliance with the U.S. against threats from its ancient neighbor and enemy, China. 

There was a broad Anti-Imperialist League that was formed to oppose the U.S. governing let alone fighting a horrific counterinsurgency in the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, on entirely liberal and democratic grounds, and in the name of American freedom. As Mark Twain indelibly wrote, “Shall we give those poor things a rest?” But Aguinaldo, the great Filipino nationalist, admitted that their historic choice was not actually independence but dependence on either Japan or the U.S. 

Socialists in the U.S. have a responsibility, but not for a historical moral balance sheet of U.S. government actions, but for the future course of society and politics, a long-term task for which we only have the barest rudiments of resources with which to begin building today. 

As Jefferson said, the world belongs to the living — not the dead, who have no claim on us. As Fanon said, we bear no guilt and owe no reparations for crimes committed before we were born. 

We must, as Thaddeus Stevens said, transform the heritage of slavery (and worse) to free the world — and thus honor the sacrifices that have brought us to the place and opportunity we inhabit now, and only now. We must wake from what Marx called the “traditions of dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brains of the living” and heed the “poetry of the future.” It’s long past time. 

There will be a future for capitalism. Will there be for socialism? 

January 23, 2025 | Posted in: Essays | Comments Closed

Why not Greenland?

The future belongs to America — so should Greenland.

Chris Cutrone

Recently, in a scene recalling the X-Files, NASA satellite imagery discovered the ruins of an old U.S. nuclear weapons base, Camp Century, under the permafrost in Greenland, an abandoned relic of the Cold War. Its resurfacing is an apt metaphor for Donald Trump’s proposal to expand U.S. territory into the circumpolar North, which seems to have come out of nowhere, but in fact draws upon a long history. 

When Nazi Germany conquered Denmark in 1940, Britain and later the United States invaded and occupied Iceland. Four years later, Iceland ended its union with Denmark and became an independent republic. Greenland could certainly have followed. Both islands remain of strategic importance for NATO, which makes Trump’s proposal to acquire Greenland for military reasons seem redundant: Doesn’t Greenland already occupy a forward position regarding the Arctic and Russian threats? But perhaps Trump aims to abolish NATO — as he has threatened and his critics have accused him of planning to do—after all. Maybe it is not merely a ruse or negotiating position, but a real prospect. Greenland seems to be part of the calculation. 

Trump’s suggestion has prompted the indigenous people of Greenland to demand their independence. Meanwhile, the King of Denmark has added Greenland and the Faroe Islands to his Royal Coat of Arms, but Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has sent out mixed signals. Don Jr. is visiting Greenland as I write this. 

Trump’s calling Canada the “51st State” caused the downfall of its “governor,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The president-elect has since declared the benefits of a union with Canada that would erase the “artificial border.” But political frontiers represent history and its after-effects. The early Scandinavian — Viking — contact with the New World informs the Danish claim to Greenland. (The Inuit who make up most of the population now actually arrived later.) 

The U.S.-Canada border is the frontier of the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin demanded Canada from the British in the treaty settling the American War of Independence. After the Civil War, the victorious Union offered to take Canada as the compensation the British owed for their support of the Confederacy. Secretary of State William H. Seward had to settle for purchasing Alaska. Canada, then, remains the frontier of the counterrevolution after both American revolutionary wars. It remains the most European part of the Western Hemisphere. This has not been a good thing. 

Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again. Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative. Trump declared the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America. Perhaps saying so blatantly what is nonetheless a fact is in bad taste. Whether literally or figuratively, the gesture is unmistakable. This is not imperialism, but a reminder of the Empire of Liberty that Thomas Jefferson declared the mission of the new United States. It is an evergreen promise. America is revolutionary or it is nothing. The United States of America liberated the world twice — three times with the Cold War. Its mission continues. 

(This is no time of abandon the Monroe Doctrine, which was not about U.S. supremacy but protection of American freedom.)

Ever since the Civil War, the United States has demanded unconditional surrender from its enemies. It has treated all its opponents as it did the Confederacy — as echoes of the counterrevolution, the threat of undoing the revolution. The Confederates regarded the values of the revolution — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the inalienable rights of all equally — as mistaken. So have all of America’s opponents. They have been and remain Slave States.

But the revolution cannot be undone. The question is how Greenland or Canada or Panama or Mexico or the rest of the Americas — the rest of America — might still follow and not oppose it. 

The real question, though, is how America still follows the revolution. Trump seems to accept its call. The United States does not desire to rule but only to free people and places. How it does so has come now to be in doubt. But there will be no retreat to Little America. The sheer scope of American power won’t allow it. Can America find itself again — re-found itself — on these frontiers? 

The alliance between Washington and Beijing forged by Nixon and Kissinger ended with the defeat of the Soviet Union. It was supposed to shape the next century, and it has done so. Unfortunately, the original intention of the pact for the two countries — both victors of World War II, but one more damaged by it — to keep each other honest, has failed, as did that of the original Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union. 

Vladimir Putin, in interviews he conducted with Oliver Stone before Trump’s first term and after the Russian seizure of Crimea, stated that while he accepts American predominance, Washington cannot possibly govern the world. Recalling that throughout U.S. history, Russia has been its ally in all wars except one (namely, the War of 1812 — the Napoleonic Wars), he advised that regional powers such as Russia and China be allowed their own domains. The problem is that their neighbors won’t consent, hoping instead for American protection. 

Trump is decried by his political opponents in both the Democratic and Republican Parties as an “isolationist” — the old pejorative from the pre-World War II era. But ever since Woodrow Wilson’s War to End All Wars, to “make the world safe for democracy,” which was forced on America by Europe (that is, by the counterrevolution), American involvement in global affairs has been a given. Theodore Roosevelt had already negotiated the end of the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and had warned against America coming into conflict with either Japan or Germany, which he saw menacing on the horizon.  

Trump has promised to end the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza; to launch no new wars; and invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his Inauguration, extending the hand of friendship to the only potential rival of American power. Xi politely demurred, not needing the reminder of the vitality of American democracy. 

Trump has not ruled out a military solution to either the Greenland or Panama Canal issues that he has identified. He did, however, rule it out for Canada — ironically enough, considering its origins as the redoubt of America’s foes in the Revolutionary War. Is Trump’s audacious overture to his second term a prelude to a new geopolitical competition — a new Cold War or even World War III? Or is it rather a preview of a restored American world leadership, as Trump apparently intends? 

The key to hard bargaining is willingness to walk away from a deal rather than accept bad terms. Trump is wagering that his negotiating partners are at least as in need of peace as America, and that in the wake of both the Great Recession and the COVID crisis, the world depends on American recovery. 

The danger is that the United States might overplay its hand. It might not be a time for brinksmanship or confrontation. It might not be a matter of tests of strength. But it might require a match of wills. 

Washington has been bogged down by policy impasses and decided lack of vision in the new millennium. Former Rep. Joe Walsh, who briefly opposed Trump for the GOP presidential nomination in 2020, speculated at the 2024 never-Trump Republican counter-convention in Milwaukee that winning the Cold War had doomed America. He might have meant that China was the ultimate beneficiary of the fall of the Soviet Union. But such pessimism is unrealistic. The post-Cold War crisis is indeed being met — however undesirably to Walsh and the GOP old guard — by Trump. Unlike China or Russia, America has greater resources for political change in direction and leadership. There is a refusal to see the obvious regarding Trump: that he represents the “hope and change” that was merely a marketing slogan for Obama before him. 

The gravitational attraction of the United States is in its social and not merely its economic power. This extends to its political capacities. There are many sources of power, not just one, and this creates a much more resilient polity than one finds in America’s would-be enemies. 

Over the course of American history, every 40 or 50 years has seen a crisis that called for renewal. Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800, Jackson’s 1828 election, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Reagan Revolution all changed the political parties and the nature of their competition, fulfilling Jefferson’s estimation that a revolution would be needed every generation or so. We are living through such a shift now. 

While there might not exactly be a plan, there is a vision. Trump setting his sights on Greenland might seem to prove his critics right about the danger of his folly. It symbolizes the apparent absurdity of the moment. But it would be wrong to fall back on the lack of imagination that has afflicted U.S. politics for far too long. 

The neglected and forgotten Danish colony in the Western hemisphere captures something of the nature of Trump’s character, which is bombastic but not empty. Where others have been complacent to let spaces lie unutilized, he has set to building. Could this be done on the mostly vacant territory of the world’s largest island? Where others now see a barren wasteland, Trump finds not only possibilities but necessities — the necessity for American growth and change. 

In this and other fields, Trump sees the need for a broader American future. Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again. | §

Originally published in Compact (January 9, 2025).