The first time I remember seeing the phrase “might makes right” was while reading T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. It’s a brilliant book (that I definitely need to go re-read), and the core of what I remember from the book was the young King Arthur being taught by Merlyn that there is a higher principle that we should be reaching for, that just relying on whoever happens to be the strongest person to make the rules for the rest of us was, to quote another Arthurian retelling, “no basis for a system of government”.
I remember thinking at the time how obvious it was that we’d moved past that system; to a younger me it seemed that the interesting thing White was doing in the story was taking our modern concepts of having moved past brutality, and saying Arthur being ahead of his time was the basis for the mythical and utopian ideal of Camelot (it was my first time reading an Arthurian retelling outside of children’s books, give me a break). With that in mind, it’s hard for me to get over how backwards and defeatist it feels to see people talking about “might makes right” as a background way the world works that we just have to acknowledge.
It’s been bothering me for a while that that’s exactly how the United States has been talking about itself lately. Stephen Miller is talking about a world “…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”1 Pete Hegseth is talking about abandoning “politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement”2 to just fight in whatever way gets the job done. President Trump is talking about the only limit he respects being “[his] own morality”3. We’ve stopped making the argument that there’s anything right about what we’re doing, that we’re acting within any greater moral framework, and just started talking about how we get to do this because we’re the biggest baddest bullies out there.
Sheer power can accomplish a lot. It’s possible to accomplish your goals by just steamrolling other people. But we should feel dirty anytime that’s the best argument we can come up with. We used to live in a world where the United States professed to having higher ideals, and leveraged our military superiority in service to those, as a way to stand up for people who didn’t have might. Falling back to saying that military superiority is the reason anyone should listen to us is embarrassing.
At the end of The Once and Future King, Arthur laments that the bedrock of his beliefs, that man was decent, seems to have cracked. He contemplates his attempts to harness the lesser forms of tyranny, to fight strength with strength, to lay down laws against evil uses of might. He ponders whether wicked leaders incite their people to evil, or if evil people choose leaders thusly. As Arthur contemplates what to do heading into his final battle though, he doesn’t focus on what he must do to win it, whether there is a way for him to survive it, but on ensuring that his ideals, that his faith in man, can be passed down to future generations. Those principles, and a naive faith in the good of man, are what we should still fight for today.
- https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/pete-buttigieg-blasts-venezuela-takeover ↩︎
- https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/article/4318689/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-addresses-general-and-flag-officers-at-quantico-v/ ↩︎
- https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html ↩︎