Politics

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.

1. https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/pete-buttigieg-blasts-venezuela-takeover ↩︎
2. https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/article/4318689/secretary-of-war-pete-hegseth-addresses-general-and-flag-officers-at-quantico-v/ ↩︎
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html ↩︎

Last week, the Republican Party held something we don’t normally see: a Midterm Convention. It was a ridiculous event in many ways, but there’s one quote from President Trump’s speech that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about, and that I haven’t seen get much attention.

…I’m petrified that they’ll change and they’ll say, “You know what? Men should not be playing in women’s sport,” and that will really hurt us. That’s one of our great sound bites of all time. And I thought after we won in a landslide in the last election, they would change that. But I saw two senators and a congressman in the last week and a half on television, fighting like hell for men to play in women’s sports. And I hope they continue to do that.

Donald Trump, Republican Midterm Convention, Dallas, September 9, 2026 (transcript)

Set aside for now whether he’s even right¹ about where Democrats stand. What stuck with me is that it’s something he says is hurting the country, and something he wants to continue. It shouldn’t be surprising, but there was a nakedness to this way of treating politics as a game. Usually, there’s at least some attempt to claim a result is a priority: there’s some bill you want to get passed, or some program you want to get funded…anything. Here though, it’s not about accomplishing anything, just about “winning”.

We’ve seen things like this before. At the end of President Biden’s administration, Congress was all set to pass a bipartisan border security bill until Trump asked Republicans in the Senate not to, so it could stay a live issue in the election. Or going back to 2010, Mitch McConnell said his priority was denying a second term to President Obama. Hearing it in the speech though, it felt so much more raw to me. It reminded me of being a child, forced to listen to my father delight in scoring points against my mother while making life harder for us children.

When we think about what’s wrong with our country and our discourse, this is a perfect example of what frustrates me. What’s left of the Republican Party likes to talk about “American values”, but the true thing that defines us as a people should be working together towards building a better America, not ostracizing each other over where we were born or the colour of our skin.

There’s obviously plenty I think the Republican Party is wrong about, but my hope is that they come around and change their views on those things, not that they continue to hold those positions and lose over them. We should get back to fighting about ideas, not identity.

1. He’s not. Most Democrats have adopted more nuanced positions around trans rights: that there are situations where a biological difference is just a fact and needs to be acknowledged, and others where it makes no difference whatsoever and focusing on them is inhumane discrimination. With Vice President Vance talking about Democrats obsessing over trans youth, it strikes me that it’s usually the Republican Party centering the issue, and it’s absurd that anyone thinks someone having a potential advantage in sports is the issue worth spewing vitriol against fellow Americans over. ↩︎

Walking into a concert this weekend, I got stopped by someone collecting signatures for a ballot proposal. I normally just ignore people trying to interrupt me on the street, but democracy is important, so I stopped to look. He described the measure as being to protect mail-in voting in Colorado, but it only took a couple seconds of skimming to realize that’s not what the measure was; I let him know that’s what I thought and walked away.

A couple days later now, I was wondering if I’d gotten things wrong and it actually did have a pro-democracy angle to it, so I decided to look it up. The ballot measure was Proposed Initiative #362 “Mail Ballot Voter Identification”, one of a set of three near-identical measures (the other two being 363 and 364), so I can’t actually be sure which I was shown there. All three boil down to the same thing: they would amend the Colorado Constitution to require voters to write the last four digits of some form of their ID on the outside of their mail-in ballot envelope, in addition to the signature that’s already required.

So…why?

None of them actually make voting more secure. The state already verified your identity when you registered, copying a few digits onto the envelope won’t verify anything that’s not already handled by your signature. What it does do is add friction. It makes voting a bit harder for you and it creates a new way you can make a mistake: if you get one digit wrong you’re going to have to deal with curing your ballot. It’s also going to slow counting down and introduce new requirements on that side around verifying the data and around chasing down and curing ballots.

So why pitch this as protecting mail-in voting? In Boulder you’re going to get a lot more signatures talking about how you want to protect democracy and safeguard access to mail-in voting than talking about the alternatives.

The proposers though are Chuck Broerman, the Republican El Paso County Treasurer, and Suzanne Taheri, an attorney and former Deputy Secretary of State, both of whom have a history of submitting conservative ballot proposals. This one fits into a clear anti-democratic pattern aimed at tightening access to voting, not on expanding it and getting as many people as possible to get out there and vote. And if they really have a goal of tightening access to voting, the move should be to convince me that’s a good thing. Stop me on the street and make the argument that writing down some numbers from my ID will actually improve things. Make the best case possible for that. Our democracy thrives with disagreement and we all become better for it.

Trying to pretend you care about access to mail-in voting though is wrong, cowardly, and the opposite of where we should be going as a country. Canvasing outside of a Fourth of July concert in that way is antithetical to what the holiday is supposed to celebrate.