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The Sun King Is Back—and His Name Is Trump
What if, in the ruins of the liberal international order, the world is spiralling back not to the fascist 1930s, not to the gunboat imperialism of the late nineteenth century, but all the way back to the rule of warrior princes, and their predatory cliques, in early modern Europe?
That’s where two American political scientists, Stacie Goddard and Abraham Newman, believe we are headed: a world ruled by authoritarians who extract resources from their subjects and from their neighbours, with violence or threats of coercion, to enrich their families and their courtiers.
They think we’re being forced back into a pre-modern past before the United Nations Charter, before Westphalia, before the emergence of the modern state order. Calling this future “neo-royalist,” however, doesn’t sound quite right. It gives the new authoritarians a royal prestige that the princes of old—Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Bourbons—had by virtue of birth and lineage, but which the new authoritarians can only pretend to.
Our new leaders are more John Gotti than Louis XIV. When United States president Donald Trump shows up at Davos, he parades like the Sun King and threatens like a mafia don. If, as Canadian prime minister Mark Carney said, we are not in a transition but a rupture, what has been ruptured is the very way the world’s most powerful leader understands his power, exercises it, and performs his legitimacy.
Neo-royalism is too kind to this performance. It doesn’t capture the modern authoritarians’ opera buffa, made-for-television, rhetorical style. For just beneath the mafia don’s menace, there is the frantic belief that if he doesn’t “flood the zone” with insatiable bids for attention, the emperor will be seen without clothes.
What the scholars have gotten right, on the other hand, is that the new authoritarians, not just Trump, do exercise power like the lawless princes and condottiere of old. These leaders—Vladimir Putin, Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Xi Jinping—don’t negotiate with other leaders of states as sovereign equals. They don’t seek a mutually advantageous equilibrium. They regard the whole apparatus of international law as a pesky distraction. States are not equal under international law. In Trump’s mind, law is just another obstacle that any real estate developer knows how to work his way around—with a bribe or a threat.
Instead of negotiations, Trump does “deals,” in which bluffs, lies, intimidation, and raw power provide the leverage to extract resources. The resources—gold bars, planes, trading concessions, hotel deals—are extracted to enrich the state but also reward the leader, his family, and his friends. Corruption is a feature not a bug; not an abuse but the pipeline of wealth and privilege that sustains the leader’s control of his family, his followers, and his courtiers.
In place of alliance structures to stabilize relations with neighbours and competitors, the new princes replace them with personal deals with other rulers who are prepared to offer booty to the rulers’ family or reward their sons with business deals. The likeliest deals, therefore, are those with fellow authoritarians, with those rulers who also maintain themselves by using state power to extract resources and feed patronage networks. Authoritarian Arab petro states understand how the game is played. The sheikh gives the president an airplane, and soon, democracies like Switzerland understand that no deal to avoid punishing tariffs can be reached unless a gold bar is placed on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
In this emerging style of authority, which combines the ruthless rent collection of a mobster landlord with the arbitrary exactions of an early modern prince, the stated objective may be to make America great again, but the one person unmistakably made great is the leader. The leader does not accept that the state might have any interests distinct from, even opposed to, his own. What Louis XIV is reported to have said—“L’Etat c’est moi”—is the organizing imaginary of his twenty-first-century successors.
This paradigm of power is spreading. Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in Saudi Arabia, Recep Tayyib Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary operate tributary systems of patronage and extraction that satisfy their courtiers and keep them in power. Orbán once admitted that “he has a lot of mouths of feed,” an entire Hungarian middle class, in fact, dependent on him for contracts, appointments, and favours.
Trump is not the first democratic leader to seek to centralize power in his own hands or run patronage networks, but he is the first to treat state assets as private possessions—demolishing a wing of the White House to rebuild his own gilded castle—gambling, like the real estate developer he used to be, that if you build it, no one will dare to take it down. There have been crooks in the White House before, but he is the first American president so shamelessly daring Americans to deny him his God-given right to enrich himself and flaunt his wealth by adding a new extension to his property.
One question about this new authoritarian order being built before our disbelieving eyes is whether it will provide sufficient stability to last. The historical record says otherwise. Personalist, dynastic regimes in early modern Europe were continually at war. Divisions of the world into spheres of influence did not produce peace. Truces between princes were torn up by their successors. The Treaty of Westphalia, in 1648, tried to replace the instability of personalist and patrimonial rule with a state order based on sovereignty, but it was only at the Congress of Vienna, in 1815, that rulers sought to anchor stability in respect for frontiers, jettisoning order based on personal deals between princes and their families. This is the sovereignty-based order, settled in the UN Charter in 1945, that is being jettisoned by modern princes in Ukraine and Venezuela alike. There is no evidence that their new order will give us peace or stability.
The old pre-modern authoritarians preceded democracy. The question about the new authoritarian order is whether it can coexist with democracy. Democracy emerged in the seventeenth century, in a popular and intellectual revolt against the unchained violence of princely rule. Philosopher John Locke laid down the foundation stones of democracy—consent, majority rule, and toleration—to replace princely caprice and violence with self-government under law.
Once Europe began its long march toward legitimizing authority on the basis of consent, European thinkers—Samuel von Pufendorf and Emmerich de Vattel, for example—began to argue that authority in the international sphere should be limited by law, just like authority at home. By the late eighteenth century, the patrimonial, personalist era of authority began its long, slow decline. Thirteen colonies of the British Empire revolted in 1776 to free themselves from the arbitrary authority of a king and to create a form of government based on consent, law, and self-rule.
On the 250th anniversary of the revolution, an early modern, European style of personal, arbitrary, and unchecked rule is being imposed on a country dedicated by revolution to its very opposite. The unanswered question about Trump’s exercise of brute power, both at home but also overseas—Greenland, Venezuela, Ukraine—is whether American democracy, and American democrats, in all their differing political hues, will stand for it, if and when they get a chance or seize the opportunity to exercise the freedoms their revolution promised them.
Originally published as “When the Sun King goes to Davos,” by Michael Ignatieff (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.
The post The Sun King Is Back—and His Name Is Trump first appeared on The Walrus.
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