POWER

How It Works and Why It Fails

There are two fundamental kinds of power: The power to harm; and the power to observe and protest. Neither is absolute. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha males do not entirely run the show even though they can win pretty much any physical confrontation. Alphas can be countered by a group of subordinates that act together despite lacking the benefits of language. The emergence of what primatologist Richard Wrangham calls the male coalition in our evolutionary past allowed for a rough form of social justice to help keep groups intact. Cohesive groups are more likely to survive than fractured ones, and consensus thus became an important part of our evolution.

Consequently, history is full of rulers who might have wanted to unleash their military on the populace but didn’t dare because they knew that doing so could precipitate their own downfall. The power to open fire on civilians is an awesome and terrifying one but, in the long run, might topple as many regimes as it props up. In the United States, the misuse of the state monopoly on violence rarely works out for the party in charge. The murders at Kent State in 1970 and in Minneapolis in 2026 resulted in significant tactical constraints for federal law enforcement and political consequences for Republicans. In Minneapolis, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino was fired, ICE was forced to greatly reduce its presence, and Democrats tied up Homeland Security funding in a way that generated enormous political costs for Donald Trump. Head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem eventually lost her position as well. ICE and the USBP easily had enough firepower to tactically control the streets of Minneapolis but chose not to because a massacre of protestors, with dozens dead, would have immediately brought down the Trump administration. (Many federal agents are also fine and moral people who wouldn’t want anything to do with such a crime.) Public opinion has the force of floodwaters coursing down a riverbed that you can ordinarily jump across. Public opinion, once unleashed, is almost impossible to counter without becoming completely murderous. And that, thank God, is a choice that even sociopaths hesitate to make.