Going Down Swinging

The Point of Putting Up a Fight

Leonidas at Thermopylae, Jacques-Louis David, 1814

I’ve sort of struggled over the last couple of weeks to correctly capture the words necessary to demonstrate what I think is the most important principle of our political moment—the need to fight.

The opposition, or lack thereof, to the slow degeneration of American political life into an erratic personalist kleptocratic system of governance, has been the subject of significant debate lately.

The inability of Senate Democrats to hold firm and force the shutdown of the government last week was based on a rational calculus about the long-term benefits of attempting a fight later predicated on the belief that the slow erosion of support for President Trump would make the fight easier at a later date.

In a frictionless void, Trump’s increasingly erratic policymaking would almost assuredly deplete his polling numbers—and by extension, his political capital—providing a better basis from which to wage a fight.

Politics, however, is not a frictionless void.

This moment has caused me to think quite a bit about a passage from Machiavelli’s The Prince where he provides two cases about the fate of a political community facing invasion from an outside power vastly superior in strength to their own.

In one of the scenarios, he presents the leaders of the community as making a rational decision to surrender without a fight, rationally preserving their lives and wealth at the expense of giving up their sovereignty. While they remained alive, Machiavelli was quick to point out that their sense of being independent people died with their unwillingness to fight.

In the second case, the political community decides to fight on despite their almost impossible odds—and are conquered by the foreign power. However, because they decided to fight, they kept alive an idea of who they were, and would one day inevitably become free again.

What Machiavelli was pointing out (and what many others have noted) is that the fight itself is as important as the odds of winning.

It’s the basic contention in politics that when we do something, what we’re doing isn’t exactly physical. When we act we’re doing so with an abstract idea in mind of a thing that we’re collectively working towards, with leaders and heroic individuals taking on a symbolic meaning for the whole of their political movement.

They idealize the actions of the whole of the community that they lead in an irrational manner that instructs other members of that community to act with them. When our leaders put up a fight and refuse to back down from what they believe in—so do we. When our leaders are cowardly and refuse to rise to a moment, we likewise fracture and fade.

Take for example the Ukrainian defenders at Snake Island on 24 February 2022 that told a pair of Russian warships to fuck off.

It was a fight they very obviously could not win in a material sense, but the mythmaking of beleaguered defenders refusing to surrender to insurmountable odds meant something in an arational sense that built the image of Ukraine as filled with a people determined to fight off an invading army regardless of the numbers on paper.

The audio of that encounter filled the airwaves of news stations around the world—and combined with Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s refusal to leave Kyiv—did much to rally support behind Ukraine as a cause worth fighting for.

This gets me back to the point I want to make here about the necessity of the Democratic leadership putting aside rational political calculations and just fighting.

Politics is a realm that’s inhibited by passions ignited by myths and images of who we are and what we’re doing in the world. When our leadership is willing to dig their heels in and die on a hill—regardless of where that hill is—the rank and file feel like there’s something to fight for.

It’s almost a question of momentum, like a grand rugby match. The earlier and more tenaciously you dig into a scrum, the more willing those alongside you are to stick their necks out and just fight the thing out.

When people see others as willing to fight, they believe they can fight too. The will to fight doesn’t go out of a community unless the individuals in that community give up their faith in their cause. We merely need leaders who will push us to live up to that mental image of ourselves that we hold.

It’s also a story about who we are as people. I think there’s some form of psychological necessity in knowing there are things we are unwilling to bargain for. That we all have lines internal to us that we’re willing to fight it out over, and we’re not just constantly negotiating our beliefs.

How can you feel like getting up in the morning if you don’t have a sense of yourself as someone with the character to draw a line in the sand somewhere after all?

It is a romantic notion of politics (and warfare) that tends to be at odds with more traditional liberal technocratic notions of how political life functions. In normal times I’d say the technocratic theory of governance is far and away the superior way to manage the affairs of the State.

But now? A billionaire is running around closing entire agencies in our government. An erratic would-be autocrat is threatening to annex our neighbors. Our government is disappearing permanent residents from their college apartments, and renditioning people to prisons in El Salvador.

Be a brinksman with the budget. Block the doors to agencies that DOGE is attempting to enter. Clog the streets of DC with protestors. Make Tesla showrooms unusable. Contest every inch of the hill that you’re on, and then go find the next hill.

We could sit around and calculate how much better our odds might be a year from now, but by then, is there going to be anyone left with the spirit to fight?