Lula da Silva and Jonathan Sumption—Lord Sumption—, a former senior judge of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, might seem to have little in common. One is the leftist president of the largest country in South America; the other, an arguably conservative historian and judge of old England. However, both argue that it is the failure of politics that is taking society to a dangerous place.
On December 22, during his UNGA speech, Lula presented the conflict in Ukraine as a human tragedy that can only be resolved diplomatically. He cited the joint Chinese-Brazilian initiative “Group of Friends for Peace” as an example that “there are forces in the international community willing to work for dialogue”.
“War is not the continuation of politics by other means. It is the total bankruptcy of politics,” he said in an attempt to correct the famous Clausewitz quote. He meant that war—an armed conflict that claims the lives of hundreds of thousands and causes the destruction of civil infrastructure—cannot be considered “politics”. It is, rather, the end of politics. It is the end of the possibility of achieving the resolution of a conflict by diplomatic means.
There is a little-known figure, Peter Rollins, an Irish philosopher and theologian, whom I followed closely for a few years a while back. He had a podcast with another little-known figure, the US comedian Elliot Morgan, called The Fundamentalists. In the podcast, they tackle existential problems of modern life mostly from a psychoanalytical perspective.
Rollins explained in one of the episodes how the conflict in Ireland was marked by the inability of one side to put itself in the shoes of the other. He expressed it more elegantly: as the failure to see oneself through the eyes of the other. It is the gaze of the other that reveals much about oneself. When there is conflict and one is unable or unwilling to see one’s own self through the other’s view, then the only option is to destroy the other because it represents everything that stands between you and your desire. This, he said, is where war begins.
The U.S. administration—and much of the Western establishment—is unable or unwilling to see itself through the other’s eyes, be it Iran, Russia, or Brazil. Therefore, when a conflict emerges—and conflict is unavoidable—the automatic response is war: kinetic war, economic war, media war, and legal war. The impulse is to subdue or eliminate the other. In the same UNGA summit as Lula, Trump said that the U.S. could “annihilate” Iran. This is not politics, at least not in its classical understanding.
That is not how Clausewitz understood his famous statement, either. In his book On War, he argued that the purpose of war is to achieve a political goal. The result of war is too ambiguous and too unpredictable for “total” victory to become the purpose. The “annihilation” of the other is not the purpose. If that is the purpose—a zero-sum game as it seems to be in Ukraine between NATO and Russia—then that is not politics.
Politics, according to Lord Sumption during his Reith Lectures at the BBC in 2019, is the mechanism capable of bridging deep social divides and avoiding majoritarian tyranny without handing sovereign power to an unelected judiciary. During these lectures, Sumption argued that the messy affair of representative politics, together with a limited judiciary, is the best tool that we have to tame the Leviathan that the modern state has become.
It follows that when these tools, politics and law, become unhinged, the state managed by a small oligarchy becomes absolute. Eighteenth-century Europe abolished totalitarian monarchy, but we have established totalitarian democracy, he said. One may very well disagree with Lord Sumption on many things—and I do—but he is an intelligent, cultured, and articulate man.
His argument about how law has increasingly penetrated every aspect of public and private life is particularly insightful. He acknowledges that there has to be a due legal process for at least a minimum of order to exist and that this should be predictable; that is a good and valuable thing, and it has been the case everywhere human life has flourished. Law existed to resolve insoluble private clashes, not to order daily conduct. Social life was governed by customary conventions, local habits, religious precepts, and moral codes.
This existed because the state was structurally weak and spatially limited, and because the distinction between law and morality was clear. An act could be widely condemned as immoral or rude without anyone imagining that the apparatus of the state ought to punish or forbid it.
The modern state inverted this paradigm. As the democratic state became the expression of the popular will, expectations of state benevolence and administrative competence expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Society ceased viewing misfortune or friction as inherent conditions of human existence. Instead, every risk, offensive encounter, or social friction came to be seen as an administrative failure demanding a statutory remedy. This resulted in the “colonization of the human condition by law”.
Law, he argues, is binary and operates through coercion. One is right and the other is wrong, and the wrong must be punished. It represents, in some sense, the end of politics as well—the end of internal politics in a country. This reflects very well the political climate that has dominated Western politics over the past decade, where it has turned into lawfare. Lawfare is the inability to reach an agreement, to find common ground, and a reflection of what the politics of a polarized society looks like.
Western societies are living through the decline of politics. This is true in international affairs as well as national politics. The conflicts in Ukraine and Iran and the inability to reach a compromise—which means recognizing the other side’s grievances—are good examples. Internal politics and its polarization, as seen in the recent midterm elections, is another.
The best example of this is Israel. There is no politics in Israel. Externally, they are engaged in the annihilation of the other—in this case, the Palestinians. Internally, those who have a different view—i.e., the Arab Israelis—are marginalized, and their political representation, even though it accounts for almost 20% of the elected officials, is merely symbolic. It is highly telling that the Arab Israeli parties are being legally prosecuted with bogus claims in order to invalidate their political representation.
These two dynamics—the pervasiveness of law into all aspects of life and the corresponding decline in politics—when taken to their furthest consequences, would lead to a totalitarian democratic state. And when there is a law for everything and a party that dominates with a majority that represents a minority of the total population, the step towards technocratic governance is far easier. A technocratic government is the abolition of politics.
Despite their differences, both Lula and Lord Sumption could probably sit together and have a constructive conversation. If they had to make a decision, they would probably arrive at a compromise—not the ideal for each, but the best for both. That is politics. And if we want to avoid ultimately being governed by algorithms, we need to advocate for more of it. We need to see ourselve through the eyes of the other.
