Liberalism and the Magic Circle
Opening: Here’s an idea: Are politics just a game? And if they are… maybe it’s time for us to stop following the rules.
Part I: The Magic Circle
To help us understand games, we’ll turn to Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga, specifically to his 1938 book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element In Culture — or as Huizinga himself said it should be called, the Study of the Play Element of Culture, though that’s a discussion to take up with his posthumous editors.
In Homo Ludens, Huizinga talks about the concept of a magic circle, a “consecrated spot” where play takes place, where the rules are drawn up and a fictional world is created. The rules of the game aren’t the rules of real life, they’re simply… the rules of the game. The Magic Circle, then, is everything within the boundaries of the game, both physically and socially. In a roleplaying game you embody your character and put on a persona. Regardless of which kind of Football you mean, both have lines painted on the grass to represent the literal play area, and both have rules that govern what can and can’t be done. Mario moves left and right along the screen, jumping on enemies to… kill(?) them and gain points. Each of these interactions takes place within a Magic Circle.
We’ll come back here in a moment, but for now keep this in mind. The Magic Circle is the space that play takes place in, where rules are created and followed.
Part II: The Social Contract
Now, bear with me here, there’s one more concept to talk about before I get to politics, and… the situation we all find ourselves in. And that’s the idea of the “Social Contract”.
Everyone, the idea goes, basically agrees to take part in their society, and in doing so they agree to the terms and conditions. It’s kind of like a website wanting to use cookies. So long as you keep using the website, well, you clearly accept the cookies, no more questions asked, you’re just going to have to deal with it.
For Socrates, this obligation to the law was so great that he even chose to stay in Athens and drink poison, rather than escape jail and stay in exile somewhere else. The laws of Athens had allowed him to live for a great many years, and they allowed his mother to live and give birth to him. For Socrates, he was duty bound to stay and die, even after being arrested for corrupting the youths. He owed it to the law to follow through, even if it resulted in his death, because by his reckoning he’d agreed to the consequences by simply existing.
Thomas Hobbes took it even further in his book Leviathan, which frankly I’m not even going to try to read, but thankfully the internet exists, so I can get the short version, and by extension give you a shorter version.
In Leviathan, after arguing for a scientific and mechanistic view of humanity, Hobbes describes how he sees society as having come about, and what the function of it is. People weren’t simply obligated to follow the rules. No, according to him, all men were greedy and self-interested, wanting nothing more than advancing their own agendas. In the State of Nature as he described it the world was at odds with one another in bellum omnium contra omnes. A war of all against all. Every man is equally powerful in this State of Nature (since even the strongest person can be killed in their sleep), and everything is up for grabs. No rules! Stay up late, eat ice cream for breakfast, kill whoever you want because you like their stuff and they make you angry. Everything that people think that Anarchy is.
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(But, would it be? I mean, Hobbes was writing in a time when his countrymen were exploiting foreign peoples who’s method of ruling themselves did not particularly resemble the Europeans)
How then could this State of Nature be avoided? By Hobbes imagining, in the interest of rational self-interest all men realize that a world with no consequences is a world where no one can accomplish anything without fear of being bumped off, having their things stolen, or otherwise having those rational self-interests sabotaged by someone else. That no one alone can properly deal with anyone else — since they’ll be dealt with just as easily — it is in everyone’s best interest to give one person, small group, or a giant king made up of people and holding a sword and bishop’s staff, a great deal of power over everyone else.
In creating this Leviathan, ceding power to it, and investing it with all of the powers of a State, everyone is protected from everyone else. The sovereign, now elevated above the common man, is meant to represent the collective interest of the peoples that created him.
Hobbes is far from the only person to think of government in this way, but he’s by far one of the most famous. Many of his ideas still shape the discourse today, and of course he’s one of those “Classical Liberals” that every conservative and right wing libertarian loves to call themselves when they realize that being a conservative isn’t actually the new punk.
Part III: The Game of Politics
Now let’s return to Homo Ludens. Some of you have no doubt realized the twist here, but for anyone who hasn’t, prepare to have your mind blown:
The Social Contract is itself just a Magic Circle. It isn’t real. It’s a social construct. A spook. A phantom. The Law and The State are not physical things. You could grind every courthouse, jailhouse, and outhouse to dust and not find one speck of “The State” in any of the dirt. The power invested in The Sovereign — the State — is no more real than the rules of football. All of it is part of a game that most of us don’t even realize we’re playing.
This isn’t a wild and confused reading of The Magic Circle, either, or misapplying it. Look back to the quote from before from Homo Ludens on the play space:
Huizinga describes play as happening in all sorts of spaces, including the court of justice. I would go one further and say that anywhere the law exists is contained within a Magic Circle of those laws. None of the laws created by The State are rules of nature, they’re just layer upon layer of social contract, concentric Magic Circles that obscure the fact that they’re just as easily stepped outside of as the markings painted on the grass. Mario can never leave his Magic Circle, the limitations hard coded into the programming of the game, but in a football match there’s nothing physically stopping anyone from breaking the rules. In a game of football, there are penalties for breaking the rules. The Law ostensibly has those as well (though anyone paying the slightest amount of attention knows that such rules are rarely enforced evenly).
But what happens when someone doesn’t follow the rules?
Part IV: Why Fascism Trumps Liberalism (haha, get it? Pls kill me)
For Socrates, staying within the Magic Circle was such an obligation that he died for it. While some might commend him for that, ultimately he was choosing the play over his own life. It’s not an unusual situation, either. The only difference is that when liberal pundits condemn the actions of people who’ve broken unfair laws — unfair rules, to continue with the gaming metaphor — it’s not their own lives that are on the line, but those of other people. Most often minorities, who are disproportionately likely to be seen as upsetting the status quo in too ‘loud’ a way. Martin Luther King, Jr criticized this attitude decades ago, saying that the “white moderate” was regrettably a larger threat to civil rights than the KKK or the Citizens’ Councilers. They wanted a negative peace, that was the absence of tension, as opposed to the positive peace that is the presence of justice.
Liberalism, to those on the far Left, is characterized by this attitude. This deference to the status quo. This is what leads to Black Lives Matter being condemned or distrusted because the police start fights with them, and why there are a million thinkpieces about why punching Nazis is bad and Antifa are the real fascists whenever a Nazi rally is held and a fight breaks out. “Free Speech” has become a thinly veiled dogwhistle for nationalist groups, and yet seemingly rational people will will still refuse to acknowledge that the boundaries of the Magic Circle are strained to breaking when fascism is allowed to take protection under the rules of the game.
And of course this leads us, as all things political in 2017 do, to Donald Jeremy Trump (I don’t actually give a shit what the J stands for, and don’t care to look it up). Trump has spent his entire adult life, such as it is, ignoring the rules. He steps outside of — and all over — the Magic Circle in ways that are simply impossible for the system to handle. After all, what do you do when a football player takes the ball in his hands, walks it to the goal, and sticks it in? What do you do when he says he scored, no matter how much you insist otherwise? What do you do when he simply changes the scoreboard? For liberals, the answer seems to be to allow him to keep doing as he’s doing, because they have no way within the rules to challenge him. Yellow card all they like, it has very little overall effect. Sure, he’s gotten very little done, yet the country is already in shambles (and, frankly, always has been for minorities).
Throughout the entire excruciatingly long American election cycle, Trump trampled all over the rules. Even then there was questions of Russian support and interference — he even asked them to get the emails! — and he’s yet to reveal his tax returns — something that liberals care far too much about, even staging a march for it. He advocated war crimes. He admitted to sexual assault. He was involved in lawsuits. He suggested people shoot his opponent. He incited violence against protesters at his events, a literal crime. So many things that should have excluded him, yet the rules of the game at that level become more about asking and less about the use of violent force, as it might for a member of the working class. When he was finally crowned president, he broke the Emoluments Clause instantly, and continues to flagrantly do so. We made Jimmy Carter give up his peanut farm, but Trump uses the office of sovereign to advertise his hotels, and his wife and daughter’s #brands. He lied more than society should tolerate from anyone on television.
And what is it that was done by liberals when he lied? They fact checked him. They ran opinion pieces in the newspapers detailing that the things he said about the Jewish people were untrue.
Oh, wait, Trump never openly said anything about the Jews, who is it that I’m thinking of?
(And before anyone feels like complaining or bringing up “Godwin’s Law”, know that the man himself has spoken:)
Yes, in the 1930s when Hitler himself was rising to power, it really was like Trump taking the reins in 2017. After his failed Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler had a lot of time to think, and write a whining memoir while he was in prison. He noted three things about failing to overthrow the government and getting arrested: The first was that national media attention sure does a good job of getting your message out to the world. Second was the time he spent writing about his struggle as a failed author and racist. But third, and most importantly — and most relevantly — he realized that the path to power wasn’t through revolution, but through legitimate means. The Nazi party’s focus shifted, including doubling down on propaganda.
And, as I said before, the liberal media and government sought to helpfully debate Hitler, and correct his errors. Surely, they assumed, if he was told that his ideas were completely false, then he would give up and change his ways, right?
Well, I think we all know how that turned out.
The lesson to learn from the history here is that we can’t confine ourselves to the Magic Circle if we want a society. Liberalism is destined to give way to fascism whenever some strong man starts preaching nationalism and faux-populism, giving the angry middle class someone to blame all their troubles on, someone they can scapegoat for their mistreatment of the proletariat. Fascism thrives on hatred of the outgroup, and simply fact-checking can’t stop it.
What can stop it, though? Well, for that I think we should turn to Adolph himself:
The only thing that fascists understand is violence. And yet the Magic Circle prohibits violence, unless it’s done to brown people, preferably ones in foreign countries for oil or opium or cobalt (though we’ll definitely say that it’s to defend Freedom), or when the deaths come at the stroke of a pen or hunger, or when black, latino, and queer people somehow ~mysteriously~ seem to die in the custody of police officers who are acquitted of crimes. So liberals will continue to thinkpiece about how Nazis should be beaten in a marketplace of ideas, even as their numbers seem to swell, and their power is more than it has ever been. None of the opinion pieces ever seem to question what happens if the Jews, queers, blacks, latinos, Muslims, Irish, Catholics, socialists, Freemasons, Slavics, Asians (except the wives), disabled, and the neurodivergent are unable to adequately defend their own existences. What do the women do when the free market of ideas — whose currency is attention, not truth — determines that they belong as sex slaves, barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? When the alleged marketplace of ideas fails all these minorities — as it so clearly is — are we simply supposed to let ourselves die?
Part V: “Winning” the Game?
While it’s one of the more relevant concerns these days, antifascism isn’t the only way that staying within the bounds of the Magic Circle does us more harm than good. Capitalism and it’s flaws are protected by the circle. When people explain basic principles of socialism, the question is always “who profits?” there are so many people who can’t conceive of a world outside of capitalism and profit-driven industries. Price gouging during Hurricane Harvey is defended — albeit primarily by Conservatives — as being necessary for supply and demand, focusing on nothing more than profit an loss, ignoring the human element. We have millions of homes with no peoples and thousands of people with no homes, yet the idea that maybe we should put the one in the other is met with confusion or even revulsion.
Capitalism will kill us all, and so long as we’re refusing to acknowledge that the rules of the game can be ignored, we’ll continue to sit in our prison cell drinking hemlock.
