The trickle of stories this week suggesting that some lawmakers may have helped insurrectionists to undertake reconnaissance of the Capitol building a day before they occupied the deliberative heart of American democracy and came close to realising their plans to capture and assassinate members of Congress as they met to ratify Joe Biden’s electoral college victory, had the impact of a bombshell reverberating around political society. This culminated in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s press conference this morning where she asserted that lawmakers who were co-conspirators aiding and abetting the insurrection should be prosecuted for their actions. As I argue below, the momentary adrenaline high of participating in an insurrection will prove pyrrhic in very short order, as the dynamics of total war when waged in the arena of domestic politics is at best futile and at worst self-defeating in the extreme.
One of the most meaningful distinctions in politics is that between domestic and international politics. This is the case not because of abstract theorization by scholars but by virtue of empirical patterns within politics itself. Domestic politics in both democracies and autocracies tends away from total war; in democracies because democracy is a system of government premised on compromise and the negation of total victory or total defeat, in autocracies because autocratic leaders must exert firm control to maintain their power and in order to do this must ensure that domestic conflict is minimised and suppressed.
On the other hand, international politics, though it is often orderly and characterised by diplomacy and compromise, holds within itself the perennial possibility of war of a very high degree of violence due to the very nature of state sovereignty and the impossibility of preventing states from exerting the full scope of their powers to declare war against other states. The prevention of international warfare falls to the deterrence of war and incentives (to peace), whereas in the domestic realm the constitutional rules which underlie the practice of politics in the twenty first century explicitly proscribes actions that transgress its strictures.
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