Introduction

People as different as Mao Tse-Tung, Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and Huey Newton agree on one thing: politics is war. It’s tempting to say that we aren’t intended to take the equation literally, that we should understand it as a figure of speech (hyperbole) intended to emphasize the commitment of the speaker. Yet in each of those cases, the rhetor invoked the equation of politics and war in order to justify violating moral norms—about violence (Mao 2020, 54; Newton 1969), dishonesty (Musk 2022), and governance (Bannon, see Strassel 2016). Their equation of politics and war was not merely a figure of speech; it was intended to have real-world (that is, literal) consequences. This book takes that equation seriously, and sometimes literally, by pursuing two questions. First, what does framing politics as war do to our ability to deliberate effectively and optimally about our policy options? Second, if politics is war, what kind of war?