Discerned

Two kinds of power can be discerned at work in the byzantine processes of American politics. In The American Deep State, I used two terms from Hannah Arendt (following Thucydides) to describe them: “persuasion through arguments” (πείθειν), versus “coercion” by force and violence (βία). In another essay, Arendt wrote that only the former was true power: “violence and power [i.e., persuasive power] are not the same.… Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.” One can add that a persuasive politics is one of openness, whereas a violent politics is usually shrouded in exclusion and secrecy.

The distinction is both extremely important and hard to define precisely; a number of other opposing terms can be used, that are roughly but not exactly coterminous. Arendt herself also writes of “top down” and “bottom up” power, others of egalitarian or democratic versus oppressive power. It is clear that top-down power is not always violent, just as democratic power is not always nonviolent. However the terms “persuasive,” “bottom-up,” and “democratic,” even if not synonymous or exactly coterminous, help us to focus on a Socratic ideal of influence by persuasion that has, though the centuries, been a lodestar of western civilization. By contrast their opposites —“violence,” “top-down,” “repressive”—epitomize what I believe civilization should be moving away from.

-Peter Dale Scott,

“Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against The White House” (2015)

Special thanks to Dark Journalist for quoting the above passage during the conclusion of his live discussion, on March 18, 2025, of the JFK assassination records released earlier that day.