We are living in an age of what one Trump confidante called ‘maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.’ That phrase captures Trumpianism and his new vision of politics — politics not as negotiation among plural interests, but as a zero-sum combat. In this version of total politics, compromise is weakness and victory is everything.
The collapse of the boundary between war and politics goes back to the early 20th century. Writing after World War I, Ernst Jünger described the emergence of “total war” — a war waged without limits, where the line between civilian and soldier disappears. Total war, he argued, is the product of democracy. Once warfare involves not only kings and generals but entire populations, war must be justified in existential terms. The people must be convinced that if they lose, they lose everything — their culture, their homes, their identity. And so the whole of society is drawn into the battle: farms, schools, factories, children. Nothing is neutral. Nothing is off-limits.
The totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and the Bolshevist Soviet Union took total politics to an extreme, mobilizing terror to impose ideological conformity on society. Politics became an existential battle in which all enemies had to be eliminated. That is what Arendt meant by total politics.
We are seeing the stirrings of a new logic of total politics today in the United States. Consider the evolution of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Once a conventional enforcement agency, ICE is increasingly operating like a paramilitary force — with masked agents, secret raids, and legally sanctioned disappearances — threatening to transform into an institution that enforces this maximalist logic. To be clear: ICE remains a legal institution and is not yet totalitarian. But when enforcement becomes spectacle, it sends a message: the state is not here to mediate conflict; it is here to assert dominance. And even if the deportation regime someday ends, the massive bureaucracy of surveillance, arrest, and detention that has been built will likely remain. The real danger is what the bureaucratic apparatus of ICE becomes once its original mission is fulfilled.
The same logic now governs the electoral process. Consider the Republican effort to hold onto congressional power through gerrymandering. Once an ugly but marginal tactic, gerrymandering has become a central tool in this political war. Redistricting is no longer about gaining advantage — it is about rendering elections irrelevant. Using demographic data, psychographic profiles, and algorithmic simulations, parties can now construct district maps with scientific precision, all but ensuring that one side stays in power even when it loses the popular vote.
Last week, at the encouragement of President Trump, the Republican-controlled Texas legislature began redrawing five Democratic-held congressional districts to ensure Republican wins. The proposed map would give the GOP 30 of the state’s 38 congressional seats — despite Texas being only slightly more Republican than Democratic. And this is not an isolated case. Trump has urged legislatures in Republican-led states to do the same. The aim is clear: even if Republicans lose seats in swing states, they can make up the difference through precision redistricting in states they already control.
All of this is, of course, perfectly legal. In Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering produces unjust and undemocratic outcomes. Chief Justice John Roberts even wrote that gerrymandering is “incompatible with democratic principles.” But the Court declined to intervene, ruling that such questions are political, not judicial — that it is not the role of federal courts to limit how elected officials draw maps. The paradox, then, is that a fundamentally anti-democratic practice is shielded by democratic process.
But the damage goes beyond rigged outcomes. The deeper danger of gerrymandering is that it shifts the center of gravity in American politics. It defeats the very purpose of a winner-take-all system designed to push candidates toward the middle to capture a majority. Instead, it creates incentives for the most partisan and radical candidates. When districts are engineered to guarantee one party’s victory, the real contest moves to the primary. And in primaries, it is not the moderate majority that votes, but the ideological extremes. The result is a political class composed not of consensus-builders, but of partisan warriors.
That is why some states have moved to blunt the weaponization of gerrymandering. California, Michigan, and several others have implemented independent or bipartisan commissions to draw districts more fairly. Groups like the National Democratic Redistricting Committee have worked to push reform and fight voter suppression. But in this new age of maximalist politics, even these reformers are being pulled into the war.
In response to Trump’s push for gerrymandering in Texas and other Republican states, Democrats in California and New York have floated plans to abandon their nonpartisan commissions and launch aggressive gerrymanders of their own. It is hard to blame them. When one side plays by the rules and the other redraws them, rectitude becomes a losing strategy. Bring a knife to a gunfight, and you lose every time.
And so the logic deepens. Total politics, like total war, consumes everything in its path. Once politics becomes a maximal form of warfare, restraint seems cowardly. If one side lies and cheats to win, should the other side abide by norms of decency and institutional restraint? If the right-wing press embraces alternative facts, should the left-wing press not respond in kind as part of the resistance? If one-side packs the judiciary with partisans, the other side feels emboldened to do the same. The result of such a war, however, is the slow erosion of institutional limits that once anchored our liberal institutions.
When politics becomes a total war of competing fictions, what is lost is not just factual accuracy but the possibility of a common world. Hannah Arendt reminds us that even if truth is foreign to politics, it is existentially necessary. We cannot live together unless we agree, at least, on what the world is.
Arendt knew there are no truths in politics. “Seen from the viewpoint of politics,” she argued, “truth has a despotic character.” Politics is allergic to truth because politics is about the clash of opinions. While “unwelcome opinions can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon,” truth, Arendt argues, has an “infuriating stubbornnes.” Since truths are self-evident, they are beyond consent and agreement and thus “not between men but above them.” Truth is, therefore, anti-political for Arendt because it “carries within itself an element of coercion” as well as “tyrannical tendencies.”
And yet, even as Arendt understands the danger of truth in politics, she also sees that we cannot live without truth. Truth, however fragile and contested it may be, is the ground we walk on and the sky above us. It is what holds the common world together. Even if truth is a fiction — a lie, as Nietzsche has it — it is a useful and necessary fiction. Without truth, there is simply nothing that holds our world together. Truth is not political, but it is the non-political condition for the possibility of politics, the glue that binds the world in which we live.
The same is true of democratic institutions. Courts, elections, fair districting — these are not sacred. They are flawed, often manipulated. The history of our democracy is not perfect. We’ve had machine politics, political bosses handing out cash for votes, stuffed ballot boxes in Tammany Hall, and dead people voting in Chicago. We have seen elections bought and stolen. But the aspiration for elections that are fair is meaningful. Without that aspiration, there is no shared world in which politics can unfold. Like truth, trusted institutions do not guarantee justice, but they make justice imaginable.
As with truth, so with the institutions and norms of moderate and limited government. What Arendt valued in American government was its institutional bias toward moderation and limited power in the name of freedom. If we want to resist the descent into a politics of total war, we must defend the imperfect frameworks that hold us together. If we abandon institutional norms in the name of political victory, we may win the battle but lose the republic.
