When Power Stops Competing, It Starts Faking Reality

The strangest thing about power is that it eventually stops trying to persuade you

What happens when a political movement no longer needs to win the argument, only to control the premises of the argument itself? That is the unsettling thread running through today’s battles over elections, taxation, and governance. The same force that can kill a bipartisan compromise on national security can also insist that a tax on unrealized gains is fantasy, that a defeated candidate was not defeated, that a negotiated border deal is suddenly intolerable, or that a constitutional history conveniently rewritten in amicus briefs is more real than the one in the archives.

This is not just hypocrisy. Hypocrisy still acknowledges a standard. What we are watching instead is something more dangerous: the replacement of governing with reality management. When a political faction cannot reliably win by majority support, it has a strong incentive to change the conditions under which victory is measured. If it cannot pass a bill, it tries to make compromise illegitimate. If it cannot tax wealth directly, it argues wealth is not yet wealth. If it cannot admit an election loss, it turns the election into a fraud narrative before the ballots are even counted.

That is why the border fight, the tax fight, and the election fight are the same fight in different costumes. Each one asks a deeper question: Who gets to define what counts as real?

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Governing requires shared facts, but anti-governing feeds on fiction

A functioning democracy depends on a few basic agreements. We may disagree about policy, but we need to agree that votes are counted honestly, laws are passed through institutions, debts are real, revenues are real, and borders and budgets and court records are not improv theater. Once those shared facts begin to dissolve, the public square becomes a fog machine.

That fog machine has a purpose. It is easier to seize power when people cannot tell whether the crisis is genuine, whether the compromise exists, or whether the law means what it says. In one arena, senators negotiate border protections and aid for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Gaza, only to have the deal killed because solving the problem would deny a campaign issue. In another, a wealthy taxpayer claims value has not been “realized,” as if appreciation in assets is not economic reality until someone clicks a sell button. In a third, a political movement denies an insurrection so thoroughly that the denial itself becomes a loyalty test.

These are not isolated distortions. They are examples of reality secession. A movement gradually exits the shared world and builds a parallel one in which inconvenient facts are reclassified as propaganda, and self serving claims are upgraded to principle.

Consider the odd logic of the border episode. The same politicians who staged photo ops to demand action later opposed action once solving the issue might help the other side politically. That is not a policy disagreement. It is a confession that the problem is useful only when unsolved. The crisis becomes a prop. The border is not merely a place where policy must be made, but a stage where rage can be rehearsed.

A similar logic appears in tax policy. The debate over whether unrealized gains can be taxed sounds technical, but the deeper issue is profoundly civic. A tax system is a way of saying what society recognizes as wealth and what it believes should contribute to the common life. If a society decides that massive paper gains are untouchable, it is not simply making a fiscal choice. It is saying that some forms of abundance are private property in a stronger sense than public obligation ever could be.

Tax policy shows what a society values, but it also shows what it is willing to admit is real.

That is why tax arguments are never only about money. They are about whether democracy may see and touch the structures that concentrate power.

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The modern authoritarian impulse is not to abolish facts, but to privatize them

There is a temptation to think authoritarianism begins with dramatic repression, tanks in the street, censorship, and open coercion. Sometimes it does. But in a mature democracy, the more common pattern is subtler. First, power learns to privatize reality. It creates separate facts for separate tribes.

One version of reality says a bill exists and contains border protections negotiated in good faith. Another says the bill is a betrayal because the leader has decided border chaos is electorally useful. One version says the 2020 election was certified, investigated, and upheld. Another says the truth is whatever keeps the grievance ecosystem alive. One version says the wealthy should help fund the state that protects property and markets. Another says taxation is a nearly metaphysical assault on freedom.

This privatization of reality has a strategic advantage. If facts are merely partisan artifacts, then institutions lose their power to settle disputes. The public no longer asks, “What is true?” It asks, “Which team says this?” At that point, law becomes an instrument of tribal identity rather than a shared mechanism of coordination.

A useful mental model here is the difference between price discovery and truth discovery. In a healthy market, prices emerge from many actors testing reality. In a healthy republic, institutions do something similar with truth. Elections, courts, legislatures, audits, and the press are all ways of stress testing claims against reality. But when a faction is willing to punish its own negotiators, attack election officials, and demand loyalty to a leader over institutions, it is attempting to destroy the mechanisms that discover truth.

That is why the attack on election officials matters beyond any one contest. If officials who help process a rival candidate’s paperwork are framed as cheaters, then the system itself becomes suspect. The point is not the paperwork. The point is to teach supporters that any loss can be relabeled as theft. Once that lesson is absorbed, democratic defeat is no longer a political outcome. It is a narrative failure that must be corrected by force, pressure, or endless delegitimization.

The same logic appears in the rewriting of January 6. A resolution denying insurrection is not simply historical revisionism. It is a prototype for impunity. If the event can be recast, then the accountability that should follow it can be recast as persecution. In that sense, the lie is not after the crime. The lie is part of the infrastructure of future crimes.

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The fiscal fight is really about whether the republic can tax power

If the election fight is about who gets to define legitimacy, the tax fight is about who gets to define obligation.

That is why the history matters. During the Civil War, Republicans created the first national income tax because the country needed a way to finance the war and preserve the Union. The logic was straightforward and deeply civic: those who had more should bear more, because the nation’s survival required shared sacrifice. “The weight must be distributed equally,” Justin Smith Morrill said, meaning not equal dollars from every person, but equal regard for ability to pay. John P. Hale later captured the astonishing public mood by saying people did not ask to be untaxed, but to be taxed.

That older idea is almost incomprehensible in today’s political climate, and that is precisely the point. A republic can only function if it can sometimes ask wealth to serve the common good. When wealth becomes politically untouchable, a society starts treating economic hierarchy as a natural order rather than a public choice.

Here is the deeper connection to the modern court battles: when legal doctrines like “realization” are weaponized against taxation, they do more than protect a plaintiff’s portfolio. They narrow democracy’s ability to recognize modern wealth. In an economy where fortunes can balloon through stock appreciation, inherited assets, trusts, and corporate structures, waiting for sale before taxation can mean waiting forever. It creates a legal fiction in which immense power accumulates while public responsibility remains postponed.

That fiction is especially potent because it sounds neutral. It presents itself as a mere principle of timing. But timing can be destiny. If a society delays taxing the powerful until the moment they choose to cash out, it may never tax them meaningfully at all.

A parallel is useful here. Imagine a city allowing every property owner to postpone taxes until they voluntarily decide to sell their building, while also allowing them to borrow against rising value indefinitely. The city would rapidly lose revenue, not because wealth disappeared, but because the rules were written to let wealth live in a permanent state of exemption. That is what legal abstraction can do when it is detached from civic purpose.

The deeper issue is not whether taxation is always good or bad. It is whether a democracy still believes power should be legible to public institutions. If the state cannot see wealth, it cannot govern wealth. If it cannot govern wealth, it eventually governs only the poor, the visible, and the already vulnerable.

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The common pattern: power that cannot win honestly seeks to make honesty irrelevant

This is the synthesis that ties the pieces together. The national security bill, the tax case, and the election lies all reflect the same underlying adaptation. When power is losing the capacity to persuade a majority, it may try to do three things:

1. Destroy the referee by attacking elections officials, judges, and negotiators.
2. Redefine the game by insisting that compromise is betrayal, taxation is theft, and loss is fraud.
3. Keep the audience trapped in spectacle so attention never settles on governing outcomes.

This is why so much of the movement’s energy appears contradictory. It can demand hardline border action one week and reject a deal the next. It can demand law and order while praising those who tried to overturn an election. It can complain about deficits while defending the very tax cuts that enlarged them. These are not contradictions from the movement’s point of view. They are coordinated moves inside a different logic: the logic of permanent conflict.

Permanent conflict serves a purpose. It mobilizes emotion, centralizes loyalty, and turns every institution into an enemy or a shrine. Most of all, it prevents settlement. A settled issue can be studied, governed, or taxed. An unsettled issue can be weaponized forever.

That is why compromise is so threatening to this style of politics. Compromise implies a shared reality in which competing interests can be balanced. It implies that facts can constrain strategy. But if a movement needs instability, then every settlement is a loss. Every solved crisis is one fewer grievance to monetise.

Mitch McConnell’s critics in his own party understood that intuitively. If one senator is punished for negotiating a bill with border protections that Republicans said they wanted, the lesson to future negotiators is clear: do not solve problems, because solutions may cost you your career. That is how institutions decay from the inside. Not always through dramatic destruction, but through the deterrence of good faith.

When compromise is punished, the only durable strategy left is performance.

And performance, left unchecked, eventually replaces governance.

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Key Takeaways

• Watch for reality management, not just policy disagreement. If a movement keeps changing its story depending on what helps its leader, the issue is not strategy. It is the erosion of shared facts.
• Ask what a political fight is really protecting. A border crisis, a tax doctrine, or an election rule may be less about the stated issue than about preserving a source of power.
• Treat taxation as a test of democratic eyesight. A society that cannot tax concentrated wealth is often a society that has let wealth become invisible to public obligation.
• Defend the institutions that make compromise possible. Negotiators, election administrators, and courts are not obstacles to democracy. They are the machinery that lets democracy function at all.
• Notice when outrage rewards non solution. If a crisis is politically useful only while unsolved, the incentives are already corrupting the public conversation.

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The real crisis is not that power lies, but that it wants the right to define truth

The most revealing feature of these battles is not that some politicians lie. Politicians have always lied. It is that modern anti democratic power increasingly seeks something larger than falsehood. It wants the authority to decide which facts will count as facts.

That is why a defeated election can become a stolen election, why a negotiated bill can become treason, why a fortune can become unreal until the moment it wishes to cash out, and why history can be rewritten into a loyalty test. Once a movement can control reality at that level, it no longer needs to win by consent. It can survive by confusion.

The historical counterweight to this danger is not cynicism. It is civic clarity. The republic survives when citizens insist that borders are governed, taxes are legible, elections are real, and history is not whatever the powerful need it to be this week. In that sense, the fight is larger than any single bill or court case. It is about whether democracy remains a system in which power must answer to reality, or becomes a system in which reality must answer to power.

That choice is still before us. And the answer will determine not only who governs, but whether governing itself remains possible.