A new kind of state is born
Reflecting on what is happening in the US since the (second) Trump inauguration on 20 January 2025, people say it is becoming an authoritarian state, a corrupt state, an anti-immigrant state, a human rights crushing state, a white nationalist state, an oligarch-controlled state, and a state that is chaotic by design. It is certainly a state, where the President seeks to ‘rule’ over the co-equal institutions of the government, the Legislative and the Judiciary. While all of these explain an aspect of the Trump (and, to be analytically honest, also the Hungarian) state, this is actually a new form of post WWII governance arrangement in the West, an arrangement best technically described as a Sadistic State (SS).
To see how AI looked at this phenomenon, I put ‘sadistic state’ into ChatGPT. The answer was as follows:
A “sadist state” typically refers to a situation where a governing body or authority exhibits or encourages sadistic behaviour, which is the deliberate infliction of pain, suffering, or humiliation on others for enjoyment or control. In political or social terms, it may describe a regime or leadership that derives pleasure from the oppression, suffering, or harm of its people or subjects. Such a state might intentionally use violence, fear, or cruelty as tools for maintaining power or instilling terror.
It’s worth noting that the term “sadist” in this context is more metaphorical than literal, often highlighting a brutal, oppressive, or tyrannical system rather than referring to individuals who personally derive pleasure from causing pain.
There you have it, with all the prestige and the vast literature that ChatGPT commands!
The characteristics of a SS
Let us start from the opposite: a healthy state has an elected government that, among other attributes, provides a range of services for socially important needs of its constituents, protects its people and land from external threats, and contributes internationally to the health and stability of the Earth. In contrast, a sadistic state is a state that protects people who look and sound like the state leaders and takes actions to inflict pain on categories of people that it considers ‘others’, as this provides pleasure and satisfaction to the leaders, administrators, and their supporters. Internationally, a sadistic state also inflicts pain and suffering on those nations whose leaders and populations do not submit to and/or comply to the model of the SS. In a SS, there is no sense of ethnic equity, the rights of future generations, or the long-standing goal for 0.7% of GDP for international development assistance.
A SS clearly turns against its own people. Examples in the US abound since January 20 of this year. They range from blocking access to health care for the middle class and those in poverty, constructing migration barriers to ‘other’ people and the cancelling of health, safety, and environmental protection rules allowing private sector firms and other powerful forces to harm the physical environment, which in turn often harms human and non-human living communities. In short, a SS government, its administrators and supporters will take crisis-based information to enact additional measures to cause more disruption in people’s lifes BECAUSE that will cause two actions (1) more people will suffer and die and (2) the SS and its administrators will feel happier.
At a more institutional level, and for the first time in US history, the Trump government is dismembering the administration that it is supposed to oversee. In prior post-WWII cases, when a new government did not approve of an existing rule, regulation, or funding decision, it moved to reverse that decision. Under the current government, when the President disapproves of an action he fires the staff who made the decision or works to terminate the whole agency or programme unit that made the decision. The core functions of a federal agency or programme are laid out in an act of Congress signed by the President of the day and funded by a separate act of Congress signed by the President of the day. The current US government is acting as if the Executive Branch of government of the day can – and ought to be able to – reverse any of these decisions by discontinuing any office it feels is not in line with the President’s personal politics or staffed by those who failed to exhibit appropriate levels of loyalty.
Examples of similar sadistic behaviours occur in Europe, with its militarization of migrant control, in Russia with draft for its young people to fight and die in Ukraine, and in China with its expansive use of surveillance cameras to contain dissent. Through each of these and other similar actions the SS inflicts pain and suffering on a community of people, providing its administrators and supporters a gratification opportunity.
How to deal with a SS?
Appeals to a SS to relieve suffering and pain are in this context seriously misdirected. Organizing against a SS needs to be different from responding to a trespassing by a state that welcomes public debate and open choices. The question of how to go about it has two clearly distinct but interconnected answers:
- Restrict the ability of the SS and its administrators and supporters to inflict pain by defunding the instruments of their doing so, namely the police, military, and surveillance aspects of the state.
- Develop a new positive framework around the concepts of a multi-ethnic, gender-diverse, working class-based, caring state.
That’s all.
To get a bit more specific-
The defund portion of the counter-strategy could focus on:
- Campaigning to remove tax and subsidies benefits from private sector firms which directly benefit from the sadistic state (private prisons, manufacturers of armaments, special tax treatments for relevant parts of the service sector, no-bid contracts leading to market dominance);
- Product / service boycotting and public actions at the doors of private sector firms and their executives which benefit directly from police and military purchases and contracts from the sadistic state.
- Introducing into political discourse the concept of a sadistic state as explanatory element of why a particular crisis is left to fester or made to fester.
The build the caring state portion of the counter-strategy could focus on:
- Creating shadow governments that test out future, non-SS governance structures; and
- Defining new tax structures to meet all the requirements of this non-SS state, the use of taxes will now result in a decline of current military and police expenditures and a peace dividend for increased outlays for education, infrastructure, and social services.
These recommendations are calibrated to shift organizing activities away from exclusively identifying human and non-human communities in pain, which could then be used to select more such communities to inflict greater pain on by the sadistic state. On the contrary, the recommendations focus on identifying key supporters of the SS and putting them under pressure to reduce / collapse support to the SS and its leadership.
Harris Gleckman, Phd, is a former UN staff member and currently Senior Fellow, Center for Governance and Sustainability, UMass-Boston and member of the Advisory Board of the Foundation for Global Governance and Sustainability (FOGGS). Author of Multistakeholder Governance and Democracy: A Global Challenge, 2018 Routledge. He can be reached at hgleckman2@gmail.com
