The Third Face of Power in the Age of Trump

Amidst the now constant assault on the federal workforce, the administrative state, congressional authority, and the privacy and security of everyday Americans, both social media and congressional phone lines are awash with calls for Democrats to “do more.” The failure of elected Democrats to meet the moment has alternately been described as “complicit,” “pragmatic,” or “cowardice.”  But what congressional Democrats and their overpaid strategists are most clearly demonstrating is their reliance on an inadequate understanding of power.  As a result, they are neither wielding what power they do have effectively, nor making any apparent effort to increase it.

Power operates in multiple ways.  When House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says Democrats are “trying to figure out what leverage we actually have” and that “it’s their government,” he’s expressing the plain truth that congressional Democrats have fewer votes than Republicans and are therefore not in a position to dictate outcomes to their colleagues across the aisle, that they cannot get Republicans to do what Democrats want unless there are common goals that Republicans have self-interested reasons to pursue.

But this claim also rests on a very basic understanding of what power is, and while Democrats wring their hands about their lack of a legislative majority, Republicans and their billionaire allies understand and have been effectively wielding several dimensions of power for some time. If Democrats want to meet this moment, they must recognize, invest in, and deploy power of multiple forms.

This simplest understanding of power—what political theorists refer to as the “first face of power”—can be understood as the ability to get someone to do something they would not do otherwise. This kind of power is a manifestation of the resources one has and the various ways one can use those resources to alter the costs and benefits of another’s decision-making.  It is predicated on the idea that political power is wielded when disagreements over policy reflect underlying conflicts of interest. We can understand Jeffries’s observation that “it’s their government” as a description of the imbalance in this first kind of power in the US Congress. Simply put: Republicans have the resources (in this case, majorities in both houses of Congress) to secure their desired outcome in any decision that comes before them. They can pass the legislation that they want and confirm the nominees that they want, and Democrats do not have the votes to stop them.

That said, there are more nuanced forms of power than leveraging resources to drive the outcomes of decision-making. A second form of power is what most of us know as “agenda setting”: power operates not only in influencing the outcomes of decision-making around a particular issue, but also in determining which issues are considered in decision-making at all.  If a particular policy is never even considered in formal decision-making, this also reflects a conflict of interests, one that can best be described as the interest those who control the levers of power have in maintaining some aspect of the status quo. By preventing a policy or issue from entering into the formal decision-making process, change can be averted and the status quo preserved.

Importantly, both of these forms of power are about resolving conflicts between competing values and preferences—either when those competing values come into explicit conflict in a policy decision, or by keeping some values from entering into the possibility space of decision-making at all.  They each take the distribution of values and preferences as given and seek to describe how those values are pitted against one another, when, and by whom. But this leaves arguably the most important form of power unaddressed: the power that is wielded in structuring the distribution of values and preferences, in constructing the narratives through which people understand what their interests are and how best to promote them.

It is recognition of this, what political theorists refer to as the “third face” of power, that is most strikingly missing from prominent Democrats’ understanding of their role in the current moment. This face of power is predicated on the basic fact that part of what is up for grabs in politics are the values that voters hold.  In the 1970s Steven Lukes made the observation that political preferences are often less a reflection of individuals’ actual interests and more a reflection of a dominant ideology or political system. The “most insidious” exercise of power, he said, is when it is used by those who have it to shape the perceptions and preferences of those who do not in ways that function to reinforce and serve that power.  It often does this by obscuring from someone what their actual interests are or how they are or are not served by the political decisions that are being made, thus skewing their values.

An example of this is the now-famous slogan, “keep your government hands off my Medicare!”  The man who said this recognized that ongoing access to Medicare was in his interests, but thanks to the amalgam of messaging, ideology, information, and popular discourse about big vs. small government, he did not recognize that this interest was best served by continued investment in government programs rather than their dismantling.  Modern social media and the dominance of access journalism among mainstream news outlets have both contributed to the disconnect between individual interests and political values and preferences.  And indeed, we can plausibly understand Musk’s takeover of X (previously Twitter) as a means of increasing the right’s power to affect how the public understands their interests and what political outcomes they value as a result.  In the 2024 election this played out in the millions of voters who claimed to be motivated primarily by economic concerns but voted for a candidate who ran on a platform of steep tariffs and mass deportation—both policies that are likely to significantly increase prices on consumer goods.

What this means in practice is that an essential function of power is in constructing the lenses through which the public interprets their reality.  While Republicans have spent decades constructing a coherent lens through which voters can understand their interests—a lens that is fundamentally about us vs. them, where “them” can be understood to variously include anyone who is not a straight cisgender white man—Democrats have largely ceded the ideological playing field.  Of central import to Democrats right now is a recognition that they, too, can wield this kind of power and help to shape public opinion rather than merely responding to it.

For example, one response to the dismantling of USAID is to lament its loss but recognize that foreign aid is a losing issue with the American populace and so, when there are so many fights to be had, it may be more strategic to conserve resources and let this fight go.  This is the approach favored by Democratic strategists such as David Axelrod, who is quoted in Politico as saying, “My heart is with the people out on the street outside USAID, but my head tells me: ‘Man, Trump will be satisfied to have this fight. When you talk about cuts, the first thing people say is: Cut foreign aid.”

But an alternative approach embraces the importance of the third face of power and acknowledges that elected officials have the ability to influence how Americans understand their interests and thereby to motivate shifts in their preferences.  One piece of this is necessarily informational—as Bade notes in the Politico piece, many Americans erroneously believe the US spends as much as 25% of its federal budget on foreign aid when in reality it is less than 1%. Democrats must find a way to better inform voters of the facts that are relevant to the issues of the day.

But the third face of power is not only or even primarily about ensuring that voters have access to accurate information.  It is more fundamentally ideological: Americans should value the kind of foreign aid USAID provides because of its contributions to global public health, yes, but also because human rights are important and salient to Americans, and because it contributes to US soft power abroad, which is good for Americans.  Moreover, they should value the authority that Congress has to establish and fund various agencies as well as existing constraints on executive power that prevent a president from unilaterally overriding that authority because all of these constraints are in their interests of having a government that is constrained by the rule of law.

A competent politician can make these connections salient to voters, helping them to understand not only the important role of this particular agency, but also how that role intersects with other important interests Americans have.  Instead, Democratic politicians are abdicating their responsibilities to connect these issues to voters’ interests, to help voters recognize the import of the preservation of seemingly “elite” democratic institutions in terms of the values those voters already understand and share.

We see a similar abdication in discussions about recent and intensifying attacks on transgender rights. Prominent liberals and many politicians have repeatedly argued (or simply embodied via their actions) that going to bat for the rights of trans persons to engage in sports in conformity with their gender identity or access medical care that allows them to embody it is a losing issue that doesn’t resonate with voters. But this claim (if true; I admit my skepticism) takes the distribution of voter preferences as a fixed point rather than recognizing that those preferences can be informed by the actions and words of politicians and media elites.  An effective strategy for progressive politicians would be to loudly and consistently affirm trans rights while also making clear how and why protecting those rights is a reflection of a value system most Americans already embrace, one that prizes self-determination, equal civil rights, and the basic respect for pluralism that underlies the liberal project.

Republicans and their centrist enablers have sold voters a bag of lies about what is in their interests across a range of issues from “free speech” to DEI programs to basic rights for trans people.  Rather than taking voters’ preferences as an immutable fact to which they must always and only respond, Democrats must embrace the power that they have to help voters identify and understand what their interests are, and thus how they should perceive the impacts of this administration’s actions on their ability to pursue and achieve them.  Just as importantly, they must also do the work to construct a positive alternative vision of what our nation can be and use their significant ideational power to show voters how and why a nation built around the values of freedom and democracy is better for them than one built on cruelty and fear.

Featured image is Le Serment du Jeu de paume, Jacques-Louis David, 1791