A short summary on power for people who are having trouble parsing why things are going the way they're going:

Steven Lukes wrote about the three faces of power, or how power is practiced and applied and how it affects others. Foucault wrote on power and his ideas were integrated as a fourth face by Peter Digeser, and is more useful for understanding much of the now than ever. I had the privilege of learning from Alexander Wendt a long time ago, and this particular lesson has given me more awareness and control than any other. Keep in mind this is a simplified summary, and that you will get a lot more out of reading the original theory, but ain't nobody got time for that.

Power is at the heart of all politics, and in political science it is good to keep things clearly defined as much as possible. Politics is the process by which it is decided who gets what, when, and how. Power is closely related and commonly defined as the ability to influence or direct actions and beliefs.

However, that doesn't really tell us what power is doing; how power is applied to get actors what they want. I think going into this next era it's important for us to share and keep in mind precise mechanisms, and so I'd like to share some theory I know in simple terms.

The first face of power is very simple: it is the ability to make someone do something they otherwise would not do. The classic example is if I point a gun at you and tell you to give me your wallet. This is a coercive form of the first face, a non-coercive form would be a strict and specific law preventing you from doing something, like say a jay-walking law.

The second face of power is agenda setting. This is where you control a discussion, debate, conversation, what-have-you. The point is to shut down a subject being brought up at all. This is often seen in the American Congress when the party in power, and specifically the speaker of the house is allowed to set the agenda and disallow bills from being brought to a vote at all. You might see this in an organization meeting that insists on "staying on topic" or even a meeting that allows itself to drift off topic in some cases.

The third face of power is called thought control, but is specifically about getting people to agree to go against their own interests. This has come up quite often in American politics as of late. As this is more abstract, it can be described in myriad ways. The quintessential example is a person who chooses to remain in an abusive relationship. This example is often lauded as the universal example of this kind of power, as applications of this power necessitate a toxic relationship between the one exercising this power and the victim. Lately we have seen poor individuals vote for individuals and causes that negatively impact the poor. And a big question has been why?

You can debate the specifics of it all you'd like, you can blame social media, or a lack of education. Some blame the "smugness" of any flavor of intellectual on hand, others the fight or flight response of the economically anxious attempting to spread their misery. But the point is that the avenue by which third face power functions is by establishing a toxic relationship in which you decide that hurting yourself is outweighed by a benefit that does not actually offset the cost and benefits the one with the power.

Fourth face power does not get talked about too much because it is highly abstract, but I believe we are entering or perhaps have entered an era where it is more relevant than ever. Fourth face power is beyond thought control, in which you prevent individuals from being able to formulate ideas you dislike at all, by keeping them focused on the ideas you'd rather they be exposed to. This is most evident in the constant propaganda against any and all social assistance as a concept, employed by capitalist interests to label any and all social assistance as "socialism", "communism", or even "nazism", among other labels.

As this is highly abstract, it is difficult to demonstrate without abstracts. Take the Overton Window for example, an abstract concept that has definitely been thrown around a lot the last few years along with its applications. The idea of the Overton Window is that most political debate is had between two extremes, with a moderate force forming in the middle. Wherever this moderate population moves politically will determine the societally acceptable extremes on either end. By normalizing current extreme ideas on the right or left, you can move the moderate population toward those directions, thus allowing for more societal acceptance of those ideas, and also discouraging the increasingly extreme ideas on the other side.

We've seen the Overton Window move dramatically to the right in previous years, ideas that were once seen as horrifying are now being seen as merely extreme, but ultimately acceptable. I speak specifically of the talk that the soon to be current president signing an executive order to revoke citizenship from the children of illegal immigrants in flagrant violation of the 14th amendment. Or withholding emergency aid from California without political concessions. This process is also utilizing 3rd, 2nd, and 1st face power as well through having compromised much of the American political process.

But further than that, ideas that were previously seen as normal are now being relegated to extremism, such as universal healthcare, or public libraries, or free college for all (as was previously being discussed in 2016). A direct example of this phenomena in action may be that many in Europe are able to have viable existing Leftist parties, who advocate for the actual Leftist position of the seizure of the means of production by the working class, while Americans cannot even conceive of such a thing on any kind of politically organized scale.

So how is this helpful? It might be that we are the cows in the slaughterhouse and understanding how the meat is made is simply going to give us anxiety. And it does, absolutely.

This is where I advocate for anxiety. Anxiety is our brains and our bodies trying to tell us something is wrong. Anxiety is an animal impulse and we are animals. Information is communicated to us in a variety of ways, and there are those with power who are trying to influence the influx of that communication and thus change the outcome. But our anxiety says something is wrong. Our anxiety is trying to help us.

But we are also not just animals. Our sapience brings with us a power of its own to identify and analyze the information around us. Look at the ways those in power try to stifle us: by overwhelming us with information, and by creating divides in the ways we ultimately interpret that information. We have a responsibility to use our sapience to manage this information entropy they are inflicting upon us and to create interactive communities in which we keep in mind one thing: we are in this together.

I have always seen my life as that of clinging to a rock hurtling through space, clinging on for dear life to not be thrown off. But that is not the truth. The truth is I stand and I walk along the earth, and it is only by keeping in mind that the forces around us are tangible, predictable, and ultimately possible to overcome, that I am able to keep from falling into the sky. But first, we have to understand why the world around us is like it is.

(I highly recommend Power: A Radical View (2005) by Steven Lukes, and The Fourth Face of Power by Peter Digeser)