Realpolitik constantly endeavours to present an image of diversity and democracy by invoking geographical and cultural differences, as well as differences between electoral systems. However, a close dissection of the experiences of politicians who have come into conflict with this machinery of power from within reveals a single, bitter truth: when the internal dynamics of a power structure are flawed, justice is not served. Within such a structure, it makes no difference whether you are in Stockholm or Ottawa, London or Canberra; everywhere, realpolitik rests upon four fundamental pillars: lying, irresponsibility, immorality, and conspiracy.
These four characteristics are not isolated; rather, they function like the four walls of a single edifice. In each of the narratives presented in this treatise, one of these walls may be more clearly visible than the other three; however, the greater visibility of one characteristic does not signify the absence of the others. All four characteristics are present within one and the same structure: realpolitik.
To demonstrate this structural similarity, we shall briefly examine here the first-hand accounts of four senior politicians from four Western countries—politicians who attempted to resist the system’s departure from its proper course, only to encounter the same pattern of ‘character assassination and turning the critic into the problem’.
The purpose of naming these four politicians and examining the treatment they received—as reflected in their books—is not to defend them or to claim that they made no mistakes. Their greatest shared mistake was entering politics without the Wise Education demanded by the second paragraph of Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. None of them asked themselves before entering politics: Do I know how law ought to function? Do I understand the meaning of justice and its place in law?
These politicians entered realpolitik without wise knowledge, worked within it, and contributed to the survival of a structure to which they themselves ultimately fell victim. They then either left politics voluntarily or were forced to leave it. During their service to realpolitik, they caused harm both to themselves and to the people of their respective countries. Ultimately, the societies that had elected them were also compelled to pay the price of such choices.
1. Canada: Jody Wilson-Raybould – Lying versus the Law
Political Office: Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada (in Justin Trudeau’s government)
Jody Wilson-Raybould, born in 1971, was the first Indigenous person in Canadian history to serve as Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. Her book, Indian in the Cabinet: Speaking Truth to Power, is a disturbing account of how a politician committed to upholding the law confronted the inner core of power and the government’s public relations machine.
During the high-profile SNC-Lavalin affair, the Prime Minister and his inner circle, driven by political and electoral considerations, pressured Wilson-Raybould to intervene in a prosecutorial decision. Citing the independence of the Attorney General and the rule of law, she stood firm against these pressures. In January 2019, Wilson-Raybould was removed from her position as Minister of Justice and Attorney General and transferred to the Veterans Affairs portfolio—a transfer she herself regarded as a punitive response to her resistance in the SNC-Lavalin affair.
Once the affair became public, a series of damaging narratives and statements, based largely on information attributed to anonymous government sources, appeared in the media. She was portrayed as an uncooperative and difficult woman, lacking in team spirit and prone to causing trouble. Thus, instead of those responsible being held to account for the political pressure placed on the Attorney General, the minister committed to upholding the law was herself cast as the main problem. This narrative lays bare lying and irresponsibility at the highest level of politics: through the construction of media narratives, a structure that ought to safeguard the law seeks to divert public attention from the conduct of those in power to the character of the individual who stood up to them.
Wilson-Raybould resigned from the cabinet in February 2019 and was expelled from the Liberal Party caucus in April of the same year. In an August 2019 report, Canada’s Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner also concluded that Justin Trudeau had contravened the Conflict of Interest Act by attempting to influence her decision.
This book demonstrates how the power structure isolates a critic who insists that the law be upheld, targets her credibility by disseminating damaging narratives, drives her to resign from the cabinet, and ultimately expels her from the Liberal Party caucus.
2. Britain: Rory Stewart and the Collapse of Morality
Political Office: Cabinet Minister and Member of Parliament (Conservative Party)
In his book Politics on the Edge: A Memoir from Within, Rory Stewart, born in 1973, recounts his nearly ten years in Parliament, including his periods in government. He depicts a political system in which reality and the resolution of structural problems are pushed to the margins by opinion polls, public relations, media headlines and image management. Stewart shows how, within the Westminster system, politicians and bureaucrats devote much of their energy to producing appealing messages, announcing showpiece policies and concealing failures, rather than to confronting problems seriously.
In 2019, Stewart ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party, opposing Boris Johnson’s politics and leadership style. After Johnson became Prime Minister, Stewart, together with a group of Conservative MPs, opposed the government’s strategy of leaving the European Union without a deal. As a result, the Conservative whip was withdrawn from them, and Stewart was effectively removed from the parliamentary party in which he had served for years.
Stewart’s narrative is a clear manifestation of the collapse of morality within realpolitik: a structure in which loyalty to the leader and the preservation of power can take precedence over honesty, independent judgement and responsibility for the public interest. In such a system, dissent grounded in conscience and independent judgement is regarded not as an essential part of democratic politics, but as insubordination and a threat to the cohesion of the power structure.
The book portrays organisational silence, institutionalised cowardice, covert rivalries and the sacrifice of moral principles to political expediency. Politicians who fear the consequences of dissent remain silent, while those who refuse to surrender their judgement to party dictates are cast out of the power structure.
3. Australia: Julia Gillard and the Synergy between Intra-Party Conspiracy and Media Vilification
Political Office: Prime Minister of Australia
Julia Gillard was the first woman in Australia’s history to become Prime Minister, but her time in office became a gruelling battleground within her party and in the media. Gillard herself had succeeded Kevin Rudd through an intra-party leadership challenge in 2010—the very same mechanism of power that was used against her three years later. Her book, My Story, is an account of intra-party rivalry and hostility, the efforts of Kevin Rudd’s supporters to return him to the party leadership, and the relentless media pressure on Gillard’s government. During this period, the power struggle within the Labor Party and media attacks, particularly from sections of the media owned by Rupert Murdoch, reinforced one another and turned the political climate into a state of permanent crisis.
Gillard explains that her opponents, rather than confining the conflict to a critique of the government’s policies and decisions, also targeted her credibility and character. Leaks from within the government, the continual circulation of rumours about Kevin Rudd’s return, lobbying journalists and the persistent revival of the leadership crisis eroded the stability of her government. Alongside this power struggle, Gillard faced widespread sexist attacks—attacks that, instead of assessing her political performance, focused on her gender, appearance, private life and personal fitness for office.
This example reveals conspiracy within realpolitik not necessarily in the form of a formal and proven alliance among all her opponents, but through covert intra-party manoeuvring and its synergy with media vilification. Intra-party pressure, information leaks and the construction of media narratives worked together to destabilise Gillard’s government until, in a 2013 party-room ballot, she lost the party leadership and the premiership to Kevin Rudd.
4. Sweden: Märta Stenevi and Repressive Silence
Political Office: Member of Parliament and one of the two spokespersons for the Swedish Green Party
Märta Stenevi’s book Breathe. Survive. (Andas. Överlev.) completes the picture of this pattern. Stenevi, a Swedish Member of Parliament and former spokesperson for the Swedish Green Party, raises objections to structural problems, a lack of transparency and flawed decision-making processes within the party organisation. The system responded not by examining these criticisms openly and responsibly, but through organisational silence, anonymous accusations, leaks to the media and psychological pressure that ultimately drove Stenevi into submission and resignation.
Stenevi’s anonymous opponents portrayed her as a monster by feeding damaging stories to the Swedish media.
Stenevi, who had been elected as a party spokesperson by a majority of delegates at the Green Party congress, against the wishes of the party’s political and bureaucratic establishment, encountered obstruction from that same establishment. As she sought to resolve the party’s structural problems, the party bureaucracy turned her into the problem, branding her leadership “toxic”.
Märta Stenevi’s book brings the lying, irresponsibility, immorality and conspiracy of realpolitik into a single frame, revealing how this system isolates a politician seeking change, subjects her to pressure and ultimately forces her into submission and resignation.
Comparison and Conclusion: A Single Pattern of Suppression
Examining these four accounts from four corners of the developed world demonstrates that realpolitik is transnational and essentially uniform in nature. It makes no difference whether we are dealing with party structures in Britain and Canada, a power struggle in Australia, or a value-driven party in Sweden; whenever an individual identifies flaws within a structure and seeks to depart even slightly from the prescribed framework, the machinery of power responds in much the same way.
In this structure, lying replaces reasoned argument; irresponsibility is concealed behind unsigned letters, anonymous accusations and organisational silence; immorality manifests itself in character assassination and the psychological undermining of the critic; and conspiracy, through the interplay between intra-party bureaucracy and the media, completes the task of eliminating the dissident from politics.
The ultimate goal of realpolitik is to preserve political arrangements founded on domination. This structure seeks to enable those who command wealth and wield power to exercise control over society through the existing political system and under the cover of law. The votes and choices of the people are tolerated only insofar as they do not threaten the existing structure. Here, democracy and the rule of law are invoked not in their true sense, but as fine-sounding labels used to legitimise a structure that may, in practice, stand in conflict with the true content of those very concepts.
Any politician who enters realpolitik with a belief in genuine democracy and the genuine rule of law, and seeks to take their responsibilities seriously, will sooner or later face the same danger that these four politicians faced in four different countries.
By sacrificing such politicians and turning them into “the problem”, realpolitik diverts public attention away from demands for justice and structural reform, so that flawed power relations remain untouched and immune to reform.
However, studying these examples may also increase pessimism about the existing political system and deepen the sense of despair over the possibility of change. Such pessimism and despair can have two entirely opposing consequences: they may either disillusion individuals and drive them away from politics, or compel them to redefine the meaning of politics and reconstruct the political system.
1. Despair and the Tacit Acceptance of the Invincibility of realpolitik
Without an understanding of the philosophy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, examining the experiences of these politicians who fell victim to realpolitik can reinforce the underlying premise of the “It’s Like This Everywhere” fallacy. This generalisation may be descriptively accurate, but it does not negate humanity’s capacity to bring about change. Drawing on their collective wisdom, human beings can say—and put their words into practice—“Yes, this is how it has been until now, but it must not remain so.”
When individuals enter politics under the illusion that they can change the world by personal will alone, without Wise Education, and then fail, it is not only they themselves who leave politics as broken human beings; humanity’s capacity to bring about constructive change is also called into question in the public mind.
Studying any one of these four experiences may increase honest people’s fear of entering politics and deter them from approaching the machinery of power. When Märta Stenevi says to the bureaucrat who played a part in her resignation from political office:
“I’m resigning now, aren’t I? … I’m disappearing. You won.” [1]
This statement is not merely a declaration of that Green Party bureaucrat’s victory; at a deeper level, it is a declaration of realpolitik’s victory. It creates an image of the individual’s defeat in the face of the structure and a tacit admission of that structure’s invincibility—the very image that the entrenched core of the power structure seeks to cement in people’s minds, so that anyone considering challenging it will first contemplate the consequences of such a confrontation and hesitate to enter politics.
Realpolitik seeks to turn one individual’s defeat into a general conclusion: resistance is futile, reform is impossible and “it’s like this everywhere”. However, the failure of a politician to retain their position or implement their intended reforms does not mean that humanity has lost its capacity to bring about change. What fails is the attempt by an unprepared individual to confront a system that already has all its tools in place.
2. Wise Understanding and Conscious Confrontation with realpolitik
With an understanding of the philosophy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the benefit of wise knowledge, the wise individual is profoundly distrustful of realpolitik. They accept its pervasive presence as a reality and know they are facing a phenomenon that is extremely powerful and dangerous because of its four defining characteristics: lying, irresponsibility, immorality and conspiracy.
Unlike those who enter politics under the illusion that realpolitik will behave humanely, the wise individual knows that they are confronting an utterly ruthless system that adheres to no human principle. Yet the purpose of seeing and accepting these realities is not to fear realpolitik, but to confront it more effectively and dismantle its mechanisms of domination.
The wise individual knows that realpolitik leaves nothing to chance in maintaining its domination over humanity; therefore, neither should they. They know that lying, irresponsibility, immorality and conspiracy are always kept ready for use in realpolitik’s toolbox. Therefore, they too must keep truthfulness, responsibility, clear moral values and transparency ready for use in their own toolbox.
These are not merely defensive tools to be used when realpolitik attacks—that is, truthfulness against lying, responsibility against irresponsibility, clear moral values against immorality, and transparency against conspiracy. The wise individual must use truthfulness, responsibility, clear moral values and transparency to mount a sustained and conscious attack on realpolitik.
Providing clear definitions and demanding that realpolitik provide its own definitions of concepts such as democracy, law, justice and peace—which it constantly invokes—forces that system off the offensive and onto the defensive. Realpolitik loves ambiguity, secrecy and conspiracy, and is terrified of transparency, precise definitions and accountability.
The wise individual accepts that injustice exists everywhere, while simultaneously declaring that it must not remain so. They possess both a reasoned explanation of the present destructive state of affairs and an exit strategy for moving beyond it.
These four narratives are not stories of the defeat of four individuals; they are four warnings about one and the same structure. The purpose of studying them is not to frighten honest people away from politics, but to put an end to the practice of entering politics without Wise Education. Honesty, good intentions and personal will alone, without Wise Education, are insufficient to confront realpolitik.
Realpolitik remains victorious as long as individuals, acting separately and without preparation, enter a power structure whose internal arrangements are set against justice, under the illusion that it can easily be reformed. The way to end this domination is not merely to replace those who occupy positions of power; the internal relations and mechanisms of the power structure must themselves be reconstructed.
This change begins with Wise Education—an education that prepares individuals to understand law, grasp justice, demand responsibility and reconstruct politics. The ubiquitous presence of realpolitik is not proof of its permanence. What has existed everywhere until now must not remain everywhere forever.
[1] The original Swedish reads: “Jag avgår ju nu? .. Jag försvinner. Du vann.”