Might manufactures the terms of political possibility rather than merely being right

Evidence

But as duplicitous and dirty-handed as the Palestinian patriarch turned out, and however rhetorically insistent concerning Israel’s denial and demise, it is a whole lot more difficult, it would seem, to activate denial of the existence of one whose semi-automatic is at your nose than it is to insist that a stateless people, a nation of refugees from – while on – its own land, has no rights. It is not that might makes right in this case, if any; it is that might manufactures the conditions and parameters, the terms, of political, and by extension historical and representational, possibility. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 573

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A sharp reformulation of the ‘might makes right’ cliché: power doesn’t claim moral justness, it dictates what can even be thought or represented politically.
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ essay — the asymmetry of who can deny whose existence and the machinery that manufactures political possibility parallels how ritual power stabilizes entrenched hierarchies.
• XREF: connects to: Ideas, not vested interests, ultimately shape political possibility. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 136; Capitalist realism defines politically possible options, which diverge from physical realities