The photographs from Addis Ababa were met in Western capitals with the usual predictable smirks. There was Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, ushering his civilian cabinet—men and women accustomed to crisp Italian tailoring, climate-controlled boardrooms, and the bloodless arithmetic of policy briefs—into fatigues, forcing them to crawl through the red dirt, shoulder rifles, and submit to the bark of drill instructors. The commentary arrived right on cue: theatrical, despotic, an absurd regression into martial kitsch. How terribly un-modern. How terribly African.
Yet I found myself asking an inconvenient question—the sort of question that makes polite dinner parties in Washington or London go suddenly quiet. When, precisely, did we decide that the people who govern us should be entirely exempt from physical reality?
Our own political landscape is choking on a peculiar breed of creature: the lifelong apparatchik. These are men and women who slid effortlessly from elite universities into think tanks, from congressional staffs into ministerial portfolios, without ever once having to lift something heavier than a committee report or face the visceral consequences of the state violence they so casually administer. They deploy armed agents of the state with a signature; they order police into streets, levy fines enforced by men with guns, and vote for foreign adventures whose body bags return to someone else’s hometown. They are clean, bloodless, and radically insulated.
To look at Abiy’s ministers sweating under a relentless sun is, of course, to witness political theater. I harbor no illusions about the Ethiopian regime’s brutal track record or the cynical optics of strongman populism. Abiy is playing to an ancient instinct, reminding a fractured nation that the state is, at bottom, a monopoly on force. But dismissing the spectacle as mere authoritarian pantomime allows us to avoid a far more damning reflection in our own mirror.
For the vast majority of human history—from the Athenian assembly to the Roman Senate, and indeed throughout early American republicanism—the right to rule was inextricably bound to the willingness to bleed. You did not vote for war if you had never smelled cordite; you did not manage the treasury if you held yourself superior to the common yeoman. Today, our technocratic class considers physical hardship an indignity reserved exclusively for the working classes they profess to pity. We are ruled by an aristocracy of spreadsheets.
Imagine, for a fleeting, glorious moment, if we applied this Ethiopian experiment to the West. Picture the European Commission forced to complete an obstacle course before drafting another sixty-page agricultural regulation. Imagine the White House cabinet enduring a week of basic training—digging their own latrines, eating cold rations, learning what physical exhaustion actually feels like—before debating defense authorizations or urban crime bills. Would they be worse administrators? It is difficult to see how. They might, however, acquire a virtue entirely absent from contemporary governance: humility.
Mud has a way of dissolving self-importance. A five-mile march in the rain does wonders for puncturing the delusion that human affairs can be entirely managed by algorithmic nudges and sanctimonious press releases. If power is ultimately physical—and no matter how many layers of digital abstraction we drape over it, the state remains fundamentally a mechanism of coercive force—then perhaps those who wield it ought to be reminded of its physical weight.
Let the commentators chuckle at Ethiopia’s boot-camp cabinet. I would trade a dozen polished undersecretaries who know how to parse a focus group for a single minister who has felt the gravel in his teeth and remembers that laws, in the end, are not written on paper, but on human bodies.
Cassius Wren