In 1601, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, asked Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to stage the play Richard II at the Globe Theatre. This was done in the wake of an attempted coup against Queen Elizabeth. The intent was to stir anti-monarchical sentiment by depicting the overthrow of a weak king. The rebellion, however, did not succeed, and Devereux was executed.
House of Cards, the series starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, is a brilliant depiction of power-hungry politicians at the helm of the White House and their maneuvers to stay in power. Borgen, the Danish series, is a masterpiece of political intrigue and the backstage machinations of decision-making.
Political fiction is a powerful tool to evoke ideas—which is probably why it is often one of the first things to disappear when politicians begin to wield power beyond party politics. It’s difficult to imagine these series being produced today in China, Russia, or Turkey, for example. They show a side of politics that is too real—of course dramatized, but still a representation of the inner workings of politics that most people only glimpse through news coverage.
Russia has Roman Bolyaev, who produced The Last Minister but left the country when the war in Ukraine started. Türkiye produced the series Valley of the Wolves, which, although it makes references to Turkish politics and corruption, does so by blaming a powerful mafia that infiltrated the state—rather than the state itself.
Of course, that is not to say there are no Chinese, Russian, or Turkish political dramas—there might be—but to my knowledge, none depict the current political climate as a ruthless set of ambitious individuals willing to do almost anything to stay in power. Such portrayals would not reflect well on the current governments.
Let’s propose a few loglines for future productions:
An ex-KGB agent rises to power, promising to fight the mafia that has taken over the state, but ends up creating his own to maintain control.
A Communist Party leader takes over a developing economy and pushes it to become the world’s largest, while he becomes its de facto king.
An idealistic young politician rises to power and changes a country, but in the process, compromises the ideals he started with.
I think these loglines would make for pretty good series that will never be made—at least not in the countries where they are set.
The reason I believe they will not be made is not just because censorship exists in these countries and not in liberal democracies. Censorship exists everywhere, one way or another. The reason is that in these countries, politics—not party politics—matters far more than in Western liberal democracies. Governments hold more power than their liberal counterparts, and I believe this is because there is no true division of powers in these countries.
I am not speaking about the theoretical division of power into three branches—the judiciary, the legislative, and the executive—which constitutions establish. This division, though ideal on paper, is difficult to maintain in reality, and most authoritarian regimes claim to uphold it. I am speaking about the division between political power and financial power. If we leave ideology aside (with perhaps a few exceptions), this is the main difference between governments today. When financial and political power are unified, the state’s reach becomes far more extensive.
Trump knows this—or at least his team does—which is why he has been campaigning against Jerome Powell to try to remove him. The issue isn’t just that the Fed’s policies don’t align with his own—it’s about who controls financial power and economic policy.
Varoufakis describes it like this:
In the United States, there’s a war happening—not just a class war but also an intra-capitalist war between the cloud capital owners of Silicon Valley and Wall Street. Wall Street will never allow people like Zuckerberg, Musk, or Apple to steal their financial rents—they’d “nuke” them if necessary. That’s why there’s no app like WeChat in the West. It’s not because the West can’t develop a free payment system like WeChat, but because Wall Street wouldn’t allow it, and Wall Street controls the central bank. This isn’t the case in China.
What Varoufakis is pointing out is that in the US, Europe, England, Canada, and the West in general, banking and financial power are separate from political power. In China, this is different. The central bank is government-controlled, not independent. The country’s largest banks are state-owned. The state directly invests in private projects. There are private banks and financiers, but they don’t control the system.
In the US, the Federal Reserve resists political pressure, but its leadership seems to have been cognitively captured by the banking industry. In Europe and the UK, central banks operate independently of the government. The ECB, which rules over them, is, to all intents and purposes, an independent entity free from political control. The largest banks and investment funds (e.g., JPMorgan, BlackRock) are private. Financial power and financial policymaking are not in politicians’ hands. As Varoufakis continues:
Smart people in Washington DC realize China has a fantastic advantage because of this merger of cloud capital and finance—what I call “cloud finance,” which can’t happen in the US due to the war between financial and cloud capital. China’s political economy allows seamless integration.
“China’s political economy allows seamless integration” because politics and finance are already merged, unlike in the West. The mantra there is “laissez-faire,” which is very good—except when the one saying it holds the unique privilege of creating money out of nothing. And everyone wants that privilege. Then it can turn a bit sour.
The conflict Varoufakis mentions isn’t new either. It could be argued that it was among the key motives behind most revolutions, including France’s Revolution in 1789: when a new wealthy class becomes conscious of its power, it seeks to reshape the established order. That’s why Silicon Valley aligns with the Trump administration and why Trump is trying to influence Fed policy. Silicon Valley wants its seat at the table, and Trump’s administration wants control—at least a degree of it—over finance.
China’s real advantage over the US—and what others (like Russia, with more success than Turkey) try to imitate—is the merger of political and financial power. This gives the state unprecedented influence over its citizens, and when combined with technological advancements, it creates a Leviathan unlike anything we have seen before.
That’s why series like House of Cards or Borgen—which offer an uncanny look at politics—won’t be made in countries where financial and political power have merged. In those places, politics matters too much, and the reality of it surpasses fiction.
