By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
February 20, 2023
In his
great but now neglected 1943 book The Machiavellians: Defenders of
Freedom, James Burnham—also author of The Managerial Revolution and
an important early figure at National Review—argues that Niccolò
Machiavelli, the famous and infamous Florentine political theorist, is
misunderstood. Burnham insists that Machiavelli wrote about politics in an
amoral way not because he was an amoralist but because he was attempting to
apply something like the scientific method to the study of politics. In
Burnham’s estimate, the moral prescriptivists in politics are something like a
doctor who tries to treat cancer by expressing his disapproval of cancer,
whereas Machiavelli, to extend the metaphor, was more like an oncologist
attempting to understand how the disease actually works. Though he was himself
a republican, Machiavelli addressed his most famous advice to The
Prince, both because princes were what were available to him and because he
believed that his own political project, the unification of Italy, could be
achieved only by monarchical means. Burnham asserts:
Science limits the function of goals or aims. The goals themselves are
not evidence; they cannot be allowed to distort facts or the correlations among
facts. The goals express our wishes, hopes, or fears. They therefore prove
nothing about the facts of the world. No matter how much we may wish to cure a
patient, the wish has nothing to do with the objective analysis of his
symptoms, or a correct prediction of the probable course of the disease, or an
estimate of the probable effects of a medicine. If our aim is peace, this does
not entitle us, from the point of view of science, to falsify human nature and
the facts of social life in order to pretend to prove that “all men naturally
desire peace,” which, history so clearly tells us, they plainly do not. If we
are interested in an equalitarian democracy, this cannot be a scientific excuse
for ignoring the uninterrupted record of natural social inequality and
oppression.
For
Burnham, sentimentality is a species of dishonesty. The term
“political science” is a misleading one—the study of politics is not a science,
and “political science” belongs to the great catalog of pretentious
pseudosciences and newfangled “-ologies” such as “social science” and
“sociology,” part of the great 19th century linguistic
inflation that gave us terms such as “social worker.” Nevertheless, it is
worthwhile to aspire to a style of inquiry and analysis that is, as the word is
used by Burnham, scientific. (I suppose “economic science” is
useful for distinguishing what Paul Krugman did from what Paul Krugman does.)
Burnham’s “scientific” cast of mind is certainly a welcome palate cleanser for
the early 21st century reader of political journalism, who is
force-fed a diet of pure high-grade hooey like a goose being subjected to gavage,
a nasty process that at least has the benefit of producing foie gras. (Modern
American political discourse produces an entirely different kind of animal
product.) Burnham stated his ambitions plainly in the subtitle of The
Managerial Revolution—he wanted to communicate “what is happening in the
world.” Machiavelli, he argued, wasn’t the wicked schemer in the caricature—he
was more like something somewhere between a responsible reporter and an honest
academic.
In that
spirit—and as the 2024 presidential election gets dreadfully under way in
earnest—it is a good time for a little Burnham-and-Machiavelli-inspired look at
“what is happening in the world,” or in our little corner of it.
For
Machiavelli, the study of politics is the study of men competing for power. It
is not that these men competing for power do not have morals, principles,
ideologies, religions, fine aspirations, or any of the other transcendent
possessions that we treat as imparting worthiness to politics—but Machiavelli
simply was not studying these except insofar as they entered into his main
field of inquiry. Think of it like economics: The economic factors at work in
the business of producing and selling pornography or manufacturing Kool-Aid are
very much like the economic factors at work in the business of printing and
selling Bibles or manufacturing baby formula, but, if economics is what we are
talking about, we don’t have to interrupt ourselves every five minutes to
remind everybody that we prefer Bibles or baby formula to pornography or
Kool-Aid.
Behind
all of the Kulturkampf angst and wailing, all the talk about
gun control, critical race theory, Christian nationalism, abortion, Elon Musk,
climate change, and every other creaky politico-cultural fault in the United
States, there is a contest for power. The people who generally clump together
under the tendency of progressivism are not all college-educated, high-income,
urban and suburban professionals, but those well-off people are the heart and
soul of progressive politics and of the Democratic Party—more to the point,
they hold most of the associated political and economic power. College-educated
urban professionals do pretty well economically, socially, and politically, but
they do not hold as much political and social power as they think they should.
While
Gallup typically finds Democrats enjoying a small advantage in
party-identification (three percentage points in the most recent poll) that
modest advantage typically disappears or even reverses itself once independents
(who, on paper, outnumber both Democrats and Republicans) are pressed on the
issue. But, as Democrats are happy to point out, no Republican has won a majority
of the total vote in a presidential election in a generation—come the next
presidential election, it will have been 20 years.
Presidents
George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 not only failed to win
majorities, they were elected while winning fewer overall votes than the
Democrats running against them. (It is easy to make too much out of this, of
course: If we had direct, popular elections for president, then Republican
candidates and voters in big states such as California probably would behave
differently than they do now.) The last Democrat to win the presidency without
winning more total votes than his opponent nationally was Grover Cleveland.
But the
fight over the Electoral College is not only about control of the White House.
It is symbolic of progressives’ broader frustration at their ability to secure
what they believe to be their rightful place in society. Democrats and
progressivism prevail in almost every major U.S. city, in the media, in the
elite universities, at the commanding heights of business (Silicon Valley, Wall
Street, Hollywood), etc. If you are a Democrat, you can graduate from a good
law school, go to work for a big technology company, volunteer on a bar
association committee, publish a bestselling book, and do interviews with
the New York Times and the Washington Post about
it without ever having to worry about running into a Republican in the course
of any of that business. But Democrats’ political power falls short of the
progressive elite’s social and economic power.
Democrats
prevail in the cities, where the people are, and they especially prevail where
the money is: The economic output of the average House district represented by
a Democrat is almost 50 percent more than that of the average
Republican-represented House district, and the difference is growing: In 2008,
the average outputs of Democratic and Republican districts were $35.7 billion and
$33.2 billion, respectively—but, 10 years later, the Democratic average had
swelled to $48.5 billion, while the Republican average dropped a bit to $32.6
billion.
Conservatives
who have a little bit of imagination might be able to appreciate, against their
natural inclination, how it is that progressives feel entitled to
political power and social status.
But the
American constitutional order is non-majoritarian in many important ways and
anti-majoritarian in others; and, contrary to all that talk about “oligarchy”
from Sen. Sanders, the United States’ federal character makes it effectively
impossible to purchase a national consensus—ask Michael Bloomberg how much
money he has wasted trying to export New York progressive priorities to the
rest of the country by means of various political projects. And so, even with
all that money and power, and even with typically bigger turnout on Election
Day, even with Harvard and the New York Times, Democrats still
couldn’t get Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court over the brass-fortified
obstruction of a single wily parliamentarian from Kentucky. They cannot prevail
on the matters of gun rights or abortion, or on many other political issues.
They do not win as many presidential elections as they expect to. As a social
matter, they cannot keep Donald Trump off of Twitter, they cannot impose the
wide-ranging speech restrictions they would prefer, and they cannot even get
MSNBC’s ratings above Fox News’ ratings. They cannot confidently vote themselves a
multibillion-dollar bonus in the form of student-loan forgiveness. They are having scant luck telling
red-staters what kinds of cars to drive. They couldn’t make Ghosterbusterettes happen, much less Barack
Obama’s post-presidential career as a saccharine documentarian.
Democrats
are something like the crown prince waiting around for the king to finally die.
They stand ready to inherit the kingdom and have big ideas about what they want
to do with it, but they have not yet arrived at the state to which they aspire
and that they feel is rightfully theirs. Republicans are in the opposite
position, strongest in those places that have been economically bypassed (those
former Rust Belt factory towns) or socially eclipsed (small towns and rural
areas). Both parties appeal to well-off people, but in different ways:
Democrats do best among high-income people in high-income places (finance
workers in Manhattan, tech workers in Palo Alto) whereas Republicans do well
among high-income people in relatively low-income areas (farmers, rural and exurban
business owners); both parties also have low-income constituencies sharply
divided by race, sex, religion, and geography. Both parties are characterized
by self-interested elites that practice perverse and often hypocritical
patron-client politics: Well-heeled big-city Democrats will fight against
school choice for poor African Americans while exercising their own choice to
select private schools for their own children and go to great lengths to
immunize their own neighborhoods from crime and vagrancy; Republican tribunes
of the plebs will do whatever it takes to fight drugs, short of demanding
personal responsibility out from nice white people, and they care a great deal about
industrial jobs they’d never dream of seeing their own children take. Each
party knows that its best friend on Election Day is the revulsion its partisans
will feel for the other party.
And it
is revulsion—hence the dream of separation. It is natural to seek to separate
ourselves from that which we find revolting. It may be necessary to dress up
the elimination of effective opposition as a defense of “democracy,” the times
being what they are. But the program remains the same. From Nathan Newman in The
Nation:
Twice in the past 20 years, a GOP candidate who lost the popular vote
took the presidency—and 2020 came uncomfortably close to making it the third
time. A minority of the population
controlled the Senate for
the past six years, during which, in combination with a minority-elected
president, it packed the Supreme Court with a supermajority of Republican
justices. Our current constitutional arrangements are not just undemocratic;
they starve blue states financially, deny human rights to their residents, and
repeatedly undermine local policy innovation.
Given the undemocratic power of the Senate to entrench its own minority
rule, the threat of secession is the only viable route to restoring democracy
and equal justice, not just for blue-state residents but for Americans in all
50 states who are hurt by our undemocratic political system.
Covid-19 has transformed an ongoing political irritant into a murderous
political indifference that we can no longer ignore.
Democrats
are rarely more honest about their actual political complaints than when they
kvetch about blue states “subsidizing” or “bailing out” red states. (Never mind
that this is a nonsense claim in many ways and, to the extent that it is true
at all, it is the result of progressive policies, namely a highly progressive
income tax and welfare programs.) The poor and nonwhite Americans whose votes
give political power to rich white progressives should take note about what
that complaint really means. For example: Progressives like to point to
Mississippi as a red-state basket case. (And never mind that Mississippi was
governed almost exclusively by Democrats until approximately 15 minutes ago.)
It is true that Mississippi has a much higher poverty rate than does, say,
Oregon. But: Mississippi has a lower white
poverty rate than Oregon does, and Mississippi has about the same black
poverty rate as Oregon does, and in both states African Americans suffer much higher poverty rates
than whites, but Mississippi is 38 percent black and Oregon is 2 percent black.
Mississippi has a lower white poverty rate than Maine does and
a lower black poverty rate than Maine does, too, but
Mississippi’s poverty rate is almost twice that of Maine, where there are about
four black residents. The black populations of rich, progressive cities such as
San Francisco have plummeted over the years. Progressives may turn their noses
up at suburban gated communities, but they live behind gates, too—invisible
gates made of money and degrees and 800-plus FICO scores. Of course that has
implications that touch race (and immigration, and education, and much more) as
much as wealth and income. For these progressives, diversity is a byword, not a
lifestyle.
The
red-state/blue-state dynamic is complicated by the fact that most “red” states
and most “blue” states are, as a matter of political geography, almost exactly
alike: The cities are strongly Democratic, the rural areas are overwhelmingly
Republican, and the suburbs get more Democratic the closer they are to town and
more Republican the closer they are to the countryside. The poor people who
give Mississippi its relatively high poverty rate and its well-peopled welfare
rolls are, disproportionately, not exactly classic Republican voters. (Not
since the 1930s, anyway.) The difference is in the urban-rural mix and in the
character of the suburbs—subtract Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, and no Democratic
presidential candidate has a shot in Pennsylvania; conversely, if the rest of
Texas becomes a little more like Houston or Dallas, Republicans can forget
about it.
The
political and social situation of blue cities in red states is politically
complicated: Of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates today, eight
are in states that voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but none of those cities is
Republican-led, and they are, on average, 54 percent African American. When
Republicans point to out-of-control crime, they are largely pointing to urban
failures in Republican-controlled states. (Yes, there are a lot of Democratic
mayors and city councils in those states, but Mike DeWine understands that his jurisdiction does not
exclude Cleveland.)
When Democrats point to relatively low federal tax bills and relatively high
welfare outlays for residents of red states, they are highlighting the failure
of progressive policies and Democratic governance going back nearly a century,
especially with regard to racial disparities in education, income, and wealth. In
that way, each party uses the shortcomings of its own policies to delegitimize,
discredit, and pathologize the other. In many cases, that is only another way
of instrumentalizing African Americans in the service of well-off white people
and their parochial interests.
We have
been here before. We are, in a sense, always here.
In 1957,
William F. Buckley Jr. wrote a now-infamous editorial in National
Review in defense of the efforts of white Southerners to keep African
Americans from voting. Buckley’s racial rhetoric was regrettable, and he regretted it, but his anti-majoritarian
sentiment was much more intense than any racial feeling to which he gave voice.
While insisting that the South “must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness
to preserve the Negro as a servile class,” he argued that the “White community
in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,
politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate
numerically. … The White community is so entitled because, for the time being,
it is the advanced race. … If the majority wills what is socially atavistic,
then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is
more important for any community anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by
civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of numerical majority.”
It is
worth noting and emphasizing here that in the phrase “such measures as are
necessary to prevail” included, by Buckley’s own admission in the
piece, political
violence, which goes a good deal further than we could dismiss with, “Well,
those were different times”; on the other hand, the notion that African
Americans required “advancement” was hardly controversial at all, and neither
was that way of putting it, which was explicit in the name of the era’s premier
civil-rights organization.
We don’t
talk or—thank God, actually think—that way about race very much
anymore, and Buckley’s anti-majoritarianism has gone so far out of fashion that
members of elites are embarrassed to admit that they are any such thing while
activists with distinctly minority vanguardist or special-interest agendas feel
compelled to invent masses of popular supporters. (Ask Sen. Rubio and he’ll
tell you that the American people demand, as with one voice,
federal subsidies that keep sugar billionaires from being reduced to the
degraded state of sugar hectomillionaires.) But it seems to me that we are
nowhere near to having given up the view that the advanced people (not a race,
but a supposedly meritocratic elite) are entitled to take such measures as are
necessary to prevent the predominance of atavistic policies.
To
heighten the impression of atavism is, in fact, the reason our politicians deal
almost exclusively in caricature and communicate almost exclusively in cliché.
When somebody denounces Mitt Romney as a fascist, what they are really saying is
only: “My people are entitled to take such measures as are necessary to
prevail, politically and culturally, because we are the advanced people.”
Burnham
quotes one of his Machiavellians, Vilfredo Pareto, observing: “Whether certain
theorists like it or not, the fact is that human society is not a homogeneous
thing, that individuals are physically, morally, and intellectually different.
… Of that fact, therefore, we have to take account. And we must also take
account of another fact: that the social classes are not entirely distinct,
even in countries where a caste system prevails.” In the contemporary political
project, a great deal of effort is put into denying the differences among
individuals (“You can be anything you want!”) while exaggerating the
distinctions between social classes. Partisans believe in absolute political
equality, and they also believe that half of the country absolutely must be
ruthlessly stripped of political power and social status.
Burnham
may not have the readership he should, but somebody has been
reading Machiavelli.
The
infamous Florentine himself might possibly blush at contemporary Democrats
railing against “privilege” and demanding “social justice” in the service of a
political agenda that calls for—if we may be plain about it—giving rich people
more power, and in particular investing even more political power and social
status in the most affluent people in the most affluent communities. And that
really is what is at the heart of our current political situation: The ruling
class rules, but not as robustly or as unopposedly as its members feel
themselves entitled to rule.
So put
that in your pipe and smoke it, Gaetano Mosca.
Also
…
The Trotskyist writer Joseph Hansen reviewed The
Machiavellians under the headline, “A Shamefaced Apologist for
Fascism.” Well. The review is worth reading if only for such fools’ gold as
this: “Marxism has proved theoretically (and partially in practice in the
Soviet Union) that world economy, freed from [the] fetters of capitalism, will
develop such prodigious productivity as to finally liquidate the age-old
scarcity which has given rise to class divisions.” My recollection is that is …
not what happened in the Soviet Union.
Reinhold
Niebuhr reviewed The Machiavellians in The Nation.
That was a different era of political journalism.
Economics
for English Majors
Does
Wall Street hate working stiffs? Demagogues insist that Wall Street does, and
one sometimes—sometimes, almost—sees why.
“Why a Strong Economy Is Making Stock
Investors Jittery,”
reads the New York Times headline. Shouldn’t a strong economy
be good for the stock market? In the long run, yes, of course.
But in the short run—and we mostly live in the short run!—stock investors are
worried that continuing signs of unusual strength in the labor market will
persuade the Federal Reserve that further anti-inflation action is required.
That means higher interest rates, and higher interest rates mean less economic
activity—that is what they are supposed to achieve, anyway. If it gets more
expensive to access money, then people spend less, businesses invest less, new
projects and lines of production don’t get launched and nobody has to be hired
to do that work, etc. Everything slows down a little bit (or a lot if the Fed
gets it wrong), demand slackens, and prices go down, breaking the cycle of
inflation.
There is
a popular impression—and a rhetoric—that insists that the stock market and
financial instruments are distinct from the “real economy,” and that finance is
essentially a parasite of the “real economy.” There are times when it is useful
to draw a distinction between the production of physical goods and services,
retailing, transportation, etc., and the construction and exchange of financial
instruments, but it is easy to make too much of this, too. Populists left and
right love to heap scorn upon “financialization,” but populist economic claims
are so reliably daft that categorical skepticism is appropriate.
Financial
instruments (and financial services in general) give us a way to put prices on
things that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to price, and they allow
us to create (or extract) value from situations and services that would
otherwise go unrealized. This has played an invaluable role in building the
modern “real” economy. Modern financial services really begin in earnest with
international shipping—Lloyd’s of London got its start as a kind of
clearinghouse for marine insurance. In the earliest days of global trade,
transaction costs were very high, and investors who put their fortunes into
financing commercial voyages (or borrowed money to do so) could be entirely
ruined by a single disaster at sea. Marine insurance gave traders a way to
hedge their bets, and this most assuredly had a profound effect on the “real
economy”—with insurance, there was a radical increase in the real economic
value of a great many ships, commodities, manufactures, etc., because moving those
things great distances was more practical and economical with insurance. But
what insurers sell isn’t a tangible good—what they sell is the service of
taking on a portion of your financial risk in exchange for a premium.
Because
modern finance can be so arcane and opaque, it is easy for demagogues to claim
that private-equity firms and investment banks and the like do not create any
real value. This ignores a great deal of easily observable reality—for example,
the fact that Goldman Sachs has customers, and that these customers
are not coerced into doing business with Goldman Sachs but
find value in the services they choose to pay for. These are, for the most
part, financially sophisticated parties—perhaps it is the case that they are
better positioned to judge the value that financial services firms create for
them than Sen. Warren is, in spite of her illustrious career as an author of
dopey get-rich self-help books with such titles as All Your Worth: The
Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan.
A big
part of finance is the exchange of risk. What that means, in practical terms,
is the transfer of some risk from a party that cannot afford to bear it in its
entirety to a party that can afford to bear it—for a price. We understand this
intuitively when it comes to health insurance, but, for some reason, many
Americans grow skeptical of it when it comes to securities. Of course finance
can be done corruptly or, possibly worse, incompetently (see the unpleasant
events of 2007-08) but so can brain surgery or teaching kindergarten. If you
want to understand what is actually happening, you could do worse than to begin
by asking what it is that the people who are paying are getting for their
money, or what they think they are getting.
Without
financial services, there’d be a good deal less “real economy” out there to
enjoy.
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