The Machiavellian ideal, Militant democracy and Biden’s pardon
Georgia, Romania, and the USA — why is Machiavelli so fascinating? And what does he have to do with defending democracy from its enemies?
Isaiah Berlin, the Riga-born philosopher best known for his Two Concepts of Liberty, said it came down to his identification of two separate moral codes, one Christian, and private, the other pagan and civic,
What he institutes…is a differentation between two incompatible ideals of life, and therefore two moralities. One is the morality of the Pagan world…against this universe stands in the first and foremost place Christian morality.
This is from The Originality of Machiavelli, and I’ll have more to say about those two moralities, in another piece, because of the way they play into the radicalism of the contemporary right, but here I want to bring out the Machiavellian ideal and ask whether its absence has made the west relatively defenceless against demagogues.
Machiavelli thought a statesman’s main aim was the glory of his state (he wrote in the sixteenth century, but was sexist even by the standards of the time). Not peace or standard of living, or, necessarily liberty of its subjects, though he thought the two were normally connected, but greatness and success, in competition with others. Your state should be admired — but also able to defend itself from covetous neighbours.
And this glory was public — it wasn’t about being a good husband, or father or decent in his relations with his friends: choosing a public life came with public obligations, and a moral cost, at least if measured against the standards of private (Christian) morality.
Yet, different though it may have been from private morality, the moral code of public life was no less stringent. He condemns sloth, corruption, avarice, pointless cruelty, and the amassing of power for its own sake. The Prince is a manual for the new man who takes a corrupt state and wants to remake a better one out of its ruins (here Machiavelli appeals to the entrepreneurs and disruptors of our age) but the objective for which the blood is to be shed has to be the making of another great, public, good: a republic. He doesn’t think hereditary rule can last more than three generations.
Here Machiavelli departs from the crooks and thieves our demagogues become. The state isn’t a piggy bank to be looted or a private market whose spoils become the property of the office holder. He stood against the rent-seeking “stationary bandits” whose avarice was as much a sign of weakness as Christian pacifism would be.
An aspect of greatness for Machiavelli is the attitude of militant democracy: being able to seize opportunities as they present themselves, to preserve the republic even when they might depart from the formalism of fair play. An example is the Romanian president’s astute reaction to anti-NATO Calin Giorgescu’s surprise first round win. Raising the spectre of cyberattacks, together with a losing candidate’s suit for a recount, galvanised the electorate in the parliamentary elections held a week later. Turnout jumped 20 points compared to the last parliamentary vote, while the far right share was around five per cent less than in the first round of the presidential elections.
A greater hero is Georgia’s president Salome Zourabichvili, fighting to her last breath against the thugs in thrall to pro-Russian oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvilli who took power in parliament after a rigged election in October. As the police beat Georgian protesters demanding freedom from corrupt Russian influence, and break Georgia’s constitution by calling off EU membership negotiations she takes her people’s case to the world and does what she can to restrain security forces under the control of the rigged parliamentary majority.
The contrast with the United States couldn’t be clearer. It doesn’t lie in the evil of democracy’s enemies, but the moral weakness of its supporters. Biden stayed too long in office, preventing the Democratic Party having a primary to choose a new leader able to beat Trump; now he pardoned his son. It was the act of a good father, protecting his son from prison, but of a bad president. Biden picked private morality over the public at just the moment when Americans need the example a good president provides — because they won’t have one for the next four years.
Machiavelli makes the “detestable tyrant” Caesar the villain of his Discourses on Livy, but tars those who lacked the strength of character to defeat him, as much of the blame as his actively corrupt supporters.