While on a trip to Israel reporters asked Milton Friedman to explain “the whole Torah” of economics while standing on one foot. Friedman simply said, “There is no such thing as a free lunch, and all the rest is merely an explanation.”

Taking this as a point of departure we may speculate as follows: If reporters had asked Niccolo Machiavelli about the “Torah” of politics he might have held up one foot and said, “Politics is about gaining and holding power, and all the rest is merely explanation.” If Robert Michels were asked to comment further, he might have explained that democracy is merely another way of organizing oligarchy. Americans are taught to regard democracy as a good and noble thing, but democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The authors of the U.S. Constitution feared democracy, even as the ancients called it the worst form of government. Democracy is only one element in a “mixed” constitution in which powers are checked and balanced. The power of the many should never be absolute. The fathers of a country, the aristocrats and senators, must have the strength to say “no” to the people. The malcontents will cry foul and bitterly complain of an elite conspiracy. Yet oligarchy is not a conspiracy.

Machiavelli tells us that the populace, “misled by false appearance of advantage, often seeks its own ruin, and is easily lead by splendid hopes and rash promises.” In Book One (secton 53) of his Discourses, he explains how the Roman populace sought to aggrandize itself by moving into the houses and buildings of a wealthier town that had surrendered to them. The senate was against such a move, and many senators would have preferred to die than go along with the plan. Machiavelli thought that two things were noteworthy about this episode: “First of all, the populace, misled by the false appearance of good, often seeks its own ruin, and, unless it be brought to realize what is bad and what is good for it by someone in whom it has confidence, brings on republics endless dangers and disasters.”

The dominance of the few over the many (in a republic) need not be viewed as an evil circumstance. It is, in fact, unavoidable and natural. In our time, as in Machiavelli’s, the decisive question is not oligarchy or democracy. The decisive question is, “Which oligarchy is best?” Do we prefer the clerical oligarchy of the Islamists, the technocratic oligarchy of the scientific socialists or the market oligarchy of capitalism? Leadership belongs to a small elite in every nation, and this elite must stand against national insanity. In the case of America today, the people want endless credit. They want prosperity uninterrupted by the natural cycle of boom and bust.

Sadly, when a republic falls into decadence, the madness of the people may be rivaled by the madness of the leaders. Group insanity can overtake elites, especially when democracy has become a catchword. In this regard, what could be more insane than putting the masses in charge of the state? The ancients warned that democracies were always subject to demagogues who held power by making extravagant promises. In a gross materialist age, when mad promises are routinely made to the people (and even more outrageously, when the treasury is emptied in a vain attempt to keep these promises), then normal people naturally find themselves horrified by the “political process.” 

Unless political power is strictly limited by custom and tradition, it proves to be a dangerous thing – harmful in every respect to those who possess it. Here we must use caution. Stripped of custom and tradition, power is sinister, dangerous to life and limb, and often ruinous to those who grasp for it. Add to this the fact that misfits and madmen always seem to be reaching for power, either for personal vanity or in the name of an aberrant cause (chosen from a freakish and numberless array). The true believer seeks from power what he lacks within. Therefore, to contain the true believes and madmen of politics one must find a proper outlet for them. According to Jonathan Swift’s “A Digression Concerning Madness” there are two main branches of insanity. The first is annoying to society, and the second is useful to society. Swift says that when someone is found “tearing his straw in piece-meal, swearing and blaspheming, biting his grate, foaming at the mouth, and emptying his piss-pot in the spectators’ faces” it is time to “give him a regiment of dragoons….” If another fellow is sputtering, gaping, bawling in a sound without period or article” then make him a lawyer. If we find yet another “in much deep conversation with himself, biting his thumbs at proper junctures, his countenance checkered with business and design, sometimes walking very fast, with his eyes nailed to a paper that he holds in his hands; a great saver of time, somewhat thick of hearing, very short of sight, but more of memory; a man ever in haste, a great hatcher and breeder of business, and excellent at the famous art of whispering nothing … so ready to give his word to everybody, that he never keeps it; one that has forgot the common meaning of words, but an admirable retainer of the sound” – then his talents may be used in politics (within carefully prescribed limits).

To seek and hold political power is to seek something that distorts self-conception, enlarging the ego as it corrupts the brain. Ideology further adds to the existing madness of politics. In the “good old days” the parties were ideologically similar. Today, they increasingly represent opposites. A disagreement over fundamental ideas has taken hold over many decades, and it grows like a cancer. On its side, the truth remains silent and mysterious, unable to make itself heard in an arena full of noise and rationalization. Every partisan imagines that his party has a better grip on truth. The partisan imagines that the opposing party is nuts. As Publilius Syrus wrote in 50 B.C., “Every lunatic thinks all other men are crazy.”

When the actual situation is explained to those unfamiliar with political reality, they frequently disbelieve what they are told. “Oh no, that cannot possibly be true,” they respond. “Nobody is that crazy.” When the plans of various empires from history are described, they also marvel. The idea that present-day rulers would risk global catastrophe in the pursuit of global dominance is hard to accept. At the other extreme we find the cynics, who believe in the innocence of all causes and rulers except those attending their own country, as they believe the wickedness of their own president (provided he is of the opposing party).

America’s misguided democratic idealism would give all power to “the people” – our favorite rag doll and mock idol. But there is no power in the people, and no “people power.” Furthermore, the peoples’ victories at the end of the Cold War (in Eastern Europe) did not play out as advertised. And yet, the democratic mythology continues to prevail. Modern man refuses to see politics for what it is. The world believes a lie, as it usually does. At present it is fashionable to believe that democracy is the final solution of mankind’s political problems, or failing in that belief, men blame America for the ills of the world. America is said to be the “lone superpower” as the world is gradually turned against her. But consider the terrible helplessness of the United States during the September 11 attacks – now mirrored in the inept diplomacy and misguided military strategy of an administration at war with its own intelligence services, incapable of preventing future terrorist attacks because it will not stand against the populace’s hedonistic impulses.

© 2006 Jeffrey R. Nyquist