For in every city these two diverse humors are found, which arises from this: that the people desire neither to be commanded or oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and oppress the people. Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 9.
The most striking thing about our terrible politics—here in the US, but also abroad—is how the causes seem so disproportionate to the effects. Yes, there are certainly problems here and elsewhere, some of them quite serious. But they are not of a type or magnitude that most political observers, even a few years ago, would have thought likely to split the United States, Great Britain, and other European democracies apart and produce a seemingly unstoppable slide towards blood and soil nationalism.
Of course many countries in the past have fallen apart, or fallen prey to toxic leaders, or both. But in most cases there is some plausible cause, some set of terrible events and traumas, that explain what happened. Germany turned to Naziism after defeat in the greatest war ever known, followed by hyperinflation, and years of quasi-open warfare between Reds and Browns. Russia turned communist after defeat in the same war overthrew its ruling elites, outside powers intervened, and a terrible civil war decimated the country. Here in the US, our own Civil War was the culmination of centuries of slavery and irreconcilable disagreement over the direction of the country.
Nothing like that is happening now. We have troubles—inequality, immigration, racism. (We do have one no-kidding crisis, climate change, but so far this has not been a big driver of our falling apart). But what we seem to be seeing is something different, a self-inflicted destructive spiral, something that makes one wonder if Freud was right when he postulated an instinctual “Death Drive.” When Europe marched enthusiastically into The Great War, one reason seemed to be dissatisfaction with peace (Europe had experienced an unprecedented century without major war), with normal life, with bourgeois prosperity. There was a yearning for some kind of change, to blow it all up. How bad could it be? Imaginations were sadly ill-equipped to foresee the results.
Modern countries with an educated and prosperous citizenry, an open press, free markets, and participatory politics, were supposed to be, if not immune from these dangers, at least inoculated against them. Education and access to information would make people much harder to manipulate and less prone to give in to unthinking prejudices. The fruits of industrial capitalism, even if unevenly spread, raised most people well above subsistence and offered reason to hope they could better themselves. Prosperity, education and liberty made it possible for people to participate in civil society, to be citizens and not just subjects. In a mercantile society, ambition could be channeled into the relatively safe pursuit of wealth, for the benefit of all, instead of glory in battle.
Contrast this with pre-modern societies, where the vast majority lived on the edge of starvation, only a tiny few could read and write, a highly-stratified and repressive class system made any change in status seem hopeless, and ambitious rulers and would-be rulers reveled in violence. Under those conditions, it was understandable that any crisis could lead to disaster. Hopelessness, frustration, and fear could easily lead an ignorant populace to fall prey to almost any sort of fantastic rumor, and follow almost any would-be savior. (For some eye-opening descriptions of how this happened in medieval Europe, see The Pursuit of the Millennium, by Norman Cohn).
But today we seem to have come full circle, back to a world dominated by myths and conspiracies and unthinking prejudice. Demagogues and oligarchs circumvent with ease all the advances that we once thought would protect us. The press and media can be censored and distorted. Democratic institutions can be corrupted or ignored. Scientists can be drowned out and intimidated. From Russia to China to Turkey to the Philippines to Venezuela to Poland to Great Britain to the United States, a similar pattern emerges: lies, naked appeals to race and chauvinism, backed by coercion and threats of force. And it works. This is the most astonishing and depressing fact. Statements that any normal 10-year old knows are false, are accepted at face value. Actions that any normal 10-year knows are wrong, are applauded. Not by a few, but by millions.
We must wonder if our assumptions were wrong. That a majority could ever for long resist clever manipulators. That wealth could ever be tamed. That education and science could offset prejudice and fear. That educated citizens would be willing to solve hard problems according to rules and laws.
I think part of the reason we, here in the US, have either embraced dangerous movements, or been bewildered when so many do, is that we have been raised to think it can’t happen here. We think that ‘other’ countries, far away and long ago, might turn bad, but it’s impossible in today’s America, or in all those countries that now look pretty much like America. We Americans are hugely ignorant of our own history and the history of the rest of the world. On the one hand the history most of us are taught paints ‘us’ heroically and leaves out much that might teach us humility: the centrality of slavery, the destruction of Native Americans, colonial intervention in Latin America, the depredations of our titanic industries, and much more. But it also inadequately describes just how hard it is to do what we aim at. Many think we are able to just snap our fingers and do away with millennia of religious and racial discrimination, oligarchy, and patriarchy.
The “American exceptionalism” that Americans imbibe, on both left and right, is now proving to be our Achilles heel. First, it excuses our ignorance—what lessons do we need to learn? We’re different! So we fail to fix our embarrassing healthcare and tax systems, even though other states have shown the way. Have we ever in our history had a President who knew or cared less about what we might learn from others?
Second, it deludes us into thinking that we are not vulnerable to the most ancient failings and weaknesses of humanity. The default condition of mankind for all of recorded history, since the consolidation of large-scale agriculture-based states, has been oligarchy and autocracy, built on essentialist and rigid divisions of class, caste, race, faith, and gender. The dismantling of some of this scaffolding in the last three centuries can be seen as an irreversible tide, proof of a sharp break with the past. Or it may be a blip, now in the process of being snuffed out by clever oligarchs, skilled at turning modest grievances into existential threats.
Machiavelli said in The Prince there are two types of men. There is an ambitious few who want to rule. And there is a stolid many who want not to be ruled, or not ruled badly. America and other modern democracies have been partial victories for the many. But the would-be rulers are always with us, and like floodwaters they seek every weakness and every opening.
Basking in our largely unearned exceptionalism we have let our guard down, and handed our affairs over to the ambitious few. Most Americans think, correctly, that government has been captured by wealthy special interests. Machiavelli warns that “So too, the people, when they see they cannot resist the great, give reputation to one, and make him prince so as to be defended with his authority.” This describes the election of Donald Trump to a tee—he’s a sonofabitch, but to his voters he’s their sonofabitch. Why not roll the dice? How bad could it be?
Tyrants have ever posed as the friends of the people. And the teaching of the past is relevant again.