Transcript for Lecture on Machiavelli's Domestic Policy

A lecture on Machiavelli's Domestic Policy

0. Introduction

America is the land of freedom. She’s the protector of self-evident rights. In my mind, there can be no doubt about America’s genuine achievement in world history. How then, do we make sense of her founding? Of the systematic elimination of the natives’ freedoms whose rights were not so evident? America’s founding act violated her most deeply held principle. How do we make sense of this? This is the paradox that the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss, introduces to help us tease out Machiavelli’s central political insight. Principles need to be violated in order to be actualized. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s necessity. For Strauss, as for Machiavelli, the modern left and right are both deluded about America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash, whereas the left wants to denounce; but neither own up to the actual cost of doing politics in the real world. In this lecture, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end, but not before explaining the terrifying cost of building an equal, free, and lawful society, according to Machiavelli.

1. American Founding

1.1 American Founding: Geography

I quote to you, the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss,

“Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.” - Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

So I’m going to save, as always, my personal reservations... And believe me, there’s a lot... Towards the end of this lecture. And we’re going to start just by trying to understand the most charitable interpretation of Machiavelli. And we’re going to do it by unpacking Strauss’s example here. So what is he gesturing at? This mischievous interpretation of the founding of America. Up to 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out in the first phase through contact of disease alone. Think about ten of your best friends and family. Nine of them dead. And then came a brutal, centuries-long, westward push. Massacres, war, fraud, contracts that were agreed to, but blatantly violated. By the time the frontier closed, only a sliver of the native population was still surviving. And it was not much better for those who survived. Families were confined to reserves, children were ripped out of those families, forced into boarding schools, punished for practicing their own religion, speaking their own language, until the native way of life was all but eliminated. Why does Strauss think Machiavelli would highlight this fact of founding? Is it to condemn America? No, not even close. We can tease out what Machiavelli would say about America’s founding, as Strauss suggests, by seeing what Machiavelli has said about the founding of Rome.

Rome, too, was founded on at least two crimes. The first crime, Romulus literally killing his brother Remus. The second crime, Rome subjugated, colonized, enslaved her way to greatness. And the way she did it was absolutely treacherous. Machiavelli tells us when Rome was just a small city-state, what it did was it forced... It invited the city-states around it to become her junior partners. You get to keep all of your ruling class, you get to keep your laws, most of your property, your language, your religion, but you listen to us. And what Rome commanded her junior partners to do, was to go further out and subjugate the people in further regions. So not as inviting them as junior partners, but getting them in as subjects. Killing off the ruling class, taking their land, enslaving some of them, absorbing others as citizens. And when Rome’s junior partners collected enough subjects for her, Rome turned on those junior partners, with the very subjects she got, and subjugated everyone until Rome ruled alone. Blatant fraud is the heart of Rome’s greatness. This is what Machiavelli tells us. And a not too dissimilar strategy was used by America in her expansion. And the most infamous example of this is the Creek War.

In the Creek War, Andrew Jackson, as general, was fighting against the Creeks. And one of the pivotal reasons he won, was because he allied himself with the Cherokee tribe, the Cherokees, who helped America defeat the Creeks. A Cherokee leader even saved Andrew Jackson’s life. Andrew Jackson called the Cherokee, My dear and faithful friends. Now, Andrew Jackson becomes President, and he pushes through the Indian Removal Act, which would exile the Cherokee from their native land... His own allies who saved his life... It would exile them from their native land that they’ve been living for centuries, and push them west. What makes this even more treacherous is that the Cherokee at this point, had done everything they were supposed to do to assimilate. They adopted a written constitution modeled after the US’s constitution. They created a written alphabet. Many of them even stopped practicing their own native religion and rituals, and converted to Christianity. The Cherokee literally had treaties with the American government recognizing its sovereignty. So the Cherokee, again, they did everything they were supposed to do. They fight this legally, not through terrorism. They fight it legally. They take it to the Supreme Court. It’s a bit nuanced, but eventually the Supreme Court sides with the Cherokee. They recognized the Cherokee’s authority, over what Jackson said. What does Jackson do? He ignores the Supreme Court. He does an under-the-table deal with an illegitimate group of Cherokee leaders, get them to sign over the land in an illegitimate treaty, and use that as legitimacy to exile them from their land. This resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee were exiled from their native land. A quarter of them died on the journey as they went out west. Why did they go out west? Because the government told them: west of the Mississippi, native land forever.

Machiavelli’s lesson about the founding of Rome is this: Rome could not have been the free state par excellence, a beacon of freedom inspiring all the great nations that have come since, if she actually respected the freedom of others. And if you are going to conquer, if you are going to go to war, I quote to you Machiavelli,