Andrew Sullivan gives us his blistering take on the neoconservative legacy:
[T]he neocons might be better defined as aggressive democracy-promoters who actually don’t like real democracy and constitutional checks at home. They believe – and have long believed – that Western systems cannot truly compete with dictatorships. One response to this has been the unleashing of the executive, what Harvey Mansfield calls the “untamed prince” to take action – alone – in the interests of the state in alliance with a vast apparatus of military-industrial power…
That’s one reason neocons were utterly unconcerned with a presidency that gave itself unlimited powers in an unlimited war: the power to seize citizens and non-citizens at will without due process under emergency laws, the power to torture victims to procure rationales for future warfare and retroactive casus belli, and the power to ransack anyone’s private property (John Yoo found the Fourth Amendment as “quaint” as the Geneva Conventions). Every time you hear Bill Kristol blithely say that someone does not need to be granted due process in order to be jailed or executed, the veil slips a little.
Anyone who feels a devious little thrill when they hear Harvey Mansfield talk about the virtue of the “prince” — or the soft “femininity” of modern man — should recall what this looks like in practice. The 2000s in America: Bush is our prince; evangelical fundamentalism and nation building his cure for the “flat soul”; illegal torture and nonstop public deception what the “seamy side of moral virtue” actually entail. Here’s Mansfield on Machiavelli:
Whatever legacy he may have left to bourgeois liberalism — and it is considerable — he may also be said to have anticipated the critiques of the bourgeois that were to come from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and their followers on the left and right. If modern man were defined as Machiavellian, he could not so easily be accused of a dull life, a flat soul, and a lack of patriotism. Machiavelli enlightens princes and those who want to become princes but leaves good people in the dark they want and make for themselves. The latter are shown the seamy side of moral virtue and offered instructions in scheming evil, but Machiavelli knows his teachings will not take, for it is the good, not the evil, who are incorrigible. The evil can be brought to see that their glory requires action for the common benefit, but the good are self-sufficient and ineducable because they think goodness is enough. (29, Machiavelli’s Virtues)
On the one hand, I’m attracted — perversely, maybe — to the idea that “goodness is not enough,” that greatness, even if it’s destructive, might count more. But on the other hand, I know how all this plays out in the real world of governance, and it’s a familiar bad story. In a way, the modern world has a solution to this paradox, our need for princes but our fear of their consequences: it’s called the free market. In free markets we get to create great things through “scheming evil,” like Machiavelli’s prince, but no one prince can ever establish his (or her!) power as final, no one gets access to guns or to public funds (as they do in the government), and thus all can be outcompeted and nothing gets too evil.
But in other ways, the free market is not the solution at all, because the key to the virtu of the prince is that his or her action is intrinsically public. It’s fundamental that his/her “great deeds” are greater than manufacturing tampons or putting out new ipad apps — that they concerned the founding of new nations and the redeeming of a people.
What this suggests, I think, is the need to reawaken the idea of “princes in the public sphere.” We need people who consider non-governmental community service an act of greatness, not “goodness,” who believe that their destructive/creative zeal should be used to make our country better.
It’s a far cry from neoconservatism, but that’s hardly a strike against it. Reappropriate Machiavelli!