FUNDAMENTALS TO MISUNDERSTANDING POLITICS
Chapter 1.1 Are We, As Followers, Too Far Beyond Driven?

(See Chapter 1.0 here.)

Oak Boat: I want to come back to that line you quoted earlier from the present-day American essayist Wesley Yang: “that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.” We might say: Let’s let Wes Yang meet Nicky Mach. And Wes, meet Nicky Mach, etcetera.[i]

Newt Monk: And who might you mean when you say “Nicky Mach?” Him I know not. (At least, I don’t think I do.)

Oak Boat: Well, Nicky Mach … I mean, you do know, it’s simple shorthand for Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). (Yes, yes, that Machiavelli.) Ole Nicky, despite the popular trash of a myth that continues, even in 2024, to ostracize him as one of the meanest, most cynical humans being to have ever walked the earth, not unlike Caine in Kung Fu, Mr. Machiavelli was actually, believe it or not, quite human and even quite humane.

Newt Monk: Yeah, I might just believe it.

Oak Boat: So, in his book of Discourses, ole Nicky Mach expressing a fundamental political maxim where, essentially, for any and all human civilizations, hunger and poverty mark (and always mark) the two fundamental drives behind all laws and politics. In other words, all statutes, precedents, prohibitions, rule-making, and other public policies, along with all the methods and motivations behind their supposéd achievements, remain rooted in the prevention, restraint, treatment, acceptance (as well as denial) of a civilization’s risk against succumbing to either/or (or perhaps, “both/and’) widespread hunger and generational impoverishment.[ii]

Newt Monk: I sort of see what you’re saying Machiavelli once said. (Sort of). I don’t know if things are quite as absolute and formulaic as you and or ole Nicky Mach say they are. But I grant that general threats like widespread hunger, crop blight, disease, famine, and trade embargos, as well as economic depression and/or the decay of affluence across entire classes—yes, these things have been, and will continue to be, at the root of most political (dis)agreements and conflicts.

Oak Boat: Yeah, you’re following me correctly. What you’re saying is like what a pair of recent translators of Machiavelli’s Discourses, Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, have suggested: that in that book Machiavelli “tries to show that to understand political situations correctly, one must not listen to the intent of the words people use but rather look at the necessities they face.”[iii]

Newt Monk: Ah yes, I’m starting to see the point. Just as food prices and retirement funds concern much of today’s day-to-day politics––and by “our” I include fellow followers like myself, who are fellow non-leaders of our communities––so too did the hopes (and despairs) of farmers (which includes ranching and fishing) and the general graft of those farmers’ bankers drive the politics of Nicky Mach’s world way back in the day.

Oak Boat: Yeah.

Newt Monk: And these twin drives that beat the heart of all the politics occurred in all the centuries before Nicky Mach ever dreamed of putting his own pen to paper?

Oak Boat: Yeah, that’s why you see today, writers like Yang observing how the leaders who govern us profit off the “plight of the poor in spirit.” You see how that kind of plight continues to constitute the bare essentials to these oh-so-lovely latter-day politics we fellow glitched-out Americans seem to find ourselves stuck in as we grumble toward the fall of 2024. [iv]

Newt Monk: So, ole Nicky Mach, meanwhile, offers in his Discourses no more thantwo reasons for why humans being, so long as they remain uncorrupted, desire freedom?

Oak Boat: Yeah, but do you understand the rationales for why he limited himself to just those two reasons? Do you see the two groups of humans being Nicky Mach divides, a division obvious to all individuals affected by political life for all situations?

Newt Monk: I would guess that his first reason, or the first group involves and includes only a slender few—a perpetual, numerical minority––a few who, for whatever reason, strongly desire the freedom to command others.

Oak Boat: Yeah, those are the ones who want to be free only to make others unfree!

Newt Monk: On the other hand, for the majority of a civilization’s citizens—which may even include mildly meek and moldy me!––they instead deeply yearn for an authentic freedom simply so that they––and that we!––may find a way to pay our overdue bills, to find a few minutes to prune a few overgrown vines and perhaps water some overlooked patio cacti as an overall reflection of how we have found a way to “live secure.”[v]

Oak Boat: Yeah, but often our leaders fail in their freedom to let us (their followers) freely live our lives securely. It happens all the time in all kinds of places.

Newt Monk: So it seems to go. So it seems.

Oak Boat: More like suck it seems to go, I’d say. Suck it seems. So it seems. I mean, that happened in the jim crow American South a century ago, where, instead of secure living, the political system offered to its followers through the leadership of its leaders, it instead, to quote Isabel Wilkerson from her study The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010): “mostly fear and dependence—and hatred of that dependence—on both sides,” both the leaders and followers who somehow lived in that South.[vi]

Newt Monk: Yeah, but as American political philosopher Sharon Krause has pointed out––in Liberalism with Honor (2002)––even in our own modern times, a growing number of members of the nation’s non-leadership class feel a certain sense of powerlessness with what the present has decided to present to them. Presently in 2024, the present seeks to present to we non-leaders a subtle sense of powerless confinement. Krause’s examples highlight how––

the special ‘bills of rights’ that have proliferated in recent years (patients’, victims’, parents’, children’s, now even air travelers’) speak more to a feeling of powerlessness and the need for protection from forces beyond one’s control than to new freedoms. [vii]

Oak Boat: Yet it’s not just academic types who’ve lately noticed, and have later written about, the seemingly ticking temporarily behind an apparent, ever-depleting expiration date for American rights and freedoms. And it’s not just me or you. Would you believe that occasional, prominent personalities who (at least momentarily) make up our popular culture media have sometimes spotted this, sometimes even spoken about it as well?

Newt Monk: I would believe you, and I will believe you, because I believe that you are the one who most wants to be believed. (And I even believe that you mostly believe the beliefs I just stated.)

Oak Boat: So you should then believe me when I take some (modestly popular?) media figure, like Stoya, for example. She’s a retired adult film actress who has shifted her endeavors to become quite an impressive essayist and cultural observer––like when she differentiates modern American notions of empowerment from their notions of entitlement. According to Stoya, when these two concepts are set side by side—or, at least when they are set so in twenty-first century America––the idea of being “empowered feels as though that power,” whether it’s political, cultural, or spiritual sort of power, “can be revoked according to someone else’s whim.” But on the other hand, the word “entitled” tends to mean, at least for Stoya, that “it is far easier to believe that that power is actually mine.”[viii]

Newt Monk: To her intriguing differentiation I might add a blunt line once given by the great comedian and thinker George Carlin when he said: “The powerful keep the power. That’s why they’re called the powerful.[ix]

Oak Boat: “So it goes,” said some sad saint from long ago. “So it goes.”[x]

NOTES

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[i] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.

[ii] Machiavelli contends: “It is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and the laws make them good. Where a thing works well on its own without the law, the law is not necessary; but when some good custom is lacking, at once the law is necessary.” Thus, for Machiavelli: “There is greater virtue to be seen where choice has less authority.” See: Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi Sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio in Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), (I, iii), p. 15 (1st quotation); (I, i), p. 8 (2nd quotation).

[iii] Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, “Introduction” to Machiavelli’s Discourses on The First Ten Books of Titus Livius, trans. Mansfield and Tarcov, (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. xxxiii.

[iv] Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, p. 25.

[v] On the point that they want to be free only to make others unfree, see Edmund Burke’s various warnings:

The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do….

But liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,—and particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers. (242)

And:

In all [political] bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing … will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects….

In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders. (284–85)

Burke goes on to say that “To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made by the leaders in any public assembly, they,” that is, the leaders “ought to respect, in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct”: their followers. But, continues Burke, “to be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must also be judges of natural weight and authority.” See: Edmund Burke, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1791) in The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, (12 vols.; London: John C. Nimmo, 1887), III, pp. 242, 284–85; Machiavelli, Discourses, (I, xvi), p. 46.

[vi] Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 2010), p. 31.

[vii] Sharon Krause, Liberalism with Honor, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), p. x.

[viii] Stoya, Philosophy, Pussycats, & Porn, (Los Angeles: Not a Cult, 2018), pp. 147–48.

[ix] George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? (New York: Hyperion, 2004), p. 106.

[x] Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five, (New York: Dell, 1969; 1971).

Recent Thoughts on Russian Conservatism (with Literary Comparisons)

The structure of these regional directorates has remained largely unchanged for decades, which, when combined with the FSB’s system of personnel rotation, means that the fossilized provincial state security offices shape the FSB from within.

–Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, “Russia’s New Nobility: the Rise of the Security Services in Putin’s Kremlin,” Foreign Affairs, 89 (September–October 2010): 80–96 at 93.

*****

Russia has the third-largest gold and currency reserves in the world, but has become an international anti-model—a byword for non-modernization (and even de-modernization), uncompletitiveness, and chronic corruption….

One of the principle themes to emerge here is the Kremlin’s reluctance to graduate from its preoccupation with traditional security and geopolitical priorities to tackling a new global agenda.

–Bobo Lo, Russia and the New World Order, (London: Brookings Institution Press, 2015) 58, 72–73.

*****

Russian strategic theory today remains relatively unimaginative and highly dependent on the body of Soviet work with which Russia’s leaders are familiar.

–Maria Snegovaya, “Putin’s Information Warfare in Ukraine: Soviet Origins of Russia’s Hybrid Warfare,” (Institute for the Study of War: Washington, DC, September 2015)  7.

For comparative purposes only:

The generation’s insularity began to change in the mid-330s. For some members of this generation (most notably Praetextatus) the early 330s saw their initial foray into public life, a step that certainly increased their awareness of the age’s political developments. Others, like Ausonius, would have seen their awareness increase when they began studying law or pleading cases. As members of the final pagan generation moved into their midtwenties, their focus shifted from the classrooms and parties of intellectual centers like Athens and Bordeaux to the social and political life of members of the imperial elite. These young men began assuming the duties and responsibilities of mature citizens. As the next chapter will show, they did so with a mixture of seriousness and conservatism that would become characteristic of their approach to public life.

–Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2015) 58.

*****

“It was said [by Burke], that, as she [France] had speedily fallen, she might speedily rise again. He doubted this. That the fall from an height was with an accelerated velocity; but to lift a weight up to that height again was difficult, and opposed by the laws of physical and political gravitation.”

–“Substance of the Speech in the Debate on the Army Estimates in the House of Commons,” Tuesday, February 9, 1790. From The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke – In Twelve Volumes.” Vol. III. John C. Nimmo, London. 1887.

*****

“What floods ideas are! How quickly they cover all that they are commissioned to destroy and bury, and how rapidly they create frightful abysses!”

–Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), III, iii, § 3.

*****

Historical experience [in intelligence gathering], even if inadequate, is the most reliable guidance system in existence. It may have to be discarded on occasion, but it must never be disregarded. In this sense, then, conservatism is mandated by prudence.

–Walter Laqueur, A World of Secrets: the Uses and Limits of Intelligence. (New York, NY: Best Books, 1985) 283.

Chivalry didn’t die in France–like Burke bemoaned–because chivalry had been dead for well over a hundred years prior to the Revolution. If chivalry hadn’t died, Cervantes could not have written Don Quixote (1605). But hundreds of years after Cervantes and Burke, people are still chasing windmills. Over at The American Conservative, Gracey Olmsted writes:

This is what the “spirit of the gentleman” used to provide: a reasoned, courteous atmosphere in which public discourse could take place—where opinions could be stated without savagery, and received without rancor. The problem is that gentlemen are out of popularity on left and right—for reasons [Mark] Mitchell makes clear in another FPR post.

The gentleman is unpopular with the left and “PC” crowd because, in Mitchell’s words, he “is one who is willing and able to judge well. He is discriminating in his judgments and does not shy away from making hard distinctions even when they cause him discomfort and even when he is forced to stand alone [emphasis added].” Such discriminatory value judgments will not be honored on the modern university campus, nor even in the larger political world.

I suppose a rather ungentlemanly act would be to point at that last line from Olmsted–“Such discriminatory value judgments will not be honored on the modern university campus, nor even in the larger political world“–and say, yes, that may be true, but that is also a very narrow and reductive Weltanschauung. There is plenty more to life than universities and politics, particularly if you’re too poor and/or live under a gerrymandered regime.

Plenty of Americans live their day-to-day lives in a brave new world beyond the constraints of chivalry and bureaucracy.