Tag: Machiavelli

The Wisdom Of Machiavellian Virtu & Why America Is Losing Its Bill of Rights & Constitutional Virtues

On January 30, 2026

If you’ve read Machiavelli, especially “Discourses on Livy”, which is actually his major work (“The Prince” is not) you know his emphasis on Virtu of the people and elites as what holds Republics together. Machiavelli thought that Republics were the best form of government and that the greatest feat was to create or maintain a Republic: he was not a fan of autocratic government.

To summarize an important part of the Discourses: good men can make bad systems work, but good systems cannot save bad men. This is the opposite of what most “leadership” and “management” thinkers say today, but they’re wrong and Machiavelli was right.

I mention this because we’re seeing it in the US today. I won’t pretend the Constitution or the Bill of Rights were perfect, or didn’t include substantial evil (aka. slavery), but the Bill of Rights in particular is genuinely good. It’s failing completely right now, the government is just ignoring rulings it doesn’t like. The first thru fifth amendments are essentially dead letters, including habeas corpus.

Likewise the Constitution did include substantial checks and balances and they aren’t working.

It’s ironic that the worshippers of the US constitution have always touted its system of “checks and balances” as part of its distinctive genius and that at present every one of those supposed checks and balances is failing.

But I think this is unfair. The checks and balances exist, the system was designed fairly well, BUT it requires virtuous people to use them. When the Supreme Court, Congress and Presidency are all filled with corrupt men and women with no virtues (virtu), of course they don’t work. The best system in the world won’t work if the people running it don’t want to follow it.

American elites don’t believe in civil liberties. (Remember how the Patriot Act passed with only Senator opposing.) They don’t believe in liberty, freedom or equality. It is asinine to pretend that they do. They believe in nothing but enriching themselves and their donors, and they seem themselves as an elite and feel no duty towards the masses well-being. This is so obvious that arguing against it is absurd.

Since they don’t want to enforce the Bill of Rights, they don’t. Since they fundamentally are OK with ICE running rampant, genocide, war and impoverishing the American people, they make it happen and certainly don’t push back against it. Why would they want people to have rights? In what way does that benefit them, as long as they have rights (which, mostly, they do. Elite impunity to law is the real Constitution right now.)

Without virtue: without wanting to do the “right” thing, no system intended to produce good results can work. America doesn’t work to produce good outcomes for most people because American elites only want it to produce good outcomes for them. It’s that simple, and no laws or constitution or rights can fix that. The only fix is to replace the entire elite, wholesale, by whatever means necessary.

But that requires a population willing to replace them at whatever price is necessary, and that means the people have to be virtuous (brave, just and desiring the welfare of their fellow citizens) and enough of them aren’t, especially since at least a plurality of regular Americans are cowardly, unjust and want to hurt their fellow citizens.

In such a situation no laws, no constitution, can work and the issue is thrown back on power, as it was during the Civil War but since, this time there is no anti-evil party (Lincoln and the Republicans) there is no clear basis for organizing or fighting. This means a long descent is far more likely than a revival of the good parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Good people can make bad systems work. Bad people cannot make good systems work.

China works because the Communist Party, whatever its flaws, genuinely wants its people to be prosperous, genuinely tries to reduce inequality and genuinely wants China to be strong. America doesn’t work because American elites, including both major parties genuinely wants only a small minority to be wealthy, genuinely wants to impoverish most Americans and genuinely just wants money without the work required to keep or make America strong. And they sure as hell don’t believe in civil liberties.

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The Future Belongs To The Young, Once the Old Die

By Ian Welsh

On February 22, 2016

29 Comments

Science advances one funeral at a time – Max Planck

For years it has been clear that real change wouldn’t come until the current generation of politicians and apparatchniks died off or were forced to retire in large numbers due to age.

One of Machiavelli’s maxims was that people don’t change. They learn whatever lessons they’re going to learn, become who they are, and then act much the same no matter what happens.

What we’re seeing with Sanders’ numbers makes this clear. He’s winning 90 percent+ of the under 30 brigade. In the Scottish independence referendum, we saw that minus the pensioner brigade, Scotland would have left Great Britain. Corbyn’s supporters tilt young.

And so on.

Now, these are very young people, being led by the very old: Sanders is a true civil rights baby, someone who actually walked the walk in the early 60s. Corbyn is a largely unreconstructed British social Labour politician from the sixties.

The left is being led by the remains of the last actually socialist generation. (Hilary’s close to that age, but was a conservative “Goldwater girl,” and she acts like it.)

But the people who are flocking to those oldsters are young, young, young.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

And the people who are blocking left-wing change are generally old. Remember the Reagan Democrats? The Boomers, Silents, and GIs who gave their middle finger to the Great Society so long as they could have their nice suburban homes free of of “icky” black people?

As they die, change becomes possible.

They aren’t going to change their minds at this stage in their lives, the status quo is what they know and what they want.

What goes around, comes around. There is no end to history till we go extinct. The conservative era was never going to last forever.

What it has done is last too long–long enough to lock us into a rather nasty future. And because the conservatives have resisted any reasonable change from the left at all costs, there is a good chance some form of fascism will come to control many core countries.

This was expected. I’ve been warning for years that economic failure was setting up the conditions for fascism: You are more likely to get a Hitler or Mussolini instead of an FDR.

But, those on the inside, who are successful, don’t listen to those on the outside (like myself). They see no reason to do so, because they are “the winners” and the people on the outside are “the losers,” and why would you listen to losers?

And so, here we are. Good riddance to those who refused to deal with climate change and who presided over nearly 40 years of economic stagnation and decline.

The only problem is they have died too slowly. All humanity will pay the price.

(Caveat: You may be, and probably are, of the same age, and you’re probably a nice, good person who did not support these horrible policies. There are always some “Good Germans.”

The Hippies were great people who were right about almost everything. They also were a small minority who lost the culture wars.

So don’t take this post personally, though I know many of you will. (For the record, I think Gen-X, my generation, is pretty awful.)