Machiavelli's succinct and semi-diabolical advice to the prince
is one of the most enduring works of political philosophy in the
world. This man, writing in a time roughly contemporaneous with
the Reformation, was less concerned with seeking the will of God
than with winning at all costs. I wrote about him in my book
The End of Secularism.
He is famous for advising the prince that it is important to
appear honest, humane, religious, faithful, and charitable, but
that it is equally important the prince be ready to abandon any
of those attributes when opportunity presents itself. The prince
should not worry about whether he will gain a bad reputation for
deception, because, as Machiavelli suggests, there are always
ordinary people willing to be deceived and the world is FULL of
ordinary people.
The primary thrust of the book is advice about how to gain
principalities and to maintain control of them. Many things work
to a prince's advantage, such as traditions of servitude and
customs that reinforce the reign of a prince. But there is one
thing that puts sand in the princely engine and grinds things to
a halt. That thing is a tradition of liberty. If a people are
accustomed to liberty, Machiavelli writes, then they will never
stop trying to regain it. Even if they haven't had it for a
hundred years, the ancestral memory of liberty will be
overpoweringly strong. It may be so strong that no manipulative
device of the prince will be able to defeat it and he may have no
other option than to destroy such a city.
Might I suggest to you that on Tuesday night we saw Americans in
New Jersey and Virginia issue notice that they are not prepared
to trade their liberty for hyper-statism and that they are not
ready to become Europeans, always more subservient to the state
than we have been, instead of free citizens of a great republic?
The tradition of liberty is one of the greatest weapons we have
in this struggle.
When William F. Buckley thought about the possible triumph of the
United States in the Cold War, he imagined that American children
would someday be thankful that "the blood of their fathers ran
strong." Let our blood, too, run strong with the cherished
memory of our past and present liberty.
