Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, which was first published in 1532 and still remains in print, is known for its unsentimental and amoral advice to leaders and would-be leaders about attaining and using power. Machiavelli wrote the book to gain favor with Lorenzo de’ Medici and to hopefully return to public service in Florence. But the qualities of The Prince that have withstood the test of time throughout the centuries include Machiavelli’s understanding of human nature — especially when it involves politics. And, interestingly, Machiavelli wrote about the political wars between populists and elitists that rhyme with the politics surrounding the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.
In Chapter 9 of The Prince, Machiavelli explained that political leaders gain office “by help of popular favour or by the favour of the aristocracy” — populism vs. elitism. Machiavelli called these political forces “opposite [political] parties” that arise “from the desire of the populace to avoid the oppression of the great, and the desire of the great to command and oppress the people.” Machiavelli sided with the populists: “[W]hen the nobility see that they are unable to resist the people, they unite in exalting one of their number and creating him prince, so as to be able to carry out their own designs under the shadow of his authority.”
Machiavelli believed that the elites “think more of themselves” than of a populist leader, and he warned a populist “prince” to “guard himself and look upon [the elites] as secret enemies, who will help to ruin him when in adversity.” The class that Machiavelli called “nobles” have their own interests and “prerogatives,” and a populist leader who attempts to deprive elites of their prerogatives invites their opposition.
In the American republic, the elite class was unanimous in its dislike, and in some cases hatred, for Donald Trump when he entered the political arena in 2015. At first, Trump’s candidacy was considered by them a joke or a publicity stunt. But as Trump embraced the populist movement in the country that had once surrounded the candidacies of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, and that had surged in the off-year elections in 2010, elite fear was added to dislike and hatred. Trump refused to play the political game by elite rules. Instead of courting the elite political media, he mocked and ridiculed them. He overtly challenged elite Washington, referring to its members as the “Swamp.” It was never Trump’s “conservatism” that brought about elite opposition. In truth, Trump was not and is not a philosophical conservative, but he does have conservative instincts that inform his populism.
Trump did not emerge from the elite political class, and that, above all else, was why the members of that political class did and do oppose him so vociferously. Populism threatens the elite class’ power, prestige, and privileges. The day after Trump’s election in 2016, elites in this country questioned Trump’s legitimacy and expressed shame that the country would elect such a man as president. All of a sudden, former President George W. Bush, who liberals pilloried as a liar and warmonger for eight years, didn’t look so bad to them. At least Bush was a member of the elite political class. At least Bush played by their rules.
The great political observer James Burnham noted that Machiavelli’s reputation has suffered down through the years because he wrote the truth about the power and privileges of political elites. “[T]he powerful and their spokesmen–all the ‘official’ thinkers, the lawyers and philosophers and preachers and demagogues and moralists and editors–must defame Machiavelli,” Burnham explained. “If the political truths stated or approximated by Machiavelli were widely known by men, the success of tyranny and all other forms of oppressive political rule would become much less likely.”
Donald Trump, like Machiavelli, exposed the “mechanism of rule and privilege” of our elite political class. Trump exposed, emphasized, and skillfully used the class divisions that fundamentally lie at the heart of where Americans stand on major issues of the day, including foreign wars, immigration, Second Amendment rights, and cultural issues. He tapped into class antagonisms that Machiavelli wrote about six centuries ago. For a time, Trump was “the prince,” but the elite class waged a war against his presidency even before it officially began. Machiavelli would understand.
