The joke about political science is that it’s not about politics, and it’s not a science. This would have surprised Aristotle, the ancient inventor of the field, and Machiavelli, its modern reinventor. Both believed politics were a means to the end Aristotle called a telos, an objective. For Aristotle, the telos was the cultivation of virtue and happiness in citizens. This led Aristotle to the ideals of balance, moderation, and the “mixed regime,” which spreads power among what we now call the middle class. For Machiavelli, the telos was the means of getting and keeping power so that the prince could stabilize his rule. Machiavelli’s idea of virtu isn’t virtuous but a form of radical amoral strategizing. Anyone who spreads power is asking for a dagger in the doublet.
Still, Machiavelli believed, like Aristotle, that the nature of society and politics could be perceived through our senses and rationalized into universal principles. Political science as taught and practiced in the United States has its universal principles, too. They tend, as the principles of Aristotle and Machiavelli did, to reflect the telos of their time and constitutional regime. The American telos is Aristotelian, pursuing eudaemonia (philosophical happiness) in a mixed regime. When the nature of the regime is a settled question and the regime is bourgeois liberal, How to Win Friends and Influence People is probably a more helpful guide to political life than the lawless visions of Machiavelli and Hobbes.
And so it was that American political science became a philosophy of managerial liberalism. This is not a phrase that sets the heart aflutter. No one ever sacrificed their life for managerial liberalism. No one ever admitted, at least openly, that they wanted to become a managerial liberal. Still, there are many worse things, such as managerial illiberalism. However, when the telos is attained by the Constitution, the practical techniques of politics are neglected for psephology, the speculative arts of polling and voter psychology. The result is a foreshortened tradition that emphasizes the useful over the true and the local over the universal, and is understandably unwilling to perceive its place and function in the managerial order.
It didn’t help that Americans, despite their myths about the Colonial and Revolutionary eras, had only ever lived under liberal regimes of one kind or another. American society was shaped by Protestant values, too, so its political scientists were more willing to discuss the virtuous distribution of power than the wicked virtu of getting it. And if you considered the path not taken, there was the catastrophic warning of 20th-century Europe, with its cults of amoral power.
The icons of postwar American political science and philosophy became liberal moralists such as John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, and Hannah Arendt. Again, nothing wrong with that. But it’s not enough. What do they know of Rawls, who only Rawls knows? As James Burnham warned in The Machiavellians (1943), the liberal “wish” for value-neutral institutions replaces the “reality” of oligarchic power-seeking within the institutions. The same wish prefers the naive and virtuous view of human nature over the reality that political history is one long proof of human virtu in the arts of selfishness and crookedness.
As Burnham observed, the former masks the latter. When George Orwell reviewed Burnham’s The Managerial Society (1941), he objected to what he called Burnham’s “apocalyptic” tone. Orwell had a point. The rush toward revelation is a Protestant script, translated into liberal politics. Burnham, who learned the lifting of the veil in a seven-year stretch as a Trotskyite, applied the Marxist method to the liberal regime he wished to save. Orwell then translated Burnham’s observations on managerial illiberalism into his own exercise in lifting the veil, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The academy and the media cannot accept the irruption of President Donald Trump because they prefer not to accept the premises of this Machiavellian countertradition. Its view of human nature degrades their class vanity along with their self-conception as enlightened elites. Regardless, Trump’s two electoral victories are an indictment of the liberal regime. If it were functioning well as a regime or, to use Rawls’s formulation, as a “fair” liberal distributor, Trump would never have won.
It’s another question whether Trump’s victories are a repudiation of the liberal regime, as some of the MAGA ideologues in his administration like to think, or a cry for help from a public that, like Burnham, Orwell, and Rawls, wishes to see fairness restored. Either way, now the veil is off, the only way for the liberal regime to survive is to take a good look at itself through the eyes of the Machiavellians.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
