Jim Holmes, Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and Distinguished Fellow at the Krulak Center at the Marine Corps University, is one of our country’s leading public intellectuals. He is a throwback to Alfred Thayer Mahan, a naval officer and perhaps our country’s greatest public intellectual of the late 19th-early 20th century. Holmes has an interesting take on President Donald Trump’s approach to governing in his second term, comparing Trump to Niccolo Machiavelli, the brilliant Florentine statesman and the author of timeless classics on politics, including The Prince and Discourses on Livy.
Burnham understood that political change often results from … the “circulation of elites” — when a new ruling class takes power from the old ruling class.
Holmes’ piece in The National Interest titled “Donald Trump’s Machiavellian Instincts” sheds light on the flurry of Executive Orders and policy changes Trump is pursuing in his first month in office. Trump seems to understand not only the wisdom of Machiavelli, but also the political realities explained by a group of thinkers that the political philosopher James Burnham called “the Machiavellians.”
Burnham wrote The Machiavellians during the Second World War, shortly after he broke with Trotskyism and began the remarkable intellectual journey that ended with his becoming a senior editor and the most important writer for National Review. People who have studied Burnham’s career judge The Machiavellians to be the key to Burnham’s political thought. Burnham developed a “science” of political power through synthesizing the ideas of Machiavelli and four intellectual disciples of the great Florentine: Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Georges Sorel.
Holmes credits Trump with wielding two Machiavellian insights in his early moves in his second term. First, Trump is introducing massive changes that have produced great resistance from the old order he is seeking to replace. Trump calls the old order the “deep state,” and as Holmes notes its “stakeholders” have attacked Trump with “partisan zeal.”
Holmes rightly views Trump as a “counterrevolutionary” who intends to “uproot what he considers the excesses of past presidencies” and who wants to “restore past eminence” (“make America great again”). Resistance has come from the bureaucracy, Democrats (and some Republicans — Mitch McConnell for example) in Congress, and especially from the courts.
Trump’s second Machiavellian insight is to “strike quickly.” Holmes writes that Trump is “mounting a lightning assault on what he sees as the defenders of a corrupt old order within the Beltway.” Holmes compares Trump’s approach to “savvy field generals” who strike “blow after blow in swift succession to keep adversaries stunned and off balance.” Unlike in his first term, Trump has quickly moved to install loyalists to head the bureaucracies and announced new rules and policies that seek to reverse the agenda of the old order. Machiavelli would surely approve.
Ruling Class Struggle
Back to Burnham. In The Machiavellians, Burnham, channeling Mosca, wrote about how “ruling classes” seek to protect their power and privileges by force and fraud, and by what Sorel called “myths” and violence. The “myths” of today’s old order include, among others, “green energy,” “diversity, equity and inclusion,” “democracy versus autocracy,” and the “rules-based international order.”
Trump is moving to uproot all of them which is an attack on the elite of the old ruling class. Burnham, channeling Robert Michels, understood that the struggle for power in every society is waged by elites — Michels called it the “iron law of oligarchy.” “[T]he primary goal of every ruling group,” Burnham wrote, “is the maintenance of its own power and privilege.” It is this factor, not the ideal of “preserving democracy” that motivates the resistance to Trump.
Trump and the key players in his second administration are a new ruling class who tapped into a political movement that originated in the presidential campaigns of Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan, and later morphed into the Tea Party. Trump calls it MAGA. Burnham understood that political change often results from what Vilfredo Pareto called the “circulation of elites” — when a new ruling class takes power from the old ruling class.
Holmes’s piece in The National Interest is correct. Trump’s instincts are Machiavellian in the best sense of that word. Holmes, like Burnham, understands that the conventional view of Machiavelli as an amoral political manipulator is wrong. Burnham called Machiavelli and his intellectual disciples “defenders of freedom” because they conveyed the truth about politics and power. We are seeing the truth of their observations and analyses play out every day in the moves and countermoves of Trump’s new ruling class and the resistance of the old order.
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