On the Joe Rogan Experience, Jordan Peterson warned of “dark tetrad” psychopaths on social media who possess Machiavellian traits and opportunistically adopt ideas to play power games for their own benefit.
Peterson implies the “dark tetrad” is emerging on the non-interventionist right, cloaking their real intentions with conservative rhetoric. Interestingly, however, a historical parallel exists in neoconservatism, whose intellectual roots are deeply rooted in Machiavellianism, as its founders adopted the mantle of conservatism and the Republican Party to advocate for military interventionism.
Irving Kristol, widely regarded as the “godfather of neoconservatism,” was a radical, anti-Soviet Trotskyite in his early life who later became a Republican, advocating military interventionism during the Cold War and a “conservative welfare state” modeled on Bismarck’s social reforms. While he was the godfather, he was heavily influenced by Leo Strauss, who could be called the “intellectual godfather of neoconservatism.”
Kristol admired Strauss’s theory that ancient philosophers concealed esoteric meanings that could only be understood by a select philosophical elite, while the majority of readers received an entirely different message. Strauss also wrote about Machiavelli and admired the “intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.”
Although he rejected Machiavelli’s amoralism, Strauss appreciated his realism and thought that his rejection of the classical philosophers was valid because they did not recognize the reality of war, whereas Machiavelli was a pragmatist, a man of action, who focused on “how men live” rather than “how they ought to live.” He believed that democracies always faced hostile forces that must be faced by strong governments.
Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense during the Iraq war, and Abram Shulsky, who in 2003 served as Director of the Office of Special Plans (created to find evidence of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction), both studied under Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago. Shulsky later joined the Iranian Directorate to undermine the Iranian government with similar intelligence tactics.
Despite claims that Strauss would have rejected neoconservatism, Shulsky, in “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence,” cited Strauss as an influence on intelligence and foreign policy. Specifically, he explained that Strauss’s theory of esoteric writing and exoteric writing “suggests that deception is the norm in political life, and the hope . . . of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the exception.” He praised Strauss for his “ability to concentrate on detail, his consequent success in looking below the surface and reading between the lines.”
In The Prince, Machiavelli argues that rulers should appear virtuous while acting pragmatically. Neoconservatives—inspired by Strauss’s esoterism and the Platonic “Philosopher King”—arguably employed “noble lies,” like the use of WMDs, to mask strategic aims, such as regime change. Critics argued that Strauss believed that the “person who whispers in the ear of the King is more important than the King” and that “philosophers need to tell noble lies not only to the people at large but also to powerful politicians.”
Pivotal neoconservatives Richard Perle and Norman Podhoretz further exemplify the movement’s Machiavellian tactics and Straussian influence. Perle—one of the architects of the Iraq War and co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC)—advocated regime change, claiming that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, also shifted from the left to neoconservatism, and said that there was “no doubt” Saddam Hussein was “on the precipice of nuclear power” in 2002. They both crafted public narratives of democracy and security while pursuing elite-driven agendas, embodying the dark tetrad’s cunning and opportunism, evidenced by PNAC’s “A Clean Break” memo, written for Netanyahu, which revealed the private intentions behind regime change in Iraq and Syria.
Regardless of the Straussian roots, however, we are inevitably led to the question of whether these policies of regime change are actually conservative. Perhaps the “Leo-Con” roots are a baseless “conspiracy theory.” Still, we should ask if American intervention in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iran is conservative. Do these policies align with “Mr. Republican” Robert Taft and the Old Right’s anti-New Deal, non-interventionist stance? Or is it possible that neoconservatives opportunistically cloaked themselves in Republicanism and conservatism for power?
The neoconservatives were initially aligned with the Democratic Party, which championed a firm anti-communist and interventionist foreign policy (Wilson, FDR, Truman, LBJ), but the neocons found themselves at odds with its platform due to rising anti-war sentiments during the Vietnam War. They began to align themselves with a faction in the Republican Party. In the essay “The Emergence of Two Republican Parties,” Irving Kristol derided the “Old Right” conservatism, which he considered overly concerned with fiscal responsibility and opposition to New Deal policies, and suggested that “Post-New Deal Republicans” should embrace “energetic leadership” similar to Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first progressive president who pioneered an interventionist foreign policy.
This shift was not unique to Kristol. James Burnham—another former Trotskyite—similarly influenced conservatism’s interventionist and neoconservative turn as a founding editor of National Review. Although non-interventionists can still glean much from his work, James Burnham called for America to wage a “Third World War” against communism and criticized libertarian Murray Rothbard for being an “isolationist” during the Cold War. He celebrated FDR as “the chief War-Monger” whose militarism pulled the United States out of the Great Depression.
Burnham’s The Machiavellians championed Machiavelli’s realism and elite theory, concluding that politics is a science of power, divorced from the “transcendental, other-worldly, and…rotten ethics” of the religious, moralists, and utopians. Burnham believed Machiavelli’s amoralist realist method could be implemented to secure liberty through a powerful elite.
In his essay “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” William F. Buckley—the founder of the National Review (who said that Burnham was “the number one intellectual influence on National Review”)—wrote about the Republican Platform, beginning with an appeal to libertarians such as Albert Jay Nock, Herbert Spencer, and H.L. Mencken. But he ends the essay by revealing the truth: neoconservatives dress in libertarian anti-statism but are statist, Machiavellian, and opportunistic in their militarism.
Because he prioritized defeating the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Buckley argued for “extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-Communist foreign policy.” To defeat the Soviets, Buckley said, “[W]e have got to accept Big Government for the duration — for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged … except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” Therefore, he concludes, we conservatives and libertarians must put aside our principles and support “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington — even with Truman at the reins of it all.”
Although he later diverged from the neoconservatives during the Iraq War, Buckley’s early willingness to accept Big Government for anti-communism showed a pragmatic, or Machiavellian shift, aligning with neoconservative militarism.
In his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Jordan Peterson criticized Canadian politician Mark Carney as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” another dark tetrad type who assumes the guise of a businessman. In reality, Peterson believes he is an anti-growth “central planner” and advocate of stringent climate policies who has no respect for free markets and thinks we must “crack a few eggs to make an omelet.” But Carney’s tactics mirror the neoconservatives, who masked their interventionist agenda in conservative rhetoric by justifying the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc., as “defending freedom.”
Rather than comparing anonymous trolls online to powerful leftists like Carney, Jordan Peterson should direct his attention to the “dark tetrad” that co-opted conservatism in America and champions centralized military power in Washington, empire-building, and regime change. After all, their actions have caused immense human suffering, including hundreds of thousands of deaths, reflecting the same Machiavellian deception and harm that Peterson warns could result from Carney’s policies.