Full disclosure: I consider the NYT to be a gang of flabby, post-modernist girlymen who stroke each other(‘s egos) all day long, and try to get an emotional response out of their dwindling readership.
So today I saw a comment on one their articles that fully describes my opinion of what is wrong with America.
Who do we want to emulate? A bunch of tribalist beach bums who sing “O Sole Mio” while thinking about how to poison their uncle in order to take over his restaurant, or the Iron Will of Prussian Steel???
Here is the comment from the unworthy-to-read article:
Do we really need to be told that “Machiavelli still matters”? The Medicis had maybe a small handful of household advisers. Today, we have vast bureaucracies–the State Department, the NSA, the CIA, the Pentagon, etc.–all full of thousands of little Machiavellian policy advisers, whose careers depend on being as coldly realistic and pragmatic about National interest as possible. Our entire economy is run by little Machiavellian profit maximizers who get fired if they think about anything but the bottom line.
So if anything, we need more reflection on how so much of all this pure Machiavellian advice has gone so terribly wrong, even judged by its own Machiavellian standards. And then we need to ask if we the people should put so much trust in these Machiavellian guardians. Their claim to power is based on supposedly understanding policy complexities better than “the people” and having the Machiavellian virtue of being committed to the exclusive pursuit of National power and economic interest. Why does that so seldom work out as promised? Why has Iranian hegemony been strengthened by the invasion of Iraq, not weakened? Why do their policies so often harm National interest instead of furthering it, or turn out so often to serve narrow sectoral interest, like Wall Street, enriching a few but leaving the country in economic crisis or mounting debt? Maybe the problem is that Machiavelli matters too much.
Original Article Why Machiavelli Matters
P.S. – I do have Italian friends and I enjoy their company a lot. I am not an Italo-phobe.