The Neocons and Machiavelli
The current US leaders' actions are so clearly sabotaging the very system that sustains them that an explanation is in order. What motivates these people? Is it mere thirst for wealth and power? Perhaps we can gain some insight by examining the philosophies they espouse.
Neoconservatism, the political movement to which most of the current administration belongs, is widely attributed to be the intellectual offspring of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a Jewish scholar who fled Hitler's Germany and taught political science at the University of Chicago. According to Shadia Drury in Leo Strauss and the American Right (Griffin, 1999), Strauss advocated an essentially Machiavellian approach to governance; he believed that
a leader must perpetually deceive those being ruled;
those who lead are accountable to no overarching system of morals, only to the right of the superior to rule the inferior;
religion is the force that binds society together, and is therefore the tool by which the ruler can manipulate the masses (any religion will do);
secularism in society is to be suppressed, because it leads to critical thinking and dissent;
a political system can be stable only if it is united against an external threat, and that if no real threat exists, one should be manufactured.
Drury writes that, "In Strauss's view, the trouble with liberal society is that it dispenses with noble lies and pious frauds. It tries to found society on secular rational foundations."
Among Strauss's students was Paul Wolfowitz, one of the leading hawks in the Defense Department who urged the invasion of Iraq; more distant followers include Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Irving Kristol, William Bennett, John Ashcroft, and Michael Ledeen.
Ledeen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules are as Timely and Important Today as Five Centuries Ago (Griffin, 1999), is a policy advisor (via Karl Rove) to the Bush administration. His fascination with Machiavelli seems to be deep and abiding, and to be shared by his fellow neocons. "In order to achieve the most noble accomplishments," writes Ledeen, "the leader may have to 'enter into evil.' This is the chilling insight that has made Machiavelli so feared, admired, and challenging. It is why we are drawn to him still. . . ."
Machiavelli's books, The Prince and The Discourses, constituted manuals on amassing political power; they have inspired kings and tyrants including Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin, and Stalin. The leader, according to Machiavelli, must pretend to do good even as he is actually doing the opposite. "Everybody sees what you appear to be, few feel what you are, and those few will not dare to oppose themselves to the many, who have the majesty of the state to defend them. . . . Let a prince therefore aim at conquering and maintaining the state, and the means will always be judged honourable and praised by everyone, for the vulgar is always taken by appearances. . . ." It is to Machiavelli that we owe the dictum that "the end justifies the means."
But what are the ends to which neoconservatives strive? Briefly: in foreign policy, American supremacy; in domestic policy, reactionary "values." We can get a sense of what makes these people tick by reviewing a little recent history.
The neoconservative movement began to coalesce in the 1970s amid the Supreme Count mandated legalization of abortion, court-ordered busing, rising crime rates, and the disruption of urban cores by major highway projects. Otherwise liberal wite urbanites began fleeing to the suburbs. Meanwhile in foreign affairs, the US was in a state of paralysis as a result of the Vietnam debacle. American elites were losing confidence in their own Cold War rhetoric. However, Israel, in contrast, had just trounced its enemies during a six-day war that had devastated the armies of the Arab world. Catholic and Jewish Democrats, many of them followers of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (who mounted three unsuccessful bids for the presidency), began entering the GOP establishment. Disagreeing with their party's positions on social issues (busing, welfare, secularism, and campus revolts) these voters were also looking for a way to regain lost US prestige. For them, Israel served as a positive example: the solution to America's foreign policy directionlessness was a turn to the right. An early intellectual leader of the movement was the Jewish former Trotskeyite New Yorker Irving Kristol, whose book Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea describes the events or the era from the neocons' perspective and gives considerable insight into their motives. Kristol founded Public Interest, one of the primary organs of the movement. Another Jewish former radical, Norman Podhoretz, founded the equally influential magazine Commentary. Podhoretz later defined neoconservatives as "liberals who had been mugged by reality." Two other neoconservative former Democrats, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had been members of "Scoop's Troops" (Jackson's cadre of young activists) during the 1970s, but jumped the Democratic ship during the Carter years. Both came to advocate a values-driven, hard-line approach to American intervention. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the UN under Reagan, was yet another former Democrat turned neocon hawk.
On the domestic front, the neocons learned first to speak the language of southern Democrats - a language of carefully veiled racial fears and resentments - and thus gained the entire South for the Republican Party. In some respects, this was part of a larger strategy to emphasize values as a way of motivating support among the lower and middle classes. The somewhat independent neoconservative Ben Wattenberg explained this strategy in his book, Values Matter Most: How Republicans or Democrats or a Third Party Can Win and Renew the American Way of Life (Free Press, 1995). Right-wing think tanks, funded by wealthy right-wing foundations, spent years systematically and scientifically identifying the "values" issues that would connect with the masses. In the process, they cemented important alliances with a cultural group that was itself becoming increasingly organized, activist, and powerful.
Enter the Religious Right
Strauss's belief that religion is a tool that leaders can use to manipulate the masses naturally leads one to wonder about the history and nature of the collaboration between neoconservatives and the Christian evangelical movement. Clearly, the neocon agenda is not what most people would traditionally have thought of as exemplifying the teachings of Jesus; how, then, has the philosophy of Strauss, Kristol, Podhoretz, and Wolfowitz come to achieve virtual sanctification in the eyes of tens of millions of devout American Christians? To answer this question, we must first examine developments within the more conservative US Christian churches in the past few decades.
In her essay The Despoiling of America, investigative reporter Katherine Yurica explains the origins of the now-dominant faction of the Christian Right, which she calls "dominionism," and how it has found common cause with the neoconservative movement.10 Dominionism, closely related to another Christian movement called "reconstructionism," was founded by the late R. J. Rushdoony, who also co-founded the Council for National Policy - which has been called the politburo of the American conservative movement, since it is composed of top political and business leaders who set the national agenda for the vast network of right-wing foundations, publishers, media, and universities that have schooled a whole generation in the ideology of neoconservatism, much the way the extremist Wahabbi religious schools funded by Saudi billionaires have seeded the Middle East with Islamic fundamentalism. Dominionism began to flourish in the 1970s as a politicized religious reaction to communism and secular humanism. One of its foremost spokesmen, Pat Robertson (religious broadcaster, former presidential candidate, and founder of the Christian Coalition), has for decades patiently and relentlessly put forward the dominionist view to his millions of daily TV viewers that God intends His followers to rule the world on His behalf. Yurica describes dominionism as a Machiavellian perversion of Christianity.
The original and defining text of Dominionism and Reconstructionism is Ruchdoony's 800-page Institutes of Biblical Law, (1973) a turgid exegesis of the Ten Commandments that sets forth the Biblical "case law" that derives from them. "The only true order," Rushdoony wrote, "is founded on Biblical Law. All law is religious in nature, and every non-Biblical law-order represents an anti-Christian religion." Further, "Every law-order is a state of war against the enemies of that order, and all law is a form of warfare."
Reconstructionism argues that the Bible must be the governing text for all areas of life - including government, education, law, and the arts. Reconstructionists examine contemporary issues and events in the light of a "Biblical world view" and "Biblical principles." Reconstructionist theologian David Chilton summarizes this view as follows: "The Christian goal for the world is the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics, in which every area of life is redeemed and placed under the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the rule of God's law." Reconstructionists espouse the goal of world conquest or "dominion," assured that the Bible has prophesied their "inevitable victory."
Reconstructionists would replace democracy with a theocratic elite who would govern according to "Biblical Law." They would also eliminate labor unions, civil rights laws, and public schools. Women would leave the work force and return to the home. Capital punishment would be applicable to crimes such as blasphemy, heresy, adultery, and homosexuality. While not all viewers of Robertson's popular daily 700 Club television program would agree with the most extreme dominionist and reconstructionist dogmas, most have been conditioned to believe that the US is a "Christian nation" that is under attack from within by secular humanists, homosexuals, and socialists; and that George W. Bush has a mandate from God to govern America (on behalf of the Lord Jesus Christ) during these troubling times. The rise of the religious right has so shifted the American political landscape in recent years that a law, the "Constitution Restoration Act of 2004," which would have been unimaginable only a decade or two ago, is now making its way through Congress. Introduced in February, the new law would, if enacted, "acknowledge God as the sovereign source of law, liberty [and] government" in the United States. Thus, in effect, the arbitrary dictates of a "higher power" - as interpreted by a judge, policeman, bureaucrat, or president - could override existing legal precedent. Any judge who presumed to overrule "God's sovereign authority" as so interpreted could be removed from office.
All of this provides tinder for the spark of Mel Gibson's recent film The Passion of the Christ, which Roger Ebert has called "the most violent single movie I have ever seen." In my view, the film's danger is not merely its anti-Semitism (Bible scholars have pointed out that the New Testament was written several decades after the events it describes, and after the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome; evidently, in that context the Gospel authors hesitated to saddle Romans with the primary responsibility for Jesus's death, and thus settled on the Jewish aristocracy as the best available scapegoats). Richard Cohen, writing in the Washington Post, perhaps comes closer to capturing the inherent danger of this movie phenomenon when he calls The Passion "fascistic" because of its glorification of violence. Others have made light of the film's goriness: Maureen Dowd notes that The Passion "has the cartoonish violence of a Sergio Leone Western; you might even call it a spaghetti crucifixion, 'A Fistful of Nails'"; the online magazine Slate described it as "a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie - 'The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre'"; while Steve Martin suggests it should have been called "Lethal Passion."
For the devout, however, the blood and flying flesh are sacred reminders of what our Lord endured for us. They are a measure of the wickedness of the secularists, the Muslims, the unbelievers. "See what they did to our Lord!," the well-schooled dominionist must thing when leaving the theater. "When the time comes that we have them supine before us, we must show them no mercy!"
And so, for the next few months, until the election, we will, all of us - like it or not - be marinating in a dangerous mixture of religious fanaticism, political intrigue, economic upheaval, and unraveling scandal. The people in power (and their supporters) are not open to logic or compromise. Nevertheless, challenges to their power are arising in ever-greater number and intensity. An irresistible force is about to encounter an immovable object.
