Like many Americans, I was mortified by developments during the Obama and Biden administrations, when government became more controlling, more crusading, and more coercive than anything previously seen in the US. Throughout my career, I have strongly preferred governance that is as unintrusive on daily life as possible. But the recent radicalization of our culture, economy, and government made me much more open to the pugnacious actions of the Trump administration.
For the chaotic moment in which we find ourselves, Trump’s disruptive strategy feels necessary. Destructive cultural radicalism, strangled freedoms, economic decline, and overseas dangers left even many temperamentally conservative citizens like me ready for a dramatic break with the past. Anything to shake off societal sickness and give our body politic a chance to start over in fresh and healthy ways.
Trump is a highly unlikely savior, unanticipated by any of the solons running our country before he arrived, and a sharp break from all prior presidents. He embodies many of the personal qualities our mothers warned us against. But he seems the only contemporary figure capable of clearing blockages, cutting out tumors, and resetting our national health.
Yet burn-it-down approaches to governance are not sustainable over the long run. At some point the government needs to exercise authority in ways that are less jarring and disruptive, more temperate, more deferential to precedent and continuous rule of law. So when common-sense policies and more responsive institutions return in our nation’s capital, sensible Americans of all stripes will say a prayer of gratitude and then hope that our nation’s capital can become a much quieter and more boring place.
A reformed and restored America will need people who respect consensus. People averse to radical change, utopias, or life in armed camps. People who want the state to avoid encroaching on the organic community life of citizens and families. Then we can stop focusing on events in our capital and pour energy instead into our traditional projects of building enterprises and interacting with our neighbors with restraint and forgiveness and generosity.
Government “is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master,” as a quote widely attributed to George Washington puts it. Thomas Jefferson urged that federal rule should be deliberately mild: never high-handed, arrogant, or imperious; modest in scope; and light in its press upon people. “That government is best which governs least,” as the famous Jeffersonian line has it.
There are scads of cautionary examples from history warning that even the most noble and necessary crusades can swing too far into purity campaigns, personality cults, vengefulness, self-indulgence, and tyranny. The most welcome reformers can inadvertently create a terrible mirror image of the wrongs they arrived to overturn. The guillotines in Paris sliced many innocent necks. The Bolsheviks became far more abusive than the czars.
Disrupt and replace is the right mantra when pushing through reforms for which society is starved. But once beyond the national emergency, leaders must shift to more restrained, disciplined, and respectful ways of operating. If there isn’t eventually a transition of this sort, the Trump era could end in flaming hubris and overreach.
Many people are grateful to today’s disruptor in chief for jolting us away from a dangerous abyss. Next we must hope that he and his successors will evolve into more lasting leaders. Our presidents must avoid the arrogance that will eventually undo any leader in a representative republic.
Niccolo Machiavelli was a jaded political strategist in Renaissance Italy who prescribed manipulation, ruthlessness, and deceit to win political battles. He dismissed Christian ethics. His win-at-all-costs, might-makes-right philosophy has been attractive to strongmen like Henry VIII and Joseph Stalin.
Machiavelli has never been an American favorite. Every political leader, however, has to be more interested in results than theory, so I’m neither surprised nor troubled that there is a spurt of interest in Machiavellian strategy today in Washington. With sensible Americans losing over and over in the culture wars, you can see why rummaging through Italian utilitarianism to find ways of leveling the playing field might have some attraction. Yet I suggest the men and women who govern in America should never do more than dip occasionally and tactically into Machiavelli’s toolbox.
Administrators of our great representative government must mesh the practical imperatives of princes of power with the deep wisdoms of the Prince of Peace. That is excruciatingly hard. But the unremittingly bellicose have been humbled again and again by the opposing approach of the world’s most successful revolutionary creed: “Do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. … Do to others as you would have them do to you” (Luke 6:27–28, 31). In a popularly ruled nation, that is the path to lasting trust and authority.
Karl Zinsmeister from 2006 to 2009 was George W. Bush’s chief domestic policy adviser. His new book, My West Wing, expands on these views of Washington resistance to reform.
