Loved or Feared

Every ruler dreams of being loved by his people, and most discover, sooner or later, that fear is much easier to manage. That was the lesson Niccolò Machiavelli learned in 1513, after his name turned up on the wrong list, found in the pocket of a conspirator he barely knew, and the new government of Florence subjected him six times to an ordeal known as the rope, his wrists bound behind his back and tied to a cord that hoisted him by the arms toward the ceiling, then released him in a sharp drop that wrenched his shoulders out of joint.

From there, he went into exile on a country estate, where by night he began writing a manual of political survival, offered without a shred of shame to the very clan that had tortured and banished him. There is something delicious, and a little uncomfortable for anyone who writes about power while living under it, in the fact that the most lucid portrait of authority ever put on paper came from an unemployed courtier willing to resort to any flattery to get his job back.

If he needed work today, he would probably be writing the most servile column ever published in defense of the prime minister of Israel, and I doubt that I, or anyone else who also depends on the goodwill of those in charge, would have the standing to throw the first stone.

But the text escaped its author, which tends to happen with good ideas and almost never with flatterers. The Medici, for the record, never gave him his job back. He asked whether it was better to be loved than feared, and answered, with the calm of a man who had seen too much to afford idealism, that the ideal would be both, but that since this is rare, a ruler does better to bet on the fear of others, because affection depends on the goodwill of whoever gives it, while fear depends only on whoever inspires it, and goodwill, as anyone who has ever been betrayed knows, tends to switch sides exactly when it is needed most.

Applied to the man who has governed us longer than anyone else in our history, that distinction stops being theory. We have plenty of reason to fear the missile coming from outside. What sounds increasingly familiar is the rest of the script, the prosecutor who softens the charge, the judge who postpones the trial, the press that moderates its tone, and the reform of the very court that might one day convict the leader, sold to the country as the salvation of the state.

It is worth pausing over what exactly is being saved. This is a country whose judges have sent a president to prison for rape and a prime minister to prison for bribery, a record that does not describe a fragile democracy in need of rescue but a sturdy one that learned to treat no office as sacred, and that sturdiness is precisely the inconvenience, because a court capable of jailing the powerful is of no use to a man who intends never to stop being powerful. Political scientists have given that script a pretty name, illiberal democracy, and the curious thing is that it always arrives dressed as a national emergency, never as personal ambition.

It is tragic to watch the same men who present themselves as guardians of our people and our history reach, whenever the law gets too close to them, for the same trick, confusing the survival of the country with the survival of their own tenure, as though the two things were the same thing, an equivalence no one but them has ever actually confirmed.

The logic Machiavelli put on paper, even though composed to please one particular prince, spares no prince who resembles him. Perhaps because its author had dangled from the state’s rope and learned, in his own shoulders, what fear costs whoever suffers it, the book sets apart the prince who is feared because he protects from the prince who is feared because he fears being replaced, and reserves for the second the harshest adjective in its vocabulary, contemptible.

The flattery failed, the book endured, and the unemployed courtier, who wanted only a job, ended up bequeathing to every generation the exact instrument for measuring the man who wants only not to lose his. Our prime minister carries that adjective with the same discipline he applies to everything else. He knows exactly what he is doing, and he does it because he knows, which is a far more precise way of saying that the devotion he sells us as love of country has, for a long time now, been nothing but love of himself.