Power, Peace, and Knowing When To Shift Gears

Yahoo

29-04-2025

Our Disruptor-in-Chief has grabbed the bloated federal corpus in his teeth and given it a good hard shake for 100 days. Many Americans have welcomed this forceful reassessment.
I count myself among them. My service as chief domestic policy adviser in the George W. Bush administration left me appalled at how truculently the federal blob resists reform. Bureaucratic inertia and managerial arrogance make even the most sensible improvements exhaustingly difficult. In my new book My West Wing, I describe how doggedly the "permanent state" in places like the FAA, VA, Education Department, and Fish & Wildlife Service obstructs efforts to revamp governance.
Thats how we ended up with a runaway federal train. When I left the White House in 2009, the national budget was less than $3 trillion. It was hardly lean and clean then. So consider that just 15 years later, federal spending and coercive power reached $7 trillion.
In addition to being profligate with the common funds, federal authorities have often been hostile to common sense. Destructive magical thinking has been promoted with increasing force: "A trillion-dollar spending spree wont cause inflation." "A persons sex is assigned, not intrinsic." "Locking up criminals is wrong." "Non-citizens should have the same rights as citizens to a drivers license, housing, EBT cards, due process, even voting."
If the bull now occupying our national china closet can jolt the federal apparatus in different directions, millions of Americans will be grateful.
However: Right after giving thanks, many of those same folks will begin to pray that Washington, D.C., can soon become a quieter and more boring place. As happy as they are to say goodbye to the go-with-the-flow timidity that so many pre-Trump politicians exhibited, the public will soon be looking for less overbearing, more temperate, more lasting leadership from the White House. Progressive arrogance got us into todays mess; some conservative humility will be necessary to get us into a better spot.
High-handed modes of governing are not a sustainable way to run a representative republic. Over a longer haul, our levers of power need to be operated in prudent ways that are respectful of evolved traditions, human weaknesses, and continuous rule of law. Once our state organs have been brought back under the control of sane citizens, finding consensus, building alliances, and getting away from a wartime footing will be essential.
History is full of warnings that even the most necessary crusades can swing too far into purity campaigns, personality cults, self-indulgence, and tyrannizing. Think of the excesses of Oliver Cromwell at the end of the English Civil War. The bloodiness that followed the French Revolution. Andrew Jackson turning his egalitarian movement into a system of personal spoils. FDR bullying opponents to swing the country toward collectivism.
Reformers can quickly create terrible mirror images of the wrongs they arrived to overturn. The guillotines in Paris sliced many innocent necks. The Bolsheviks became far more abusive than the Czars.
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.
That there is a spurt of interest in Machiavellian strategy in Washington today does not trouble me. Every political leader has to be more interested in results than theory, so even in idealistic nations like ours its not wrong to study Machiavelli for hints on how to get difficult things done against opposition. For years, a powerful progressive establishment closed ranks and pointed spears at anyone questioning their governing orthodoxies, so we ended up with the inmates running the asylum. You can see why sensible people tired of losing culture battles might rummage through Italian utilitarianism for new approaches.
Yet I suggest that the men and women who govern America should never do more than dip occasionally into Machiavellis toolbox. He can help us understand how political war gets waged. But we must avoid being swept into the cynical power-grabbing that he and other autocrats have promoted throughout history.
Abraham Lincoln is a fine example for leaders who want to win arguments without losing their souls. Lincoln had enough realism in his veins to recognize that there were points where he had to suspend habeas corpus, ram through a military draft, seize newspapers, defy the separation of powers to release an Emancipation Proclamation, and fire generals until he finally found a hellhound. He did all of those things - but he did them reluctantly, temporarily, carefully, with provisos.
Even as Lincoln found his inner Machiavelli when essential, he drew much more often on a paragon who preached principles utterly inverse to those of the crafty Italian. Lincoln leaned on the precepts of Christ far more than any other body of wisdom. He used them to make sense of life, to inspire action, to show his citizens how to bear suffering and ultimately triumph.
In our humane republic, the Christian virtues are ultimately superpowers, not weaknesses. Faith "directs the manners of the community" in America, observed Alexis de Tocqueville. "And by regulating domestic life it regulates the State."
Many of us who worked in the White House after Lincoln have tried to find his golden balance of hard heads and soft hearts, his mix of battling and reconciling. Thats an extremely difficult synthesis. Its clear, though, that a political reformer who scorns self-control, humility, and neighborliness will find that his haughtiness eventually leads to defeat.
Freedoms best leaders find ways to reconcile the requirements of power and peace. They offer the steely authority of a national father, who fiercely protects his charges at dangerous moments, and they mix this with the restraint, warmth, and patience of a national mother who plants seeds for enduring success.
Yes, every head of state must periodically respond to hard threats with hard rebuffs. To keep a democracy healthy, however, you must sometimes trade martial triumphs for the advantages of mutuality. That insight often baffles, even inspires derision, in aggressive wielders of authority. But again and again the unremittingly bellicose have been humbled by the worlds 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." In our self-governing nation, that is the path to sustained authority.
Politicians whobuild upon Judeo-Christian virtues and acknowledge human frailties will be more effective at managing free people. They may lose some day-to-day skirmishes. But their solutions built on respect and empathy will eventually be preferred by ordinary people - who recognize that society is ultimately a compact, not a cage fight.
Karl Zinsmeister was chief domestic policy adviser to the president from 2006 to 2009. This article is adapted from his new book 'My West Wing: A very personal account of work in the White House…and how to solve Washington's perpetual resistance to reform.'