Back to the Future
As most of my readers are aware, I have been away for the past week and a half. I've been in 15th century Florence, to be precise, colloguing with Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Savonarola, Cosimo and Lorenzo de' Medici, Machiavelli, and others. As a traveler in time and space, I was eager to share my thoughts on the American present, which for them is an unimaginably distant future.
When, from time to time, I received messages from July 2024, I asked them for comments. President Biden's woes intrigued Machiavelli. He pointed out that this American President, whose career I described to him, was a good example of a prince whose power has been more or less given to him by the exertions and talents of others. Such men may be--as Biden certainly is--as unscrupulous as Cesare Borgia, but if they lack the necessary virtù--manly fortitude--they almost always lose.
What puzzled my new friend Niccolò was how a man so manifestly duplicitous and incompetent could ever have found himself the ruler, even the nominal ruler of a vast empire. I tried to explain the American political system in terms he could understand and compared the two party system to the rivalry in Florence between the Commune, which represented the larger economic interests, and the Popolo, which claimed to speak for the lower classes, while at the same time serving the interests of Gibelline nobility and disgruntled competitors for power within the commune. Machiavelli replied that only one Florentine leader had ever been as stupid and degenerate as Biden and that was Lorenzo's son, Piero the Loser, who had inherited his power and promptly lost it.
Niccolò then inquired who was Biden's brilliant and powerful successor. When I described Kamala Harris, he burst out laughing and explained,
Now I understand, my Atlantean friend. You have told me about some of my future disciples, Gaetano Mosca in particular, and by reading his work and mine, you should be aware that leaders are only a magnifying mirror of the people's character. A Spartan king was supposed to be tough, brave, and resourceful, because those were qualities that Spartans admired and sought to display. We Florentines were brilliant and not a little greedy, full of panache, lovers of beauty, fond of taking great risks in business and in foreign adventures. We looked up to leaders who were intelligent, crafty, full of life and devoted to beauty, as Lorenzo was and also his son Pope Leo X. You Atlanteans by contrast, if we can judge from these characters--Biden and Harris--whom you describe, are petty thieves, utterly charmless, incapable of telling the truth, even when the truth does not harm your interests, blind to reality. We followed Brother Gerolamo, but he was brilliant, erudite, incorruptible, but your people run after the sort of greedy little clerics who seduce little boys and steal from the collection plate. You believe what they tell you, when they declare, "the king of Babylon shall not come against you, and you will be astonished when your nation is as desolate as Judaea after the Babylonian conquest.
I could not help asking my new friend about the shooting of Trump.
What you tell me of this man indicates that there is a different side to the Atlantean character, probably a residue of a time when your great man were bold adventurers, rough-hewn and courageous. They were perhaps not entirely scrupulous in their treatment of the weaker peoples whom they easily subdued, but they could rise to meet a crisis. From this Trump's response to being shot, I would also say they must have had a good deal of humbug about them--like this man Barnum you have been telling me about, what we Italians call a Saltimbanco--the trickster who gets up on a soapbox and promises a miracle cure or love potion to the dupes that believe him. What is that Atlantean slogan you told me about? Never give a sucker an even break. I take that to mean: If you play cards with a fool, you should always cheat him.
My skeptical friend went on to explain that if the American people had to choose between a Barnum and an aging and overweight courtesan, we should pick the Barnum, "But," he added, "Don't be the sucker who thinks he is going to make a difference. The society you live in long ago lost the power and the right to enjoy even the smallest dose of reality, the slightest taste of liberty.
