The politics of the Gilded Age were undeniably corrupt — Mark Twain dubbed the whole thing the Great Barbecue — and the progressives of the era — intellectuals like historian Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and the Mugwumps — hoped for a better system:
What Adams and the Mugwumps are asking for is no less than the creation of a new power structure, a “lofty rostrum,” which is above democracy — which supersedes mere politics, which makes decisions and policies much as Adams and his friends would have — in the light of reason and science, the “calm lessons of history,” not the mad psychological battlefield of the torchlight election parade.The result is our Modern Structure [of power], of course. The dream made real. The Mugwumps won. Yet somehow, all the diseases Adams diagnoses seem worse then ever. What happened?
What happened is that Adams and his friends, as members of an aristocratic intellectual caste, true Platonic guardians, Harvard-bred heirs to the American dream, had been disempowered. Sidelined, in fact, by grubby street politics of a distinctly Hibernian flavor. This could not have been expected to make them happy. It did, however, render them pure — because even if the Carl Schurzes of the world had been inclined to corruption, which they were not, competing with the James G. Blaines of the world in that department was simply out of the question.
So the Mugwumps believed that, by running a pipe from the limpid spring of academia to the dank sewer of American democracy, they could make the latter run clear again. What they might have considered, however, was that there was no valve in their pipe. Aiming to purify the American state, they succeeded only in corrupting the American mind.
When an intellectual community is separated from political power, as the Mugwumps were for a while in the Gilded Age, it finds itself in a strange state of grace. Bad ideas and bad people exist, but good people can recognize good ideas and good people, and a nexus of sense forms. The only way for the bad to get ahead is to copy the good, and vice pays its traditional tribute to virtue. It is at least reasonable to expect sensible ideas to outcompete insane ones in this “marketplace,” because good sense is the only significant adaptive quality.
Restore the connection, and the self-serving idea, the meme with its own built-in will to power, develops a strange ability to thrive and spread. Thoughts which, if correct, provide some pretext for empowering the thinker, become remarkably adaptive. Even if they are utterly insane. As the Latin goes: vult decipi, decipiatur. Self-deception does not in any way preclude sincerity.
Ideas are not individuals. They do not organize, have meetings in beer halls, wear identically colored shirts, practise the goose step or chant in the streets. However, to ambitious people the combination of good and altruistic intended effects, with evil and self-serving actual effects, is eternally attractive. We can describe policies exhibiting this stereotype as Machiavellian.
The Modern Structure [of power] exhibits a fascinating quality which might be described as distributed Machiavellianism. [The US Government] under the Modern Structure enacts large numbers of policies (such as “affirmative action”) which are best explained in Machiavellian terms. However, there is no central cabal dictating Machiavellian strategies, and actors in the Structure do not feel they are pursuing evil or experience any pangs of conscience.
Under this pattern, the intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both. The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc, etc. In other words, the adaptive purpose of the actors is to maximize their own share of sovereignty. The side effects are at least parasitic, and at worst far worse.
Most people’s share of sovereignty is zero. However, many aspire to make policy who will never get there, just as many aspire to play in the NBA. Since Machiavellian thinking tends to become the corporate culture of all powerful institutions, and since the ambitious naturally tend to emulate the thinking of the powerful, the natural perspective of the ambitious becomes Machiavellian. In a meritocratic oligarchy, where power is open only to those who succeed in contests of intellectual strength, the natural perspective of the intelligent is Machiavellian.
In other words: Machiavellian ideas are adaptive in a competitive oligarchy, because they allow members of that oligarchy to feel good about themselves while in fact looking out for number one. However, if the same exact people are completely disconnected from power and have no chance of regaining it, these same ideas will dwindle and die out, their intrinsic stupidity soon revealing itself.
Just in time for Watchmen, Mencius re-raises the old question:
Once again, we see the failure to solve the quis custodiet problem. The classic mistake is to pass power to some new institution, already extant but hitherto uncorrupted. It appears worthy of power because it is worthy of power, being uncorrupted. However, it is uncorrupted only because it has not yet held power. Handed power, it becomes corrupt, and the problem repeats.So it was not the intelligence or education of the Mugwumps that shielded them from the corruption of power, but solely their (temporary) irrelevance. When that irrelevance was reversed, the consequence was a new system of government by deception — the Modern Structure — which is not, unlike the coarse populist mendacity of the Gilded Age, transparent to anyone of any intelligence or education.
The Modern Structure is just as sophisticated as Charles Francis Adams, Jr., and no less slippery, mendacious or corrupt than James G. Blaine. It is subject to all the woes of the system it replaced, but its new system of deception is impenetrable enough to convince even most of the most intelligent that up is actually down. It is, in short, a perfect disaster.