Our Trumpiavellian moment: Column

The twists and turns of the 2016 presidential race should not have been a big surprise. The fury behind the rise of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has a lot in common with the anger that drove the American Revolution.

Today’s leaders grasping to comprehend events could well understand British views 240 years ago. To the ordinary Briton in 1776, American patriots needed to chill. Taxation without representation? That described Manchester, England, too, and in any event, one estimate put the tax in question at the price of today’s dinner date.

But what about the loss of freedom? Britain and its American colonies were likely the freest places on earth in 1776. That is, if you didn’t count American slaves. There was one thing, however, that reasonably rankled the colonists, and that was British corruption.

Eighteenth century Britons took corruption for granted. “Men … no more dreamt of a seat in the House in order to benefit humanity than a child dreams of a birthday cake that others may eat it,” wrote Sir Lewis Namier. The patriots were well aware of this, from the writings of John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon (Cato’s Letters) and Viscount Bolingbroke, and also from the reports brought back to America by visitors to Britain, such as John Dickinson. “Bribery is so common that it is thought there is not a borough in England where it is not practiced,” he observed.

Closer to home, the patriots thought that the British had exported their corruption to America through the officials they had appointed. In Massachusetts, for example, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson had created a system of patronage that John Adams thought amounted to a tyranny. At one point, Hutchinson was simultaneously the colony’s lieutenant governor, a member of its House of Representatives and its chief justice. As for the tea the Sons of Liberty threw in Boston harbor, Hutchinson’s sons had been waiting to take delivery.

The patriots had studied John Locke, but they had also read the history of the fall of the Roman republic and thought that monarchies were always going to be corrupt. Monarchies would depend upon a swarm of courtiers who’d milk the public purse. We can do better, said the patriots, by adopting a republican form of government with a regime of disinterested civic virtue. The Constitution they drafted, at their 1787 Philadelphia convention, was designed as an anti-corruption covenant that would check “cabal, intrigue and faction.” The most consequential issue they debated was how presidents would be chosen, and when the question was put to them it was the fear of corruption that carried the day.

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We owe our understanding of how the patriots seized on the language of republican virtue to a group of historians, including J.G.A. Pocock. For Pocock, the Revolution was a “Machiavellian moment.” Machiavelli also held up classical republican ideals as an answer to political corruption in 16th century Florence. But just how long did republican virtue persist in America?

By 1829, when Andrew Jackson introduced the spoils system, there wasn’t too much left. As for today, the lobbyists of K Street, the associations of Alexandria, the network of political donors in America have created what Pocock regards as “the greatest empire of patronage and influence the world has known.” Our government is “dedicated to the principle that politics cannot work unless politicians do things for their friends and their friends know where to find them.”

The dream of a government free of corruption never dies, however, and the alarming rise of crony capitalism and the protest candidates who oppose it explain what increasingly looks like a new Machiavellian moment. Bernie Sanders’ improbable rise can be attributed to one thing only: He’s not corrupt. His economic proposals might strain credulity, but his supporters are recalling a nobler Democratic Party and are comparing him not with the perfect candidate, but with the Clinton Cash alternative actually on offer in the primaries.

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Then there’s Donald Trump. By taking on a Republican establishment, with its donor class and its cozy ties to the Chamber of Commerce, by questioning our campaign finance laws, Trump has emerged as the candidate of republican virtue. While perhaps not its poster child, he at least knows how the game is played. So, too, did Joseph P. Kennedy, whom Franklin Roosevelt appointed Securities and Exchange Commission chairman in 1934. Kennedy had not been seen as entirely scrupulous in his business dealings, and that was FDR’s answer to his critics. “It takes one to catch one.”

Trump has been faulted for his less than orthodox commitment to conservative principles. That hasn’t hurt him with primary voters, and in any event, the conservative who faults Trump for his lack of entitlement reform plans simply doesn’t understand the much greater cost that corruption imposes on our economy. The voters get it, however, and it has made the old liberal-conservative ideological axis increasingly irrelevant. In its place, a new corruption-virtue axis bids to take its place, one we’ve seen before, at our founding.

F.H. Buckley is a Foundation Professor at George Mason Law School and the author ofThe Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.

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