Returning to First Principles America's Machiavellian Moment?

Niccolo Machiavelli, is usually cast as something of a villain for supposedly promoting cut-throat politics. Regarded as the father of modern political theory and science, however, among his many ideas was that when regimes - governments - slip into a state of decline, a return to first principles was necessary to save them. Turning back to the ideas that were most pure at a founding was, he believed, essential to revive a country that had lost its way. Is America at such a point today? Political theorist, commentator, and author Jay Cost believes we are, and discusses what a “Machiavellian Moment” is, and why America, especially as we approach our 250th birthday, is in need of one. Read his article: https://tinyurl.com/3ytfx3fb Host: Jeff Sikkenga Executive Producer: Jeremy Gypton Subscribe: https://linktr.ee/theamericanidea Homepage: https://ashbrook.org/the-american-ide... Timestamps 00:32 Jeff Sikkenga introduces guest Jay Cost, AEI's Gerald R. Ford Senior Fellow, to discuss the "Machiavellian moment" and what a 16th-century Florentine thinker has to do with America. 02:03 Cost traces the concept to Spencer Klavan's "Age of America" essay and J.G.A. Pocock's book The Machiavellian Moment, which draws on Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy: regimes decay over time, and renewal requires a return to first principles, since governments are best at their founding. The idea reaches back to Polybius and the cyclical view of history. Pocock argues that the book connects republican thought in Florence, Civil War Britain, and the American Revolution, framing the "Machiavellian moment" as when a new republic first confronts the problem of preserving its ideals and institutions. 04:33 The American Revolution itself was such a moment: colonists revolted to preserve traditional Whig principles of self-determination and popular sovereignty against British corruption, making it almost a sequel to the Glorious Revolution. 07:10 Cost identifies later moments led by presidents: Lincoln preserving the republic against the southern slaveocracy, Teddy Roosevelt confronting concentrated wealth and oligarchy, and FDR reimagining federal power to secure the social contract during the Depression. 09:09 On Jefferson's "earth belongs to the living" letter, Cost distinguishes Jefferson's small-d democratic instinct from the more elite-driven, small-r republican framework of Madison (Federalist 50) and Machiavelli, where "heroic sacrifices" by political elites awaken the people. 11:45 In the modern era, Cost places Reagan firmly in this tradition. Reagan's moral framing of the Soviet Union as evil and his case for unlocking American entrepreneurship both drew on founding-era convictions that liberty is morally good. Obama, by contrast, gestured at the register rhetorically without substance. 14:44 Cost argues realignments are downstream of statesmen resolving major policy disputes (Lincoln on slavery, TR on concentrated wealth, Reagan on tax-and-spend liberalism), not products of the elections themselves. 17:55 On 2026, Cost sees a period of potential decay: both parties gleefully attacking constitutive republican rules — Republicans pushing to end the filibuster, Democrats backing the National Popular Vote Compact and Supreme Court packing. America is a democratic republic, and these are assaults on its small-r republican character, which Machiavelli would call corruption. 21:21 The deeper failure is one of elites and the educational institutions that form them. Higher education has become a "glorified finishing school" and resume-builder, conditioning future elites to pursue personal glory rather than to see themselves as trustees of the greatest tradition in Western civilization. Civic virtue as duty to the broader community has been lost. 28:33 The founders studied Roman statesmen — Publius, Cato, Cicero — as exemplars. Americans now have their own treasury (Washington, Lincoln, Webster, Henry Clay as a model of compromise), but elites no longer know them or draw lessons from them. 32:33 Cost points to programs like Arizona State's School of Civic and Economic Thought and the Hamilton School at Florida as workarounds, reconstituting departments explicitly aimed at training statesmen who understand public service as a trust. 34:15 Despite being a temperamental pessimist, Cost is hopeful: America has repeatedly pulled out of seemingly fatal crises (the Gilded Age spoils system, the Great Depression, recent economic gloom now overtaken by the AI revolution). Betting against America has historically been a losing proposition. 36:31 Sikkenga closes by recommending Cost's book Democracy or Republic: How the Founders Crafted the Constitution as the Blueprint for Self-Government.