In 1943, James Burnham published what may be the most important political work of the twentieth century, The Machiavelians. Why is it so important? The book introduced a unique and rarely employed approach to politics, one which concentrated on attempting to explain politics as it actually functions in the real world, rather than as various individuals believe it ought to function (and rarely, if ever, does). Burnham presented the three most prominent members of the Italian elite school, Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto, as exemplars of this approach.
Despite the brilliance and importance of Burnham’s book, it nonetheless fell out of print at the end of the twentieth century. Only in the last fifteen years or so has it been rediscovered by a new generation of intellectuals. The lion’s share of these intellectuals, as it turns out, tend to be on the right; and by right, I don’t merely mean what is considered as “the right” in popular discourse (i.e., “mainstream” conservativism), but the “dissident” right, or what could easily be regarded as the true or genuine right (at least if viewed in a historical context). What passes for the right in American politics is not the right at all, but is more properly called the center or even the center-left. Today’s so-called right-wingers, whether in their “conservative” or “populist” guise, are representatives of the liberal tradition in America (as defined by the political scientist Louis Hartz). They are classical or Lockean liberals, not right-wingers. Their chief inspiration is the British statesman Edmund Burke, who was hardly a man of the right.
Now the dissident right, it must be admitted, exists mostly outside the mainstream of culture, politics and even, to some extent, societal norms. This enables it to offer an original, often heretical, examination of prevailing social and political pieties—one that you’ll certainly never find from mainstream sources. And this, if I’m not mistaken, is the reason why Burnham’s The Machiavellians has become such an important book to many of dissident right’s most interesting thinkers. For The Machiavellians is a heretical book. In many important respects, it challenges the cliche-thinking and platitudinous moralizing that tends to dominate mainstream political theorizing. A realist view of politics will never be popular either with the ruling class or with the ruled.
One of the most important scholars and intellectuals operating within the current dissident right is author and YouTuber Neema Parvini, perhaps more widely known on the internet as “Academic Agent.” In 2022, Parvini published one of the best political books to come out in recent years, The Populist Delusion. Ostensibly, the book seeks to explain why the wave of populism that catapulted Donald Trump into the Presidency in 2016 failed to bring any meaningful change. Making use primarily of political thinkers from the Machiavellian tradition (the aforementioned Mosca, Michels, Pareto, and Burnham), Parvini contends that the whole thing was fixed from the very beginning. Democracy is a fraud: the people have no sovereignty or power and therefore can do nothing on their own initiative to affect social or political change.
Parvini’s argument is of course eminently plausible, and he makes a very good case for it in The Populist Delusion—but is it fully and absolutely true? I’ll admit to entertaining a few stray doubts. To be sure, there isn’t much to quibble with when it comes to the main thrust of his thesis—which is to say, that “the people” can never be “sovereign”:
An organised minority always rules over the majority [explains Parvini]. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study showed that public opinion has a near-zero impact on law-making in the USA across 1,779 policy issues. In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’.
Parvini’s insistence that no social change can ever occur from the “bottom-up” strikes me as true in part but not in whole. Just because “the people” are not entirely sovereign doesn’t mean they have no influence whatsoever on their rulers. If ninety percent of the subject class passionately opposed cannibalism and yet the ruling elite made an effort to “mainstream” feasting on human flesh, that would lead to a potentially dangerous level of social disequilibrium, likely ending in violent protests, sanguinary clashes with elite military forces, and blood running in the streets. We must also keep in mind that the elite itself is not entirely homogeneous, that on the contrary it is made up of factions in competition with each other for the top positions within the ruling elite itself. In this struggle for preeminence between the elites themselves, widespread discontent within the subject class will often be used as a kind of leverage through which one faction within the elite tries to gain an advantage over all the others. Nor should we forget that there may exist political factions—organized minorities, if you will—existing outside the ruling class, eager to worm their way up the greasy pole and secure a place for themselves at the summit of power. In other words, in any reasonably “pluralistic” (i.e., non-totalitarian) society, there will likely be would-be political leaders looking for wide swaths of dissatisfaction within the subject class which they can use to help propel themselves up the status hierarchy into the higher reaches of the power elite.
Now Parvini could argue that, since these wide swaths of dissatisfaction can never get anywhere without help from “elite” leadership, he is right to insist that no change in society or politics can be “driven” by the “the people.” But I would counter by suggesting this misses the point. When a political faction either within or outside the elite attempts to use a “bottom-up” social movement to leverage themselves to a higher rung on the power-status hierarchy, it must be granted that the “bottom-up” part of the equation plays a role in the whole process. Now of course these would-be elites are competing with other often better positioned elites, so there is no guarantee that the challengers will succeed. And even if they do succeed, it’s unlikely they’ll get everything they want, whether for themselves or their clients in the subject class, because in politics as in life hardly anyone ever gets what they presume to want. We live among hundreds of millions of people, both competing and cooperating with us in pursuit of goals that sometimes clash, sometimes align with our own. In this maelstrom of heterogeneity, almost everyone has to settle for something less than what they would regard as optimal.
The larger point I would emphasize is that the MAGA movement did not fail solely because it was a “bottom-up” movement. It may have started as a bottom-up movement, but during its brief ascent via the Presidency of Donald Trump it was clearly something more than that. It actually had a taste of power, and with a bit of luck it might have enjoyed better long-term success. It certainly put the scare into the more entrenched elites within the ruling class, especially those within the Democratic Party. Large sections of the ruling establishment were so frightened that they went out of their way to form a “secret” committee of their very best people to develop and execute a “shadow campaign” that would assure Trump’s defeat in the 2020 Presidential election; and if it hadn’t been for the Covid-19 Pandemic, it’s not altogether clear these election fortification stratagems would have succeeded.
I suspect The Populist Delusion could also be criticized for going too far in its denial of the efficacy of democratic institutions. While it is no doubt true that government “by the people” is an imaginary construct, this does not mean that the actual “system” of democracy, as it prevails in the world of fact, is a complete and total fraud. From a more realistic, non-ideological perspective, democracy can be seen as, in the words of Joseph Schumpeter, an “institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire [constituted power] by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote" [Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 269]. That is to say, under a democracy certain elites are forced to compete against one another in a game called an election. While this is a very imperfect way of coaxing the ruling elite to be observant of the desires and “needs'' of the masses, it does allow for at least some measure of democratic influence. If we were to rate this influence on a scale of zero through ten, while it wouldn’t be a ten or even a five, it wouldn’t be zero either.
Although I don’t find Parvini’s main thesis altogether convincing, that doesn’t mean The Populist Delusion isn’t worth reading. The trick is not to read it for its thesis, but rather for its brief but superb essays on some of the most important political thinkers of the last century or so. Parvini covers not only the Italian Elite theorists (i.e., Mosca, Michels and Pareto), but Carl Schmitt, Bertrand de Jouvenel, James Burnham, Samuel T. Francis and Paul Gottfried. All these political theorists wrote books well worth reading. But not all of us have the time or the energy to read their books, many of which are very long and pose huge difficulties for the non-scholar. So having a book that provides concise and eminently readable overviews of these seminal thinkers is very useful to have on hand, and every library, personal or otherwise, should have a copy of Parvini’s tome on its shelves. It makes for an invaluable reference book if nothing else.
As splendid as Parvini’s abstracts on these eight political thinkers undoubtedly are, there is one thinker that in some respects eludes our intrepid author’s grasp. Parvini’s treatment of Pareto does in a few places miss the mark—which is hardly to be wondered at, given the sheer immensity and ambition of Pareto’s thought. Hardly any social thinker has been more dogged and valiant in his attempt to grapple with the bewildering mass of complexities that make up modern society than this Italian polymath. Pareto’s main work on sociology, translated into English as The Mind and Society, is over a million words long. Perhaps the reason why some of the nuances in Pareto’s thought may have eluded Parvini’s grasp is that he admits to reading a 450 page abridgment of the work rather than the whole thing. It’s not clear to this commentator that the richness of Pareto’s thought can be fully grasped by reading an abridgment. While I can certainly sympathize with those who don’t have the time to trudge through the massive original, there may not be any help for it.
This does not mean, however, that Parvini’s sketch of Pareto’s sociology doesn’t have some excellent things in it. He does a superb job of explaining Pareto’s theory of residues and derivations. He even points out how Pareto’s theory is congruous with the psychological theories developed by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind. He also does a superb job of explaining Pareto’s rejection of theories of histories—no mean feat, given the complexity of Pareto’s views on this issue. Where Parvini perhaps loses his way is when he suggest that Pareto’s system might not be internally consistent with itself:
[T]here is the more penetrating critique that his argument is self-refuting: namely that his whole edifice is simply what he “already feels.” This would not refute the correctness or validity of Pareto’s project since if the theory of the sentiments and residues is true then the fruits of Pareto’s own instinctual feelings simply tell us profound truths about human nature itself… In other words, that the ideas may have their root in some non-logical aspect of Pareto’s thinking and feeling is not significant. Pareto does not say that all derivations based on residues and sentiments are delusional, he says it is delusional to believe that there might be derivations that are somehow not rooted in residues and sentiments. Since almost all other derivations (i.e. all those other than his) do not acknowledge this fact, they are therefore delusional. However, even with these caveats, I am not sure that Pareto can escape the charge that his absolute adherence to this view itself amounts to a faith position.
The error Parvini commits is to assume that Pareto regards all social theories and other ideas as mere “derivations” (i.e., as rationalizations of thought and conduct). This is simply not true. Pareto clearly distinguishes between what he calls conclusions based on logico-experimental science and “derivations” based on sentiments. Logico-experimental science discovers “probable” truths about the external world, while derivations are merely rationalizations of underlying psychological and motivational states. Early on in The Mind and Society, Pareto explains what he is attempting to accomplish in his massive sociological treatise:
We start with facts to work out theories, and we try at all times to stray from the facts as little as possible. We are looking for the uniformities presented by facts, and those uniformities we may even call laws; but the facts are not subject to the laws: the laws are subject to the facts. They are hypotheses serving to epitomize a more or less extensive number of facts and so serving only until superseded by better ones.
Every inquiry of ours is, therefore, contingent, relative, yielding results that are just more or less probable, and at best very highly probable….
Proofs of our propositions we seek strictly in experience and observation, along with the logical inferences they admit of, barring all proof by accord of sentiments, “inner persuasion,” “dictate of conscience.” [§69]
Pareto also makes it clear that he has no interest in converting anyone to a specific creed. His quest is confined to discovering social uniformities and social laws, and he even goes so far as to intimate that he would not have bothered to write his treatise if he had any reason to believe it might have attained a wide readership:
I am here reporting on the results of my quest, since I hold in view of the restricted number of readers such a study can have and in view of the scientific training that may be taken in granted for them, such a report can do no harm. I would refrain from doing so if I could reasonably imagine these volumes were to be at all generally read. [§86]
Pareto is here suggesting that he doesn’t want his book to be widely read. But why not? Aren’t all authors eager to gain as many readers as possible? Pareto seems to believe that his book, were it to become popular, might cause harm to society. Harm in what way? The answer would seem to lie in Pareto’s theory of myths and ideals. Pareto held that belief in what he called “imaginary aims” could lead to beneficial results for society:
Our conclusions, therefore, will be that the pursuit of certain imaginary aims, T, has been in the past, continues in the present, and will probably continue in the future, to be very advantageous to human societies. [§1882]
And Pareto expounds upon this basic idea as follows:
[The psychological proclivities prevalent among the individuals making up a society] must, in part at least, be favorable to the preservation of [that] society…. It is to the advantage of that society, therefore, that neither such [psychological proclivities] nor the precepts that express them should be impaired or minimized. But that is best accomplished if the individual judges, believes, imagines, that in observing those precepts … he is working for his own welfare. Speaking, then, in general and very roughly, disregarding possible and in fact numerous exceptions [the religion of Wokism, for example], one may say that it is advantageous to society that, at least in the minds of the majority of individuals not belonging to the ruling class, … that facts should be viewed not as they are in reality, but as they are transfigured in the light of ideals. Therefore—passing from the general to the particular case here in hand, the relations of moral conduct to happiness—it is advantageous to society that individuals not of the ruling classes should spontaneously accept, observe, respect, revere, love, the precepts current in their society, prominent among them the precepts called—roughly, inadequately, to be sure—precepts of “morality” and precepts of “religion”.... Hence the great power and the great effectiveness of the two forces, morality and religion, for the good of society; so much so that one might say no society can exist without them, and that a decadence in morals and religion ordinarily coincides with a decadence of society. [§1932]
While Parvini might not necessarily quibble with any of this, he seems bothered by Pareto’s insistence that these ideals ultimately arise from various psychological states.:
[I]t strikes me that in his zeal to strip his own worldview of any metaphysical content, Pareto too readily dismissed ideologies as second-order effects and seems to overlook their tremendous animating spirit. On this score, Mosca—less wedded to the totality of a system—was a much shrewder observer of history. Myths are not simply “beautiful lies” used to hoodwink the masses, but also extremely powerful motivators of human action.
But the question in dispute is whether these ideologies and other “beautiful lies” are “extremely powerful motivators of human action” in and of themselves, or if they require a specific type of psychology, not shared by everyone, to bring them to life. Motivation is fundamentally psychological; it is difficult for any man to be enthusiastic about moral and political ideals that go against the grain of his basic temperament. Without the right psychological profile, a myth becomes a stale thing, hardly capable of arousing the necessary enthusiasm. For many of us, the myths of wokism are stupid, horrid, and disgusting; but for others, these myths of the radical left are the very stuff of life, throbbing with moral significance and compassion for the distressed. Why do some people respond to the woke myths while others are repulsed by them? Inquiring minds what to know.
Perhaps what Parvini really finds objectionable in Pareto’s insistence that it is psychology, rather than ideology and myth, that forms the ultimate well-springs of the political enthusiasms that fuel activism and sacrifice, is that if it is psychology, or rather character, that determines ideological enthusiasms (rather than the other way around), this will inevitably narrow the scope in which intellectuals can exercise their influence. Under such a view, the pen is no longer mightier than the sword and the evolution of the social order is rarely pliable to the intellectual’s powers of exhortation. Undoubtedly this is a humbling view, especially for those who toil in the world of ideas. But is it really more humbling than the main postulate of Elite Theory, which contends that political power is inevitably concentrated into the hands of a small number of elites? The obvious correlate of this postulate is what I have elsewhere called The Problem of Political Agency, which simply states that if you’re not part of the elite, you have no political agency. Humbling stuff, indeed. We must endure whatever politics our masters seek to inflict upon us, just as we must endure the weather. But just as we can study the weather and learn the shape and bent of its most prevalent patterns, so we study politics and learn its special laws and tendencies. Such knowledge can then be used to imbibe a greater sense of the future course of both the weather and politics—which can then perhaps enable us to prepare for potential storms in either domain.
Greg Nyquist is author of The Psychopathology of the Radical Left and The Faux-Rationality of Ayn Rand.
If the elite is, pace Jefferson, a "natural aristocracy of virtue and talent" and if they hold the same values as the people they lead, then we may hope for a healthy democracy. In the daily world, I'll submit to the surgery of a doctor, or trust my car to a mechanic, if I believe them to be honest and competent. Even in areas where success is less assured, I might accept the policies of the political class if: 1) they clearly value a free and prosperous republic; 2) the odds of them achieving successful policies are greater than in any other group; 3) if they don't succeed, it's because they failed in good faith and the problem is one of the limitations of human knowledge than the defects of character; 4) they are able and willing to learn from their mistakes. I believe good leaders believe that "goodness, truth and beauty" are genuine transcendentals. We may not be able to grasp them entirely, different people may be sensitive to different aspects of them, but nevertheless, these transcendentals are objective realities.
Robert Fritz of "The Path of Least Resistance" fame pointed out that, to have the best chance of succeeding at making a positive change, you must: 1) be absolutely honest and clear about your current situation (and here the political realists are of great help); 2) absolutely honest and clear about the situation you's like to bring about, so that 3) you will feel a tremendous tension between the what-is and the what-should-be and 4) use this tension to spur you to the actions that will, to the humanly possible extent, bring the what-is in alignment with the what-should-be. Some psychological make-ups lend themselves to creating and using this tension; others do not.