Machiavelli Book Club Check-in

I made some serious headway through The Discourses and I am about done. But this topic is open. I teased a bullet list last week, but I’m going to do a video or two this week instead.

The Discourses, in my opinion, past book one gets redundant. I can’t not say it. Yet, while Machiavelli is redundant and contradicts himself, he is consistent. He injects his political theory in all chapters, and hammers his points. The more I read it, the more I get the gist of modern politics.

But I’ve noticed something else as well.

The “do something” cry of constituents, which is often a cry from the Left side of the spectrum, is inherently Machiavellian. An event happens, and then the “do something” wants to overhaul the current system and instill a new government system with new laws, new morals, and severe punishment for those opposing.

A similar impulse exists on the Right. Some call it the New Right, but I find the New Right label sometimes vague and sometimes way too online but more often than …