Category: Rhetoric

In the October issue of Commonweal, I consider the complexity surrounding “weird” in American political culture. On the one hand, “weird” is a favorite attack against bizarre MAGA Republicans. On the other, it’s the proud self-branding of diverse, liberal-leaning Austin. What separates the interestingly weird from the dangerously weird, especially when it comes to politics?

To answer this question, I turn to the rhetorical and political thought of Cicero and Machiavelli, both of whom take an interest in the “push and pull between individual conviction and social pressure” and warn against a kind of “obstinate weirdness”:

Instead of flattening Machiavelli into an apologist for thoughtless immorality, we should see him as a realist grappling with “necessity.” It’s a theme that resurfaces in his Discourses on Livy, where he argues that “the reason why men are sometimes unfortunate, sometimes fortunate, depends upon whether their behavior is in conformity with the times.” While the vocabulary is different, his arguments here should sound familiar even to those who just learned their first lessons of ancient rhetorical theory in the preceding paragraphs. Whether Machiavelli speaks of “necessity” or “the times” or “fortune,” he persistently urges rulers to adjust their political calculus—and their moral scruple—to fit their circumstances. In short, leaders need to abide by a realist politics of decorum.

To borrow a phrase from Kamala Harris, Machiavelli did not just fall out of a coconut tree. Specialists in the classical tradition have long noticed, as Michelle Zerba explains, “the essential affinity between the Machiavellian doctrine of princely fraud and the Ciceronian ethics of gentlemanly dissimulation.” The ideas of rhetorical “propriety”—attention to “circumstance,” a sense of the aptum, a knack for fitting the occasion—permeate his political and ethical maxims. When Machiavelli writes, “It is necessary that [a prince] should have a mind ready to turn itself according to the way the winds of fortune and the changing circumstances command him,” he has simply taken to heart Cicero’s “universal rule, in oratory as in life,” to consider the moment. Cicero, of course, was chiefly interested in an apt turn of phrase, while Machiavelli was also interested in the apt turn of a dagger.

Launching from this ancient tradition, I draw on Isaiah Berlin’s reading of Machiavelli as a theorist of democratic accommodation and negotiation. He explains how people and princes “gradually [come] to see merits in diversity, and so [become] sceptical about definitive solutions in human affairs.” We should not be surprised, I conclude, to see how “the very politician celebrated for his attacks on weirdness has also reminded us to ‘mind your own damn business.’”

Head over to Commonweal‘s site to read the rest.