Trump, the Ambitious, and the Virtuous
Peter Schultz
Which kind of human types are likely to be politically successful? Vaclav Havel claimed it was the “cunning shits.”
Aren’t the ambitious most likely to be successful politically, at least personally successful? Isn’t it often – or maybe always – the case that this personal success is then understood as political success? And then because of this alleged political success, those who are successful are thought of as virtuous. And, so, as a result, ambition is thought of as virtue and ambitious types – “the best and the brightest” – are thought of as virtuous humans. Politics transforms ambition into virtue and the most ambitious human beings are the most celebrated, even taken to represent one of the pinnacles of human achievement.
Whereas Machiavelli argued in The Prince that Hannibal’s greatness, universally recognized, was due to his “inhuman cruelty.” Are the ambitious willing to embrace inhuman cruelty to achieve personal and political success, personal and political fame, that is, a kind of political “immortality”?
If Trump succeeds in making America great again, then he will have proven himself to be great, magnanimous, or virtuous. His self-righteousness would then be justified, just as was Churchill’s, de Gaulle’s, or Lincoln’s. He could, justifiably, strut and smirk to his heart’s content. His political project is nothing less than making America virtuous again, as it was in “the good, old days.” Interestingly, even some of Trump’s opponents, e.g., Bruce Springsteen, agree with Trump that there were, once, “good old days.” Trump and Springsteen, and of course others, agree: The ambitious once made America virtuous and this despite slavery and the destruction of the indigenous. Like Hannibal, America’s great ones embraced inhuman cruelty. And such, apparently, are the requirements of political success, of political greatness, as Machiavelli realized.
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