The key ideas

The Politician: A Companion to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince

Nick Machiavelli, 2020

Why do politicians so rarely give a straight answer? A working politician writing under the pen name Nick Machiavelli explains how the craft really works, from the first campaign to re-election. You’ll learn how a law gets buried without anyone arguing against it, why a familiar name on the ballot weighs more than a platform and which words are used to hide real motives.

Who it is for

For anyone who votes, follows the news and wants to understand why politicians answer evasively and why much-needed laws get stuck in the details.

Indulging the voter and confusing the voter are the chief employments of every successful politician.

A politician without a name

Richard Nixon once said that finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver, while finishing second in politics gets you oblivion. The author of this book works in politics himself and has been elected many times in different countries. He signed the book with the pen name Nick Machiavelli and calls Niccolò Machiavelli his ancestor.

The Prince explained how princes behave. A prince could inherit power, gain it through marriage or take it by force. A politician gets power only from the voter, and the same voter can take it away at the next election. That is why the author sees the most honest measure of success as a simple one: a politician gets elected, and then re-elected.

The book came out in 2020 with a foreword by a historian named William Landon. It is written both for those who want to go into politics and for the ordinary voter who doesn’t understand why politicians speak and act the way they do. The author promises to show things as they are, not as they are usually presented. Many of his tips sound cynical, so it’s worth reading them as a map of tricks: whoever knows a trick notices when it is being used on them.

The slower the enemies pile up, the longer the career

During an election, a candidate tries to look like a mirror of the majority, and every voter sees something of their own in that candidate. After the victory, any vote the politician casts can shatter someone’s image of the candidate. The tipping point, in the author’s view, comes when more than half of the voters decide this is no longer the person they voted for.

That is why, the author writes, a successful politician is constantly busy with two things: indulging some voters and confusing others. Faced with a divisive issue, the politician first asks whether a public position on it is needed at all. Happy is the one who can answer “no”, because whoever takes no position makes no enemies. The more slowly a politician makes enemies, the longer, in the author’s view, the career lasts.

Hence the love of doing nothing. The British civil servant Lord Trend advised testing any decision with the question: “What is the alternative?” If a tax cut promises votes while the country faces a credit rating downgrade, a politician often decides to do nothing.

The author compares a politician to the ball in a pinball machine. It gets flipped back and forth between conscience and party, between what the district wants and what serves everyone in the long run.

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About the author

Writing as Nick Machiavelli is a politician who has been elected for many years at different levels of government in different countries and keeps his real name hidden. The foreword was written by historian William Landon, a scholar of Niccolò Machiavelli.

All books by this author: Nick Machiavelli

Terms from the book

  • Freud
  • Lincoln
  • Nixon
  • Trend
  • Obama
  • Clinton
  • Washington
  • Johnson
  • Niccolò: Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), Florentine official and thinker, author of The Prince. The author of this book calls him his ancestor.
  • Landon: William Landon, an American historian and scholar of Niccolò Machiavelli, professor at Northern Kentucky University. He wrote the book’s foreword.
  • Pinball: An arcade machine in which a metal ball bounces off obstacles and flippers. The book’s image for a politician thrown back and forth between conflicting demands.
  • Chrétien: Jean Chrétien, a Canadian politician, minister of finance and later prime minister of Canada (1993–2003).
  • Younger: J. Arthur Younger (1893–1967), an American politician and member of the House of Representatives from California.
  • Stanfield: Robert Stanfield (1914–2003), a Canadian politician and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party who lost three elections to Pierre Trudeau.
  • Trudeau: Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919–2000), prime minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to 1984.
  • Latent content: Freud’s term: the real, hidden meaning of a dream, as opposed to its manifest content, what a person remembers. The author applies this distinction to the speech of politicians. It is his image, not a scientific method.
  • Hayakawa: Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa (1906–1992), an American linguist, author of Language in Thought and Action and later a US senator.
  • Harry and Louise: A 1993–1994 TV advertising campaign in the United States: a fictional married couple voices doubts about the Clinton administration’s health care reform plan.
  • Isolationists: Supporters of a policy in which a country stays out of other nations’ military and political alliances and conflicts.
  • Desegregation: The ending of the separation of white and Black citizens in schools, transport and other places, especially in the southern United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
  • Apartheid: The system of racial segregation in South Africa, in force from 1948 until the early 1990s.
  • Thirteenth Amendment: The amendment to the US Constitution that abolished slavery. It took effect in December 1865.
  • Gettysburg Address: Lincoln’s short speech of November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the military cemetery in Gettysburg, with its words about government of the people, by the people, for the people.

All terms

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