Last week, the New York State Office of the Attorney General released their report confirming that Andrew Cuomo sexually harassed at least 11 women while acting as Governor of New York. The ethics violations are clear and, in this instance, intimately related to Cuomo’s political power.  All victims except one came into contact with Cuomo as a consequence of his political position and duties (they were executive assistants, state trooper, aide, state entity employee, women attending political events and press conferences at which Cuomo spoke, advisors). Cuomo purposefully leveraged his position of authority to victimize women.  

Understandably, there is moral outrage in response to the findings.  One senior staff member who worked closely with Andrew Cuomo testifies in the report:

I’m disgusted that Andrew Cuomo—a man who understands subtle power dynamics and power plays better than almost anyone in the planet—is giving this loopy excuse of not knowing he made women feel uncomfortable […] There are several orders of victims in this issue: first and foremost the women who experienced these things with him. Second though, and unrecognized are the staff. We are almost uniformly good people who killed ourselves […] to accomplish his agenda—for his political glory, and for the feeling that he would make decisions with public service as his driving goal. I feel cheated out of that. (12-13)

This response struck me as morally convoluted.  There is an assumption that knowing how to wield power effectively is a good; at least, it has the potential to be used for personal glory and public service (also assumed to be goods).  But more importantly the staff member recognizes a disparity between Cuomo’s excellence as a politician (good, if valued by a standard of effectiveness) and his virtue as a person (clearly bad; he must have known that what he was doing was wrong).  They seem to recognize that the personal failures of the person taint his achievements as a politician.  The question underlying this reaction is, how can Cuomo claim political glory or public service when his physical, verbal, and habitual sexual assault is known publicly?  Beneath that question lies another: if the personal vice had gone unseen, would the political glory remain intact (thereby validating the efforts of the staff)? 

The more serious question that arises from this staff member’s response: why does it matter to us whether our politicians are virtuous, so long as they are effective?

This distinction between political effectuality and moral virtue occurred a while ago.  Niccolo Machiavelli published The Prince in 1532, in which he argued that politics needs to deal with people as they are and not as they ought to be.  Reacting to the Christian worldview, he argued that attempting to live in view of heaven results in destruction here on earth. Good men are weak and ineffectual against strong people who intend injustice. Machiavelli moves our goals to fix this problem: he suggests we ignore the possibility of heaven and make earth the measure of our activity.  Whereas Aristotle thought the end of virtue was happiness conceived as working well according to reason, and Christianity said that our complete end was love of God and neighbor, Machiavelli says our goal should be power. 

Thus Machiavelli argues:

…there is such a distance between how one lives and how one should live that he who lets go that which is done for that which ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation—for a man who wishes to profess the good in everything needs must fall among so many who are not good.  Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn to be able to be not good, and to use it and not use it according to the necessity. (The Prince, 93)

In moving the goalpost of our ultimate “end,” Machiavelli redefines “virtue,” especially for the politician.  The ancient philosophers partially understood virtue as a type of manliness, having the strength of body and mind that was able to acquire and keep a state.  We more typically understand virtue as acting in accordance with what is the good, and in politics that good is justice.  Machiavelli confuses these two meanings—he calls inhumanly cruel strong men “virtuous.”[*] The new virtues of the Machiavellian politician are boldness, bravery, cruelty, and cunning.  The politician should rule out of fear, rather than love, because it offers them more security.  Most of all they need to be prudent, able to recognize how to get the people to approve their actions (regardless of whether those actions are virtuous) because the ruler governs in the name of the people, not on account of virtue.  Machiavelli successfully cast doubt on the relevance of moral virtue for any political action and traded moral virtue for individual freedom.  He turned virtue into a game.

Cuomo played the Machiavellian game and mis-stepped.  He evidenced the Machiavellian virtue of boldness in the face of the pandemic, winning him the love of many people.  The Attorney General’s report reveals a man who governed his office by fear and love expressed as absolute loyalty above integrity.  We see his cruelty and cunning in the nursing home debacle.  Yet he didn’t read the handbook closely enough.  In Chapter 17 of the Prince Machiavelli notes: “The prince, nevertheless, ought to make himself feared in such a mode that if he does not acquire love, he then avoids hatred […] and he will always bring this about, if he abstains from the goods of his citizens and subjects, and from their women” (101). 

One could argue that Cuomo played Machiavelli’s game poorly; that he simply wasn’t Machiavellian enough.  However, Cuomo’s failure is not, I think, a lack of Machiavellian skill (see here for a detailed and insightful description of Cuomo’s use of power), but instead a breakdown of Machiavelli’s scheme itself.  Machiavelli’s game cannot succeed in the end because it ignores some key parts of our nature as human beings.

Machiavelli first ignores the compounding effects of vice; he assumes that a man can rationally choose which vices to use to his political advantage (and the public good), and which to ignore.  But this is not the reality of sin.  Sin is pleasurable, it is addictive, and it is an entrapment.  Sin has the potential to consume us.  By choosing to sin we lead ourselves further from reason and from the ability to exercise our will freely.  This reality helps us to understand why a politician like Cuomo, an expert in political vices, evidences deep personal vices as well.  Catering to sin in one area leads us to sin in another. The Attorney General’s report portrays a man abjectly subjected to uncontrollable desires.  Those who are tyrannized in their private lives—in their souls—become tyrannical in their public lives. 

Additionally, the Machiavellian game, however well played, and however much successful, will always leave us dissatisfied because it excludes the perfect from the good.  Without a vision of heaven (and of what human beings need to attain heaven) we are left with no ideal to guide our pursuit of any good, no matter how flawed our pursuit may be due to sin.  By insisting that we deal with people only as they are, and only as irredeemably depraved sinners, Machiavelli forecloses the possibility that we could be anything more.[**] Instead, we are convinced that all men only and continually seek power, riches, fame or reputation, and—it appears—sexual satisfaction.  As Machiavelli says: “one can say this generally of men: that they are ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, evaders of dangers, lovers of gain…” (101).  We are led to believe that a good man cannot ever be a good politician, and if left to choose it is better to pick the good politician.[***]  

This one-sided view of human nature must be corrected if we are going to have realistic expectations for our politicians. Human beings do bear the influence of sin in our minds and bodies.  Our desires are disordered; we crave what will kill us.  And we too often let our desires rule our reason, rather than vice versa.  Machiavelli was partially correct that injustice is both natural and truthful; it is how people actually work.  But it is not the complete picture. Human beings were created good before the Fall.  We retain aspects of our good nature from creation such as the ability to reason and to exercise a free will.  There is still an idea of the good which guides human action; we can know it and choose to obey it. Part of us is attracted to justice, while another part is attracted to injustice. That “both…and” is a tension within our nature we must account for in our politics.

Ultimately, the Machiavellian game is so unsettling to us because it elides the necessary relationship between justice as righteousness and justice in the public sphere. The ancient Greeks understood the virtue of justice as both individual and social through two definitions. To dikaion indicates that the law determines what is “just.”  On the other hand, dikaiosune indicates the personal virtue or disposition to do what is just; in Christianity, we call this virtue “righteousness.”  While the law influences us to act justly through threat of punishment, we cannot make good laws if we are not already just in our disposition.  We need a moral perspective—the ability to see clearly what is truly just—in order to legislate justice.  In other words, there is a necessary relationship between the individual’s private justice and justice in society.  Machiavelli thinks one can break that relationship in order to deal effectively, not morally, with human depravity.  Cuomo’s misstep gives us a glimpse that we cannot.

We can’t begin to expect our politicians to both be good and secure a common good if we stay in Machiavelli’s fault lines of what is real.  Political effectiveness is still, it seems, tied to moral virtue, however tenuously.  We need an ideal—a vision of virtue defined as moral excellence—paired with a truthful, honest view of the good and bad of human nature.

Works Cited

Berman, Russell.  “No, COVID-19 is Not a Metaphor.”  The Atlantic.  August 8, 2020.  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/cuomo-new-york-coronavirus/615352/

DeMarco, Peter. “How a Leader’s Philosophy Directly Affects an Organization’s Culture.” Chicago Business Journal.  October 26, 2016.  https://www.bizjournals.com/chicago/how-to/human-resources/2016/10/leader-s-philosophy-affects-organization-s-culture.html

Kim, Ron.  “Cuomo must pay for what he did: Why I want to pursue impeachment against the governor.” Daily News.  February 22, 2021.  https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-ron-kim-cuomo-20210223-ksamuhy77vhkpbzz4vqstu2fze-story.html

Machiavelli, Niccolo.  The Prince.  Trans. By Leo Paul S. de Alvarez.  Waveland Press: Long Grove, IL, 1980.

Smith, Chris.  “The Albany Machiavelli.”  New York Magazine April 12, 2013.  https://nymag.com/news/features/andrew-cuomo-2013-4/

State of New York Office of the Attorney General Letitia James.  “Report of Investigation Into Allegations of Sexual Harassment By Governor Andrew M. Cuomo.” August 3, 2021.  https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/2021.08.03_nyag_-_investigative_report.pdf

Notes

[*] See Leo Paul S. de Alvarez’s introductory essay in his translation of The Prince for a fuller account of Machiavelli’s use of virtù.

[**] Throughout, I am assuming that human beings can only be “something more” than a sinner, and can only pursue what is good, through the grace of Christ. Moral virtue depends on salvation from sin through that grace. See I Corinthians 15:19 for an argument by Paul about how belief in Christ’s resurrection necessarily expands our view of the purpose of life beyond earth, towards heaven (contra Machiavelli).

[***] Perhaps a good man can’t actually be a good citizen; this is still an open question.  Even Aristotle recognizes that sometimes there is disparity between the two.  For Aristotle, it is not enough to obey the laws of one’s country, i.e. to support a regime as a good citizen.  We must also strive to be good men and women.  And that type of goodness, apart from the goodness of the citizen who obeys the laws, is objective: it is always and everywhere the same. It is not the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.  You are a good man unqualifiedly, whereas you are a good citizen in relation to the regime (good or bad).  Another way of stating Aristotle’s point: obeying laws is good but obeying bad human laws could lead one to contradict a law that stands above the political order.  As a note, though, there were laws on the books that defined Cuomo’s actions as wrong (42 U.S.C. § 1983), and New York State Human Rights Law [N.Y. Exec. Law § 290, et seq.]); and so there is no incongruity in this particular case between the law and moral goodness.