Would you choose to live in a world with no war?

No violence?

No needless deaths?

What if there was a politician  who could make all of that true?

I’d vote for them in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?

But what if in order to get there,   we had to drop a nuclear bomb and kill  tens of thousands of innocent people?

Would you still vote for them?

What if it was millions of people?

This is all a hypothetical.

But it's also not far from real-life scenarios— like Harry S. Truman's choice to drop  atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, arguably ending World War II.

Or Henry Kissinger's position  that a “limited nuclear war”  could prevent total world annihilation.

All this has me wondering: How much evil could I tolerate in a politician  if I knew it would lead to some greater good?

And is it possible that good leaders  have to be willing to do bad things?

I’m Ellie Anderson and this is  Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] This line of questioning led me straight to the 16th-century political  thinker Niccolò Machiavelli.

Who, in response to the question, “Is it better for a leader to be   feared or loved?” wrote this banger: “It might perhaps be answered  that we should wish to be both: but since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved.” He’s got bars.

He wrote those words in a book called “The Prince” —a political treatise so provocative the  Catholic Church banned it for two hundred years.

And so spicy in its hot-takes, we debate  who Machiavelli really was to this day.

Was he a “teacher of evil,” a satirical genius, or just…the world’s first political scientist?

When I started to dig in, I  learned that he was many things: a historian, diplomat,  politician, and occasional enemy  of the state who lived in interesting times.

He once conspired to steal a  river with Leonardo da Vinci  and a tyrant named Cesare Borgia.

Big Ocean’s Eleven energy.

And just a year before he wrote “The Prince,” Machiavelli lost his job—and nearly his life.

The Medici family violently overthrew  the administration he was working for, chucked him in prison, and tortured him for weeks by hoisting him into the air by  his wrists, tied behind his back.

Ouch.

So, yeah, Machiavelli was up-close-and-personal with the brutal underbelly of politics.

And yet, if I’m being honest, I find a lot  of “The Prince” to be surprisingly boring —unless you’re really into the  taxonomy of principalities.

You do you.

But the juicy parts are quite juicy.

It’s time for some important documents.

There’s advice on how to rout out  old enemies and make new ones.

Advice on spending others’ wealth  to boost your own reputation.

Advice on how to make threats, how to be mean without being hated, and how to spark fear that inspires loyalty.

Regina George, take notes.

There’s praise for the usefulness of lying.

And the thriftiness of colonizing, which Machiavelli claims costs little and offends only the people whose lands are taken.

And for a person hoping to seize power,  Machiavelli has this sage advice: “Examine closely into all those injuries  which it is necessary [...] to inflict, and then [...] do them all at one stroke so  as not to have to repeat them daily.” So, it makes sense that we  often hear “Machiavellian”  used to describe politics gone nasty.

The sort of conniving,  unscrupulous, bad-to-the-bone  wheeling-and-dealing I love in my HBO dramas.

Or in Michael Scott quotes  that live rent-free in my mind.

Just…keep it away from the leaders I vote for.

Based on what we’ve read so  far, you might be thinking,  yeah, instincts confirmed, this  Machiavelli guy sounds like a bad dude.

But if you read his words closely,  something else becomes obvious:  he isn’t actually calling  for all-out nastiness here.

He writes that a leader should know when and how to be cruel, but also when to be merciful.

He cautions that there are times when wickedness is useful, and times when it’s not.

Times when it’s good to be stingy, and times when it’s better to be generous.

So I started thinking, maybe  “The Prince” isn’t the handbook  on iron-fisted rule it’s been made out to be.

Turns out, a lot of it   is focused on something resembling — and stay with me here — balance.

He’s arguing that effective  politicking really means  knowing when to be good and when to be not good.

None of this would be  necessary, Machiavelli writes, “if men were entirely good  [...] but because they are bad,  and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them.” In other words, play dirty.

The other side does.

It’s a pretty pessimistic take, right?

At this point I’m thinking, “Where are the higher, loftier ideals  like justice, virtue, and liberty?” But then I remembered that in Machiavelli’s time, Florence’s republic was more fragile than my fifteen-year-old self watching  “The Notebook” for the first time.

Most citizens had no real  say in who governed them,  and power-plays between rival families  threatened the republic’s future.

So, some interpret “The Prince”  as a defense of republicanism.

(Not the partisan position  we’re familiar with today  but the broader shift to democratic, popular rule that was tenuously underway at the time, after centuries of monarchy.)

And when I think about it that way, I wonder if “Machiavellian”  really just means strategic.

What if it’s a pragmatic take on  how politics really gets done,  where the main goal is—bare  minimum— keep the state together?

What some might call “a real downer”  others simply call political realism, the view that keeping the state afloat is more important than sticking to moral absolutes.

And since the end of World War II, so-called realists have thrived  in international politics  —including the infamous Henry Kissinger.

Let’s go to the tape.

[tv static] In 1948, at twenty-five years old, Henry Kissinger wrote to his parents: “There is not only right or wrong, but many shades in between.” And in his long diplomatic career, Kissinger dabbled in all of them.

As Secretary of State under  Presidents Nixon and Ford, Kissinger embraced realpolitik—a strand of realism  that prioritizes what’s practical  for the national interests over what’s ethical.

Kissinger took realpolitik further  than your average politician,  and he ventured into very  murky waters when doing so.

He theorized about how to use nuclear bombs in moderation to avoid total annihilation.

He backed brutal military coups in Latin America and supplied weapons used in ethnic cleansing in South Asia to keep the United States in power.

He personally approved bombing raids that killed hundreds of thousands of people in the Vietnam War and tried  to hide it from the press.

Then, when the news leaked, he ordered the FBI to wiretap phones.

But even Kissinger’s critics don’t deny: the man got some things done.

He changed the course of the Cold War —warming the United States’ relationships with the Soviet Union and the  People’s Republic of China.

He negotiated international  treaties on biological weapons,  nuclear arms, and anti-ballistic missiles.

This was how he justified making  morally compromised choices, writing that “Insistence on pure morality is in itself the most immoral of postures.” Being too high-minded, he argued, stopped things from getting done.

It’s up to us to debate whether any  good came of Kissinger’s actions,  even if his actions were sometimes abhorrent.

It didn’t surprise me to learn  that Kissinger’s politics  often get described as Machiavellian, as do Donald Trump’s, which  brings me back to the present.

But really, it brings me  back to “The Prince” itself,  and what it means for us now.

Maybe it’s too simple to think of  “The Prince” as like, a cookbook; dash of cruelty, tablespoon of deceit.

Easy weeknight recipes for  getting and keeping power.

Instead, I started thinking of  it as posing those same questions  I wrestle with every time  an election rolls around: do politics and morality belong together or apart?

Should I vote for the lying, cheating candidate as long as their opinions align with my own?

In other words, what matters  more—outcomes or ideals?

That question led me back in  time again, all the way to 1919, when a German sociologist and political economist named Max Weber pondered the same thing.

To Weber, politicians have  an ethic of responsibility, where they sometimes need to make hard choices  for the sake of bigger goals  — like governing a country — even if those choices conflict  with traditional morals.

But here’s where it gets really  interesting: two very different  kinds of politics emerged from that singular idea.

In one corner: Carl Schmitt,  a German political theorist.

In 1927, he argued that conflict  in politics was inevitable.

There would always be friends and enemies.

And he thought liberal democracies were destined to weaken and crumble, either due to disagreement from within  or from getting strong-armed  by a more unified force.

So, he thought a sovereign  dictator was a good idea.

Somebody who could unify  people against a perceived  common enemy, and then eliminate that enemy.

Getting Nazi vibes?

Good, you should be.

It means your Nazi radar is working.

Check it well, check it often.

In the other corner, there was Hannah Arendt, a German-American philosopher who also questioned morality’s place in politics, after witnessing the disturbing rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia.

In a world where everyday people had caved to social pressure and collaborated with evil, traditional morals seemed pretty irrelevant.

But Arendt observed that some people had refused to go along with brutal regimes, turning to their inner judgment rather than some transcendent moral virtue.

So, she argued that the public  sphere demands its own set of values,  grounded in a respect for differences  rather than moral absolutes.

And Arendt actually praised  Machiavelli as someone who understood  that if people aren’t willing to  make hard choices to resist evil, “then the evildoers will do as they please.” To Arendt, Machiavelli wasn’t a teacher of evil.

He was somebody willing to sacrifice his own soul for the sake of his country.

You’ll recognize this idea from  every superhero story ever.

When is it worth compromising on  your morals to defeat the evildoer?

And Catherine Zuckert, an  American political philosopher,  similarly views Machiavelli in a positive light.

She argues that “The Prince”  was actually an effort  to show ordinary people how the  political sausage gets made.

In her view, Machiavelli encourages  people to see politicians as they are.

Not as demons or as saints.

And to be clear-eyed and pragmatic about that,  so we can shape our government to  be more responsive to our needs.

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure  hundreds of years of political theory  have gotten us any closer to definitively  answering this core question: how much evil should we tolerate  in exchange for good outcomes?

Maybe—okay, definitely—politicians aren’t saints.

And maybe we do ourselves a  disservice when we expect them to be.

Some argue we’re better off  viewing politics as a negotiation  between outcomes and ideals,  with no simple formulas.

So, do good leaders have to be good people?

Or does being a good leader mean,  in part, learning “how not to be good”?

I’ll leave that for you to decide.