The Politics of Power: What Machiavelli, Jouvenel, Scott, and The Sovereign Individual Teach Us About Radical Federalism
The fight against centralized power is not just about resisting today’s authoritarian overreach—we must build durable, decentralized governance to ensure that Washington can never consolidate power again. Toward that end, Radical Federalism must be strategic, syncretic, and synthetic—drawing upon the greatest lessons from diverse thinkers, disciplines, and empirical experience to build something which could not have been built before—and which the oligarchs-who-would-be-kings, their half-rate thinkers and their outdated systems are not prepared to engage with.
Machiavelli, de Jouvenel, James C. Scott, and Davidson & Rees-Mogg all provide critical insights into how power is taken, how it is held, and how it is dismantled. Their lessons form the firmament under which lies Radical Federalism’s strategy to starve the federal government of legitimacy, resources, and function until it collapses under its own weight.
I. Machiavelli’s Warning: Legitimacy is Manufactured, Not Earned
Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince remains one of the most brutally honest analyses of power to be widely read. The core lesson? Legitimacy is not about justice or morality—it is about perception and control.
The de jure legitimacy of a ruler or a government is irrelevant if it lacks de facto authority. Power is about maintaining dependencies, shaping narratives, and knowing when to act decisively.
Thus the careful sequential planning of targets carried out years in advance; the excitement over the optics of the left fighting against what they’re careful to characterize as “locking up Venezuelan gang members and criminals”, or as Axios put it
The White House welcomes that fight. "This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win," a senior White House official told Axios.
This is why they have such preternaturally smooth escalation, always pushing the boundaries and normalizing overreach while exhausting the resistance and numbing the broader public to outrage. They understand that Legitimacy is the Battlefield. They understand that legitimacy is manufactured. And they have been planning for years.
█ We cannot cede this front to them. We must resist and we must respond, but not to the outrage, the injustice, the horror over callous harm. We must weaponize their contradictions, demanding rule of law, due process, core American values, and emphasizing the underlying integrity of our nation which guarantees we are still strong enough to afford these yet.
Equally well-known are Machiavelli’s views on fear: that fear creates stability while love is fleeting, and that while necessary to avoid being hated, a leader will find instilling controlled fear to be effective.
These are lessons which come naturally to authoritarians. The bellicose threats, the follow through, the disappearances in the night and the dehumanization, the impeachment papers against judges which rule against the regime, the judges permitting illegal DOGE takeovers without intervention out of fear of sparking “armed battle”, and on and on.
There is a reason ABC News capitulated to Trump’s frivolous lawsuit before it even made its way to a court case analysts expected ABC to win; a reason Schumer’s willingness to fight the regime’s funding bill collapsed; a reason that the media, even while pantomiming opposition, enables and legitimizes the Trump regime’s lies by playing along with the narrative that it is all Trump, that Trump just can’t control his emotions rather than calling out what we can all see: that this is a carefully orchestrated plan. They are afraid. Thus they are controlled.
However, Machiavelli warns that excessive fear without institutional legitimacy leads to instability and revolt. The Trump regime’s authoritarian tactics, rather than demonstrating mastery of The Prince, suggest either the blunders of rulers who fail to secure durable legitimacy—or a desire to create a revolt they can then covlusively quash, securing legitimacy.
█ The regime will attempt to use fear to control us, turning of and on the valve of regulated dissent along channels they are prepared for, using control over traditional media, social media, high-profile events engineered by FBI collaborators, and disproportionate ruthless response to dictate the pace of the battle. We cannot allow this. We must be prepared and inured to their tactics. We must be resilient.
The Regime’s LARP of Machiavellian tactics
Elon Musk has gone on record stating that “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” This echoes what Machiavelli tells us about morality while revealing a deep misunderstanding distorted by a fascist agenda. Machiavelli states that a leader should be moral but not constrained by morality, a willingness to be ruthless which has already been a cornerstone of US foreign policy for decades: nothing embodies a will towards ruthlessness more than Kissinger’s tenure, and regardless of brand, Obama’s drone strikes and foreign involvements were not overburdened by a loyalty to empathy. But the Trump regime has deposed this heritage in place of something new, unschooled, and immature.
Musk goes on “I believe in empathy, like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for, for civilization as a whole, and not commit to a civilizational suicide.” And here we see the underlying agenda: a manufactured crisis, a false claim of civilizational weakness (an attempt to invoke xenophobic fear of being overtaken by outsiders) in support of a predetermined solution: the dissolution of the individual, a redefinition of the focus on civilization itself, the nation itself, a revolution in scope in which the individual exists only in relation to the whole. This sublimation of the individual into the state is a core tenet of fascism—in fact, the one from which the term itself derives.
Musk misreads Machiavelli in the same way that all amateur authoritarians do. Musk’s belief that “empathy is a weakness” is not Machiavellian—it is childish. Machiavelli did not dismiss morality—he weaponized it strategically while still respecting it. Musk lacks the understanding of power that even Trump has mastered. One imagines Machiavelli would mock Musk’s juvenile framing of strength as cruelty—because cruelty without tactical restraint breeds revolt, not control.
Elon Musk is the ideal court intellectual for a regime that lacks actual statecraft. His appeal is not that he understands power, but that he flatters those who do not. Machiavelli would argue that a leader who does not understand how to cultivate loyalty through strategic benevolence is a fool.
█ The regime is powerful, and they crave control. They have been wildly successful in playing a game against an establishment unprepared and unwilling to present true opposition. And yet—they are not the masterminds they believe themselves to be. Don’t discount them—authoritarian coups and genocide do not require masterminds—but hold fast to hope that they can be effectively resisted.
Beyond The Prince—Discourses on Livy
Somewhat less famously, Machiavelli also wrote extenisvely on republics. Critically for Radical Federalism, Machiavelli writes that
Republics should be rewnewed periodically, with old institutions reset before they become tools of entrenched elites.
In normal times, power should be decentralized.
Corruption destroys republics from within.
These align with core tenets of Radical Federalism: our commitment to decentralization and distributed governance, a focus on renewal even admidst inevitable collapse, and a distrust of relying on any single institution’s ability to withstand corruption in the long run.
█ Republics survive or fall by actively shaping power.
Radical Federalist Application
Beyond applications to what comes next, there are immediate lessons for the resistance.
Washington must not just lose power—it must lose the perception of legitimacy. The federal government must be seen not just as oppressive but as irrelevant.
States must manufacture their own legitimacy—by proving that they govern more effectively than Washington, not through rhetoric but through tangible results.
Control the dependencies, and you control the power structure. Washington rules through financial coercion. States must break that chain by establishing independent financial, energy, and governance structures.
We will come back to this last point, but it is an exploitable crack in the regime’s understanding as they defund and cede services.
█ Machiavelli’s ultimate lesson? Legitimacy is not something you request—it is something you create. States must seize legitimacy by making Washington obsolete.
II. de Jouvenel’s Trap: Why All Systems Centralize—and How to Prevent It
Bertrand de Jouvenel’s On Power agrees with On Livy—centralization is the greatest threat to stability—but it expands its scope to all centralized states. On Power teaches that the fundamental problem with any federal government is that all centralized states, no matter their origin, will eventually expand their authority. Democratic systems are not immune because power always seeks to consolidate itself and this tendency must be actively, intentionally countered.
de Jouvenel’s historical analysis demonstrates how kings, parliaments, and republics all grow into massive, bureaucratic, controlling structures. The only way to prevent centralization is to construct a system where no central authority can re-emerge.
Power feeds on crises—and this is both a formula the Regime is and will follow, and a trap that we must be cognizant of and actively fight against in what we build to counter it. Expansions of power accelerate—power has a gravitational pull, which de Jouvenal describes as a one-way process.
A key point of the text, and one which we need not belabour given recent history, is that Democracy means the state does not need to seize power by force—as long as the state can manufacture the right crisis citizens will vote for it.
█ Democracy alone is not a firewall against centralization—it is often a tool of it. We must be wary ourselves—even anti-authoritarian movements, once successful, tend to rebuild central power—and this is antithetical to Radical Federalist resilience.
Radical Federalist Application
The problem is not just Trump or the current regime—it is the existence of a federal government that can consolidate power at all. If we get through this without learning any lessons, we will remain vulnerable to a worse repeat occurrence.
Any system that allows federal control—even a reduced one—will eventually return to authoritarianism.
The only solution is permanent decentralization—engineered to ensure that the federal government’s authority is never restored once it is broken.
█ de Jouvenel’s conclusion? If you do not actively dismantle centralization, it will return. Radical Federalism must ensure that once Washington collapses, it stays collapsed—each shard supporting greater, resilient new growth.
III. Seeing Like a State: Why Bureaucratic Control Always Fails
James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State exposes the core failure of centralized governance: all large bureaucratic systems simplify reality to a point where they become destructive. Their core goal is legibility—even if it means bulldozing a vibrant ecosystem and replacing it with a vulnerable monoculture suited to another clime.
A few key examples drawn from Seeing Like A State make clear this impetus to force reality into the input channels for which the state holds comprehension, and the spectacular failure in the face reality’s irreducible complexity. This is particularly significant given that the temptation to see through oppressive force will be irresistible to the coming fascist panopticon—a strength but also, as Sun Tzu teaches us, a weakness:
1. Brasília – A City Built to Fail
Designed for bureaucratic efficiency, but hostile to real communities—residents found it alienating and impractical.
Lesson: Centralized planning ignores organic social structures. Governance must be adaptive.
2. Soviet Collective Farming – Starvation by Oversimplification
Forced monoculture farming replaced local agricultural knowledge—resulting in famine and economic collapse.
Lesson: Centralized economies destroy resilience. States must reclaim control.
3. Scientific Forestry – The Fragility of Monocultures
Prussian foresters replaced diverse forests with neatly ordered monocultures—leading to ecosystem collapse.
Lesson: Decentralization is antifragile; top-down systems are brittle.
4. Tanzanian Ujamaa Villages – Forced Social Engineering
Millions relocated into planned collectivist villages—resulting in economic failure and mass abandonment.
Lesson: Social order emerges naturally—forced systems fail.
The state does not see communities—it sees grids, tax zones, and regulatory categories. This is why top-down governance is always oppressive—in order to function it must enforce uniformity in pursuit of creating something comprehensible—but this demolition is imposed on populations whose ways of life are incompatible with the new state-mandated order.
Radical Federalist Application
Some of the lessons here will resonate with community-focused socialists and small government libertarians alike:
Washington governs through mass simplification—one-size-fits-all laws, federal mandates, and regulatory coercion. States must reject this and embrace decentralized, locally adaptive governance.
Parallel governance structures must be built at the local and state level—so that when federal authority collapses, real governance is already in place.
Decentralization is not just about power—it is about functionality. Federal control will always fail because it cannot account for local realities.
█ Scott’s insight is simple: The state is blind. The only way to govern effectively is to remove centralized authority from the equation entirely.
IV. The Sovereign Individual: How Decentralization Will Kill the Nation-State
James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s The Sovereign Individual is not a prescription for resistance—it is a prophecy of what is already happening.
They offer a powerful counterpoint to de Jouvenal’s warning that power always centralizes.
Their argument is simple: The centralized nation-state is dying. Technology, decentralized finance, and economic independence will make it obsolete. The most powerful people in the future will be those who operate outside of traditional tax and legal structures.
This is, of course, exactly how many of the regime’s oligarchs rose to power—Musk and Thiel, obviously, as members of the so-called “Paypal Mafia” who promote crypto, para-intelligence agency surveillance technology, and sought to “disrupt” their way into a hostile takeover of the government even before the current coup. But others in their circle fit the bill even better: just look to Trump’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve or the “network states” which Trump keeps gesturing at when you scrutinize his proposals (Gaza, anyone?).
The realization of this second, anti-centralizing force raises two questions: (1) how do we incorporate it into our understanding of power, and (2) what does it mean that it prophesizes the regime even while that regime pardoxically consolidates power?
Radical Federalist Application
By recognizing this reality and accepting there is no turning back the clock to the 20th century, we can leverage the lessons of technological progress and decentralization ourselves while working to deny them to the regime.
The most powerful lever against Washington is economic independence. The federal government depends on financial control—taxation, debt, and monetary policy. States that build their own economic ecosystems will make federal enforcement impossible (while, as a bonus, robbing the regime of its legitimacy).
Parallel financial systems, next-generation payment networks, and cooperative state banking models will allow governance to shift away from the federal government, leveraging forces already in play.
Washington cannot survive if it cannot extract wealth. If enough states develop alternative revenue and financial structures, the federal government loses its ability to function while we insulate ourselves from the regime’s next generation of financial systems.
Davidson and Rees-Mogg do not argue for revolution—they argue that centralized states will collapse under their own inefficiencies as decentralized alternatives take over. This is, of course, exactly what is occurring now, though accelerated and guided by opportunists who, as the Bitcoin Reserve, various DOGE misadventures, and failure of any clear broad vision demonstrate do not truly know how to to internalize these lessons. They seek to corrode the established centralized systems while usurping control over the technologies which changed the paradigm. Radical Federalism must surpass them in harnessing these forces and own the transition. By doing so we don’t attack Washington—we outgrow it.
Unlike the crypto-obsessed who see deregulated finance as the answer, Radical Federalism understands that financial independence must be tied to state and regional cooperation while built to be inimical to capture and control. Next-generation financial infrastructure should be rooted in public banking, local trade networks, and alternative credit structures built on concrete value—not in the fantasy of borderless digital anarchy that only benefits oligarchs.
█ There is what the oligarchy’s cheerleaders might call ‘alpha’ here—unharnessed insight and innovation which the opposition doesn’t really know what to do with. Seize it. Exploit this fundamental decentralizing force which acts in opposition to their goal of absolute control.
V. The Strategy That Emerges: What This Means for Radical Federalism
By synthesizing these works, Radical Federalism’s long-term strategy becomes clear.
Machiavelli teaches that legitimacy is a weapon. States must seize it by governing better than Washington, making the federal government look irrelevant.
de Jouvenel warns that centralization is inevitable unless it is actively dismantled. Once Washington’s power is broken, Radical Federalism must ensure it never returns.
Scott exposes why federal governance always fails. States must use local, adaptive governance to replace Washington’s rigid, bureaucratic control.
Davidson & Rees-Mogg show how decentralization will kill the federal government over time. States must accelerate the shift to independent economic systems that make Washington’s authority meaningless.
The Plan: Four Steps to End Federal Control
Undermine Washington’s legitimacy—make federal governance irrelevant by proving that states can govern more effectively.
Starve the federal government of resources—build state-controlled financial systems and cut into federal revenue streams through legitimate avenues.
Build alternative governance structures—replace federal agencies with state and local institutions that operate independently. Harness the power of modern advances which enable and promote decentralization while siphoning legitimacy.
Ensure Washington never returns—construct legal and economic barriers that make federal consolidation of power impossible in the future.
As the Trump regime attacks and removes Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, the EPA, FEMA, and beyond remember this. As they extricate the federal government from our lives they lose the legitimacy they once wielded and they cede territory to a process of decentralization which we must seize.
Radical Federalism is no more about merely recognizing that collapse is already ongoing than it is about waiting for collapse to occur. Instead it is about recognizing collapse is inevitable—and ensuring that when Washington falls, what is rebuilt is more resilient than before. The future will not be won by those who destroy the old system, but by those who build the one that replaces it.
█ The old system is dead—it just doesn’t know it yet, succumbing to forces both natural and external. Radical Federalism must ensure that when we come through to the other side, we are prepared with something stronger than what came before. The battle is not just for power, but for the framework of power itself.
There are so many great thoughts here but it's a lot to digest. Do you do any lectures or other interactive discussions? I have questions related to this and the weaponizing contradictions article, specifically in regards to 47's ignoring of judiciary decisions of late and would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks for all you do!