Reading The Prince for my Histories class, I was drawn to Isaiah Berlin’s essay on Machiavelli, where he expounds his theory of ”objective pluralism.” ”Relativist” is the curse that believers (ideologues) fling at non-believers. For believers like Dennis Prager, relativism is the scourge the Left has loosed on society—today’s manifestation of what churchmen of the Middle Ages termed the Devil. The Left degrades eternal values, those things beyond good and evil, relativizing everything. If uncontested, the Left will destroy all the good that American exceptionalism has bequeathed the world; and without that good—not to speak of the damage done to the unmitigated goodness of American exceptionalism itself—the world will become a dark place.

Prager’s mantra has been: How can there be enduring values without such values having been enshrined by God? But what if two absolutely contrary things were to coexist, be totally independent of one another, and be equally true? What if these truths were not relative? What if these things, or ideas, arose independent of one another? Or to put it in Berlin’s terms, what if a Christian ethic and a pagan ethic were seen to be fully independent and contrary ideologies?

Machiavelli’s ideal prince is just such a man. He has inculcated the ethic of these two worldviews, and learned to act in accordance with each as circumstances demand; to slaughter in accordance with the rules of the pagan, to act charitably in accordance with the rules of the Christian. A ruler who acts out of Christian sensibility alone will certainly fail. But a ruler acting on the instincts of the pagan will also suffer defeat. Machiavelli’s ideal prince is the man capable of mimicking Christian values while acting with the freedom and acuity of the pagan.