A Prince of Second Chances Who Grants None
When a ruler proclaims mercy then denies 6,000 pleas, the question is not hypocrisy but whether this cold severity truly fortifies the republic or merely burnishes the prince.
A few months ago the ruler of your republic declares that for 250 years America has believed in the “potential of its people.” This month he denies roughly 6,000 clemency applications in one sweep. Before that, his own staff had floated a celebration of the semiquincentennial with about 250 pardons. On the stage, then, we see a prince of second chances; in the chancery, a clerk with a rubber stamp that says no. I pay less attention to the sermons than to the ledgers. The effectual truth is simple: thousands who sought mercy remain in chains, and the grand festival of forgiveness shrinks to a cancelled plan.
You will ask first if this is cruel. I ask first if it is useful. In The Prince, as translated by W. K. Marriott, I argued that ill-used mercy lets disorders grow and harms the many, while well-used cruelty is “employed once for all” and then ceases. Mass clemency can be a kind of ill-used mercy if it releases men who will despise weakness more than they love gratitude. Yet here I see severity without evidence of accompanying disorder, like a surgeon cutting deep where there is no clear infection. Severity that is not demanded by necessity is not prudence but display.
We are not told who these 6,000 are, what they did, how they have behaved in prison. This ignorance matters. A prince who denies all petitions because he fears appearing soft chooses theater over discrimination; he acts like a man who burns down the forest because one wolf escaped the hunt. The middle course is often fatal, but it is not the same as judgment. To refuse clemency on principle can be wise in a new principality that must terrify potential rebels. In a mature republic, it risks teaching citizens that their laws know only the fist and never the open hand.
Yet appearances are a currency as real as gold. This same ruler entertains at a dinner celebrating press freedom while attacking the press as “fake news,” joking about future terms, wearing a 2028 cap. He understands the banquet as battlefield, the joke as jab. Denying thousands of clemency petitions after publicly praising second chances also fits this style: embrace the language of mercy to please the people, then wield the practice of severity to reassure the great and the forces of order. Most men, as I wrote, judge more by the eye than by the hand; they remember the speech about potential more vividly than the bureaucratic massacre of petitions.
From the standpoint of personal power, there is logic here. To grant 250 pardons as a patriotic spectacle might create 250 clients but also 250 dossiers for one’s enemies to wave as proof of favoritism. To deny 6,000 in a block, by contrast, sends a simple signal: do not expect indulgence; I am no one’s dupe. This is the lion’s roar. And it shows virtù of a certain sort, the decisiveness that does not flinch before unpopularity. But a prince must also be a fox. If he boasts of second chances while building a record of almost none, even the simplest citizen eventually learns to discount his words, and a ruler whose threats are believed more than his promises rules a poor, brittle kingdom.
My republican suspicion goes deeper. In the Discourses, in Ninian Hill Thomson’s translation, I praised peoples as more constant and wiser in the long run than princes. Institutions like clemency exist so that, through regular procedures, a republic can correct its own hardness, release the rare innocent, and soften punishments that time has rendered excessive. When clemency becomes a court pageant—first proposed as a fireworks display of 250 pardons, then erased by a single refusal from above—the law no longer speaks with many sober voices but with one volatile tongue. That is how free orders slide, not into dramatic tyranny at once, but into the quieter corruption where everyone supplicates and no one trusts.
With the scant facts available, I cannot say whether denying these 6,000 petitions prevented real dangers or merely preserved a useful posture of ferocity. I can say this: a prince who constantly stages himself as merciful while almost never exercising mercy gains the fear of a tyrant without the credit of a just judge. In the short term he may indeed maintain the state; in the long term he teaches his people that words are banners and decisions are weapons, and that justice lives nowhere between them. Sooner or later, a people thus instructed returns the lesson to its governors.
From the works cited
- The Prince — Judge severity and mercy by their totals, not their optics: ill-used mercy that lets disorder grow wounds the many; well-used severity that ends it wounds the few.
- The Prince — Fortune is arbiter of roughly half of events; virtù — foresight, boldness, preparation — governs the rest. Judge leaders not by the storm but by the dykes and barriers they raised while the weather was fair.
- The Prince — Appearances are a hard currency of power: most people judge by the eyes rather than the hands, by results rather than processes. Analyze reputation, ceremony, and narrative as assets on the balance sheet, not as decoration.