Ripe for Tyranny

Monday, June 13th, 2016

As this dystopian election campaign unfolds, Andrew Sullivan revisits Plato’s Republic:

It has unsettled — even surprised — me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato mean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply; its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither; tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat; and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

Lincoln Memorial Ruins by Zohar Lazar

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher … is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

Comments

  1. Slovenian Guest says:

    Yes, Andrew Sullivan, another CON-servative RINO crypto liberal, to put it mildly, who endorsed Barack Obama back in 2008, largely because he believed that he would restore “the rule of law and Constitutional balance”; he also argued that Obama represented a more realistic prospect for “bringing America back to fiscal reason,” and expressed a hope that Obama would be able to “get us past the culture war.” Sullivan has continued to maintain that Obama is the best choice for president from a conservative point of view. During the 2012 election campaign, he wrote, “Against a radical right, reckless, populist insurgency, Obama is the conservative option, dealing with emergent problems with pragmatic calm and modest innovation. The same Andrew Sullivan who wrote in another recent column, Don’t you dare call it fascism: Andrew Sullivan on why Donald Trump’s ideologically incoherent movement doesn’t even deserve the epithet, At least “fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks”. In 2006, Sullivan was named as an LGBT History Month icon and also stated that he has always been a Zionist. If Sullivan is a conservative, like he states that he “absolutely” is, then I’m Rumpelstiltskin. He is refuted in Salon, of all places: Andrew Sullivan is wrong again: His mainstream liberalism has become scarily anti-democratic

    “Andrew Sullivan’s ballyhooed debut in New York magazine, he presents the candidacy of Donald Trump as a unique, “extinction-level” threat to the United States of America. One does not have to read far beyond his headline, however, to realize that Sullivan’s real purpose is to malign his usual antagonists on the left. His argument is an example of just how bankrupt the mode of liberalism he represents has become. It’s anti-democratic and culturally elitist message, however, reveals an opportunity for the left to reinvigorate its politics through an engagement with the humanities – an engagement that mainstream liberals like Sullivan have abandoned.”

    It’s so funny, people call Trump fascist but then support Hillary, who doesn’t have one skeleton in her closet, he has a whole graveyard, not A scandal, but one scandal rolling into another for decades…

    Like Scott Adams, I also predict a landslide for Trump, not just because I want to see a Slovenian first lady, which Melania would be, but because every time the establishment insults him, they also insult the average joe; they project the disdain for the commoner on Trump without even realizing it, but the voting public does! So the more they scream “Hitler!” the bigger the turnout and the win will be.

    Speaking of Adams, he just did a great interview on Trump:

    “I think it is a hybrid of spontaneity and talent that is baked into his personality from decades of practice. Remember, he wrote the book The Art of the Deal. And even if you think his ghostwriter wrote it, I’m sure he at least read it. Negotiating is persuasion. It is psychology. He tells us in those words.”

    Text or YouTube version of this.

    The mentioned Salon article almost warrants its own post, so negate this one, it’s a great piece.

  2. JS123 says:

    He skips that it is those Plato calls the “drones” that support the tyrant. The drones are basically the underclass and are far more likely to support Obama than Trump.

  3. Alrenous says:

    Note that democracy’s problem is an oppression, not a freedom. It becomes forbidden to defer to authority. It becomes forbidden to be productive. As we see right now, acknowledging differences becomes forbidden. In short, organization becomes forbidden. In attempting to destroy dominance and command, prestige and leadership are caught in the crossfire.

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