“At last,” Socrates asks in Plato’s Republic, “the tyrannical man is left for us to consider, his change from the democratic man, his character after the change is accomplished, and his mode of life, whether miserable or blessed?”
At last, yes. The midterm election results for the historical pattern, the routine flipping of popular opinion after the flopping of a presidency. But the speed of the Trump-led Republicans’ decline from the 2024 trifecta suggests a rout. As the “shellacking” that President Barack Obama got in 2010 (and again in 2014) anticipated the further shock of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, so the Democrats now have the chance to exploit the mood of repudiation. They are almost as schismatic as the Republicans are, but they are more disciplined. They can still blow it in 2028, but a centrist, optimistic and relatively youthful Democrat will be hard to beat.
The Trump years now enter their sordid epilogue. The first Trump term was the rule of “democratic man,” and Trump’s deregulation and tax cuts were popular. The second Trump term gave us “tyrannical man,” who arrived with a storm of executive orders and tariffs and indulged the Platonic forms of “time of feasting and rioting and reveling and mistresses, and all such follies,” including “corrupt practices” and bribery that may explain the manner in which the Iran war has been pursued. It would be a public good if congressional committees could expose the self-dealing of the Trump circle. The indictments include allegations of insider trading in the shares of corporations that benefit from industrial policy and exploiting foreign policy for private gain.
It would, however, be counterproductive to prosecute Trump’s character. The aggressive eccentricities of Trump’s second term may reflect his decay from “democratic man” to “tyrannical man,” but democratic Americans are allergic to the tyrannical impulse that wields the law as a partisan weapon. And they are right. The decay that Trump represents is structural.
In Politics, Aristotle writes that the “true forms of government are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest.” Governments which “rule with a view to the private interest” are a “perversion.” If the second Trump administration wanted to rule in the public interest, it would have institutionalized itself through legislating via the Republican-controlled Congress. Instead, it diverted and perverted itself to private government.
The privatization of the public good (“looting the treasury”) is not unique to the Trump faction. The second Trump administration’s industrial policy of taking small stakes in critical industries is dwarfed by the corporatist expansions of Obama’s unaffordable Affordable Care Act and President Joe Biden’s boondoggling Green New Deal. In all three cases, the rewards are not sufficiently shared. While the revived working class gets “good jobs,” an oligarchic political class sinks its trotters deep into the trough of plutocracy. These are polar priorities. The repeated rinsing of the public thins out the middle classes and the mixed constitution that Aristotle called a bulwark against the implosion of democracy.
AGE OF PARODY
Democracy encourages demagogues, Plato says, and demagogues become tyrants. The demagogue offers the intoxicant of liberty. Trump, Vice President JD Vance warned in a prior incarnation, sticks “cultural heroin” into the veins of America. But liberty is private, and the liberty-seeking tyrant becomes a “mass of convulsive movement and pains,” isolated in a “prison-house” of his desires with a “bodyguard of slave-pleasures” and his mediocre and corrupt courtiers. Those who cultivate the demagogue “cut any figure that is required.” Consider Vance’s chameleonic rise as all things to all patrons. But once the supplicants secure a favor, they become “strangers” again, like Tucker Carlson, who worked with Donald Trump Jr. to win Vance the 2024 vice presidential nomination, then agitated against Trump while Vance pretended not to notice.
Plato, who expects little better from democracy, takes the philosophical view. Right action proceeds from the four cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, moderation and justice. Republicans and conservatives must have the wisdom to see how adrift and divided they are, but also that there can be no return to 2016. They must summon the courage to admit the failings and successes of the last decade, and the moderation to unite a post-Trump movement that serves the public interest. Without this, they cannot do justice to the people. As our now-triumphant friends on the Left say, “No justice, no peace.”
Dominic Green (@drdominicgreen) is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
