But You Didn’t Address Their Incompetence, Ctd

Concerning the damage being done to the country by the current leadership, my reader has a fascinating rejoinder:

I also refer you to this article: https://www.vox.com/…/donald-trump-plato-democracy… And also to any reference which talks about Plato’s 5 regimes. We’re headed directly for tyranny from the vestiges of our democracy.

The cited article discusses the parallels between Plato’s Republic, which is on my list of books to read that I never get to, and the rise of Trump. From the Vox article:

Plato thought political regimes followed a predictable evolutionary course, from oligarchy to democracy to tyranny. Oligarchies give way to democracies when the elites fail, when they become spoiled, lazy, profligate, and when they develop interests apart from those they rule.

Democracies give way to tyrannies when mob passion overwhelms political wisdom and a populist autocrat seizes the masses. But the tyrant is not quite a tyrant at first. On the contrary, in a democracy the would-be tyrant offers himself as the people’s champion. He’s the ultimate simplifier, the one man who can make everything whole again.

Sound familiar?

With Trump, we have a glimpse of what this sort of evolution looks like: A vulgar right-wing populism emerges out of a whirlwind of anti-establishment hysteria; a strongman fascist promises to stick it to the elites and says only he can make the country great again; he gives the people a familiar boogeyman, some alien other, on whom they can dump their resentment.

The author, Sean Illing, doesn’t push the analogy too far, I thought, and this is important because I doubt Plato would have possibly foreseen the institution of conservative talk radio or Fox News, the two most important factors in shaping the modern “conservative” through the exclusion of facts from their knowledge base – not that I mean to reference the technology, but the deliberate hobbling of significant parts of the populace by maleficent or simply self-centered citizens.

This, too, was interesting:

Oligarchies become democracies for predictable reasons: “As the rich grow richer and richer, the more they think of making a fortune and the less they think of virtue.” The inequality and corruption spread like a disease. “Democracy comes into power,” Socrates says, “when the poor are the victors, killing some and exiling some, and giving equal shares in the government to all the rest.”

Democracy, for all its charms, is said to be a poor substitute for oligarchy. It’s an “agreeable form of anarchy,” Socrates tells us. Like every other regime, a democracy collapses of its own contradictions. It’s full of freedom and spangled with every kind of liberty imaginable.

It’s a clear statement of the motivation of oligarchies, and even more importantly, we need to remember that the rise of Trump, the tyrant, reportedly is funded by the oligarchy. Again, this is outside of Plato, at least from what I can tell in this article, but it’s an important thought in that oligarchies and tyrants may co-exist, but it’s an uneasy co-existence because the base of power is confused. Who is really in control? Maybe neither. And that leads to chaos.

The article is somewhat vague on the triggers of these phase transitions, and perhaps Republic was itself. Perhaps we need to have more public conversations on the many facets of our current form of government – and why it’s superior to tyrants and oligarchies.