Recently, I have been toying with the idea of new book project, one titled Polity and Personage, which would compare what Plato, Plutarch, and Shakespeare said about some classical figures, especially Dion, Brutus, Alcibiades, Coriolanus, Pericles, and Mark Antony, figures important to thinking about the dynamics and destiny of republican government.
Probably I’ll say more on this channel about the book another day, but in this post, I want to share something which came from my pen as I drafted an introduction to it, as I think it fairly remarkable.
I was looking to introduce the book’s subject by way of quick reflections on the fate of popular government in our time, and this is what I wrote:
Will free government survive in America and the world, or curdle into a new, and terrifyingly subtle, form of despotism? It is now the question of questions. For in the wake of the breathtakingly anti-democratic behavior in the 2020s by our technocratic and “progressivist” elites, and alas, of their largely successful manipulation of popular opinion in support of their power-grabs, it appears that an attempt to institute “Potemkin democracy” is underway, whether that attempt was the result of a long-term plan or merely a possibility stumbled into. That is, we now see that a managerial regime disguised as popular government could be just around the corner, and is already here in many respects; it is a regime in which just enough of the voters are duped—in the name of progressivism, of Woke identity politics, of Trump-detestation, of a pretended Democrat Party continuity with the liberalism of the 70s-90s period--into letting the intelligence establishment, the administrative state, the biopharmaceutical complex, and the corporate media behemoth—social media included—continue to amass power and elude responsibility for various crimes, such that they more and more control the key events and decisions, while presenting a simulacrum of public debate about various lesser issues pretended to be the main ones, and a plausible deniability regarding their allegiance to the ABCs of the Constitution. If these villains are to continue to succeed, any remaining persons who see through their games and self-delusions and is willing to voice this, will have to be excluded or weeded-out from all upper-ranks of administration, officer-ship, tenured-academia, top-level law or science, and will find their efforts to publish for peers or to communicate to their fellow citizens relegated to at-best third-class venues of limited reach. After that, a “social credit” system of internet and electronic-transaction surveillance, such as the one China has imposed upon its subjects, could then be added, overtly, or in a de facto way, the better to firm-up the emerging class distinctions and habits of totalitarian obedience.
However, it is complex enough a question that it is exceedingly difficult to provide good probabilistic predictions about it. Even in my sketching above what I believe is the most plausible scenario for our already degraded democracy morphing into a new kind of despotism in the near future, I have had to hint at certain qualifications and hesitations. Nor do I believe we should, if we enter into longer-term predictions, put as much stock as certain futurist-minded “experts” do in various theories in which mass-behavior is driven in predictable ways by developments of technology or economic organization.
Thus, no-one ought to pretend to simply know the answer to our question about popular government’s fate. All we can say for certain is that we have entered a period, one of at least several decades to come, of radical uncertainty about whether free government is going to survive, or alter into its opposite. And even if free democracy comes through this trial basically intact or even in some ways renewed, its future historians will be obliged to say that its champions received a serious shock in the 2020s, somewhat like what our forbears experienced during the 1930s and 1940s (though in fact worse since the 2020s threats to freedom were entirely home-grown). They will speak of the terrible 20s which left humanity cursed with haunting visions of how long-standing and constitution-armored republics could be transmuted into despotisms by sets of treacherous leaders, and cohorts of radically complacent citizens. They were visions of the near-future—and maybe not ones “salutary” to dwell upon, as Tocqueville once said of his scenarios of future democratic despotism—in which very tight holds of denial and information deprivation upon the minds of men, both upon the casually-vicious and the basically-decent, extended as far as the eye could see, at least on certain topics. Looking back, we will see it was a time when decisive majorities felt that, to use an excuse made for a despotism-welcoming political leader of ancient Athens,1 one would be mad not to be mad; one would be mad, that is, not to act as if one believed the main pretenses of the narrative-coordinators and their denial-addicted supporters.
We, however, are in the situation of not being able to say whether what we have entered into is a season of peril, or, a step of irrevocably downward development. What is more, if we think, or come to, that the step was essentially destined, that it was an inevitable-at-some-point development that any republican regime would eventually undergo, then the necessary character of the substantially less-free society of the near-future will have to admitted, such that we might even reject the judgment that there is something “downward” about it. That is, to become convinced that free popular government leads to despotism is likely to make one its general opponent, whether or not one voices that opposition openly, or cloaks it.
I am candid, and am not among its cloaked opponents. While we must learn how a number of evil traits of humanity can be sent into overdrive by republican societies, developing into destructive mass dynamics,2 I believe we can and should continue to place our faith in what The Federalist called the “other qualities in human nature” which “republican government presupposes the existence of,” and to “a higher degree than any other form” of government. I join The Federalist’s author, Publius, in rejecting the idea “that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”3 And if some talk of those “chains” becoming in our era, by means of social media technology, ones of self-chosen and mass-opinion-approved acceptance of expert-class guidance, and thus, as restraints not strictly deserving to be called despotic, I still side with the Federalist. Indeed, I find the idea of such cloaked oligarchy even more repellent than the outright coercion of tyrants.
That said, I insist that we hear-out those of those opponents who have given up on modern democracy because they see it as leading mankind into despotism, and worse, as preparing our souls for ever-worse forms of despotism the longer we drag out the process of its inevitable collapse. To my fellow advocates of democracy-rescue, I say that we have a duty to enter into a dialogue with them which is open to their being right, and thus, to the worst possibilities for our future. For one, we really are obliged to prepare ourselves and our descendants for living as good a life as would be possible even after a catastrophic fall of democracy, since we can now see that such a fall is quite possible.
So that’s the fragment which, regardless of whether I ever write this book, or keep this in the introduction to it, seems an important marker of where my thinking stands as of mid-2024.
I go on in the introduction to say that, of course, the democracy-rescuer of our day must grapple, regardless of whatever he learns from classical politics, with “modern-era thinkers who most closely and deeply address the question of how modern republics tend to develop” and I mention C.S. Lewis, Walker Percy, Aaron Kheriaty, Ryszard Legutko, Peter Augustine Lawler, and Chantal Delsol, but most of all Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Solzhenitsyn, and Manent, as examples.
But what do y’all think? I mean not about whether my book would help today’s defender of republicanism, nor about which thinkers he ought to read, but about my basic judgment of where we presently stand.
P.S. The pro-Hamas demonstrations are a side-show, and will remain so even if incidents of life-taking violence occur. We have little reason to be afraid of what these pathetic juveniles might do to our republic, especially compared to what the administrative and Dem-coalition-maintaining class now openly moving against them, with their legions of police in tow, might do to it. The existing universities are a lost cause anyhow, and I see little hope, of either an academia-reforming or a conservative-coalition-building kind, in the realizations a number of liberal-ish Jewish-Americans and their friends are coming to now about who the Woke truly are, given that these realizations are so damn belated. Sure, denouncing these protesters who are unwilling to distinguish their (perhaps sound) objections to present Israeli tactics from Hamas support is entirely necessary; but for many, it is also a gesture that is too damn easy, distracting them from the real perils.
The leader was Stratocles, prominent in Athens in the very late 300s, but not much known to our historians outside of Plutarch’s account of how he convinced his fellow citizens to abjectly flatter a tyrannical Hellenistic prince, Demetrius, rather than offer thanks for his military help while still insisting on his respecting certain non-negotiable principles of their republican regime. I tell the sordid story in “Out of Athens: Plutarch on Demetrius and the Hellenistic Cult of Kingship.”
In the second part of the introduction, not shared here, I say that three of the texts most focused on in my book, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Plato’s Republic, book VIII, and the whole of Plutarch’s Lives, make one aware of these dynamics, and thus administer the strongest doses of “democracy pessimism” derivable from classical history, even while my larger study balances these doses with the full political teaching of Plato and Plutarch, a teaching which, when correctly understood, is not so democracy-pessimistic as to lead one to reject republicanism. (As for Shakespeare, I think his full political teaching is impossible to lay out with confidence, though I do suspect him of a greater democracy-pessimism than Plato and Plutarch.)
The Federalist, No. 55; usually attributed to Madison, but interestingly, one of the numbers where a plausible case for Hamilton being the principle author remains in play.
Personally, I think this take is spot on - particular this passage leapt out at me - "Indeed, I find the idea of such cloaked oligarchy even more repellent than the outright coercion of tyrants."
Such a book would be most welcome, though I would like to see some other thinkers brought into the discussion, it seems a very worthwhile endeavor.
"...about my basic judgment of where we presently stand."
Personally, I agree with most of your description. So, If we stand at the brink of "...a catastrophic fall of democracy" that we can now see "is quite possible", is it possible to avoid it? If so, how?
Is or situation and its likely disastrous next step indeed, "...the result of a long-term plan or merely a possibility stumbled into"? We would need to know the answer to that if we would hope to oppose the plan or avoid the unplanned disaster, it seems.