My last blog post on WordPress contrasted Plato’s high-minded authoritarianism with that of modern autocrats. Being charitable to Plato, I argued that choosing wise rulers is a really difficult problem! And while I am personally committed to democratic principles, I nonetheless understand the impulse to solving the problem of how to choose wise leaders by resorting to authoritarian means.
Since that post two and a half months ago, the Republican Party has been convulsed by Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. By and large, party leaders have stood by, enabled, and defended this antidemocratic attempt - even when it led to violence in the US Capitol. They whiffed on two Georgia Senate elections and thereby lost control of their only remaining federal branch. Marjorie Taylor Greene has become a household name in the worst way. The paucity of wisdom in the current incarnation of the Republican Party has been on full display.
In that context, I wanted to revisit Plato’s understanding of wisdom, and his authoritarian argument for ensuring wisdom in the rulers of the Republic. On a charitable interpretation, this post will examine where the current Republican Party departs from Plato’s vision. Interpretations of Plato come from the Penguin edition of The Republic, and from Bertrand Russell’s The History of Western Philosophy.
So how and to what extent does the GOP of 2021 reflect Platonic authoritarianism?
At first glance: it doesn’t.
GOP populism is incompatible with Platonism.
To the extent that populism is a rising force in the Republican Party, and to the extent that right-wing populism is characterized by buffoonishness, the Republican Party’s authoritarianism temperamentally opposes the Platonic idea of the philosopher-king.
Trump himself represents, at least rhetorically, a populist appeal to the “base.” Never mind that Trump was never actually popular; never mind that, in 2021, it can hardly be said that his career is ascendant; Trump is a major force in creating the conditions for populism in the current GOP, as evidenced at least by his opposition to more “thoughtful” (in other words, “establishment”) Republicans. The space for right-wing populism that Trump leaves behind is being quickly filled by 2024 hopefuls such as Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tom Cotton (each of whom has deployed different strategies in order to carve out space; and incidentally, each of whom has an impressive Ivy League pedigree). Hawley and Cruz infamously led the effort in the Senate to challenge the certification of electors on Jan. 6. In the wake of the riot at the Capitol, Cruz, Hawley, and 43 of the other 48 Senate Republicans claimed that impeaching Trump for his role in the riot would be unconstitutional, on a discredited legal theory. Trumpist populism certainly seems ascendant in the GOP of 2021.
What does Trumpist populism consist of? Bloviating rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and an aversion to good governance. And who represents this better than uber-famous House freshman Marjorie Taylor Greene? Her commitment to QAnon-adjacent conspiracy theories and apparent disinterest in using her position in government to make people’s lives better, among other lovely traits, has reinforced the perception of Greene as an avatar for the worst of the Republican Party. And how has the Party reacted? Largely, by remaining silent. This indicates that the Party sees its self-interest in, if not outright accepting, at least allowing her brand of crazy within the Party - while censuring other House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Greene represents less a departure from the 2021 Republican mainstream and more an unvarnished messenger for its core values - primacy of messaging over governance, illegitimacy of dissent, and utmost loyalty to the lie of election fraud.
(A note: As I was writing this post, minority leader Mitch McConnell released a statement condemning Marjorie Taylor Greene and praising Liz Cheney. “Loony lies and conspiracy theories are cancer for the Republican Party and our country…This has nothing to do with the challenges facing American families or the robust debates on substance that can strengthen our party.” I tend to think this is the exception that proves the rule. McConnell, more than his counterpart Kevin McCarthy in the House and certainly more than Trump himself, has been more rhetorically cautious and politically calculating since the 2020 election.)
Platonic authoritarianism requires the polis to be led by men chosen for their wisdom. The Republican Party of 2021 is led by men and women chosen for their ongoing commitment to perhaps the least wise leader this country has ever seen.
Communism for the ruling classes? Not so much.
In Plato’s utopia, the philosopher-kings exist in an essentially communistic economic structure. Russell summarizes as follows:
The guardians are to have small houses and simple food; they are to live as in a camp, dining together in companies; they are to have no private property beyond what is absolutely necessary. Gold and silver are to be forbidden…Both wealth and poverty are harmful, and in Plato’s city neither will exist.
Trump’s incompatibility with this aspect of Plato’s utopia is obvious. The rest of the GOP, however, consistently lives by the gospel of wealth. Nearly 2/3 of the richest members of Congress are Republicans. Arguably the only significant legislative accomplishment of the Trump era was a tax cut for wealthy Americans, including provisions that personally benefited Trump and other congressional Republicans. When House Republicans such as Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins broke campaign finance law to personally enrich themselves, Trump pardoned them. And our heroes Cruz and Hawley have used the riot at the Capitol, which they spurred on, as an opportunity to raise money for their campaigns. Republicans have cultivated a reputation as the party of wealth, and that impression, if anything, is gaining steam as they try to obstruct additional aid in response to the coronavirus economic crisis.
On the other hand…
The biggest similarity: the BIG LIE.
In the Republic of Plato, when Socrates is asked how he will convince the members of his hypothetical society to buy in to its strange structure, he replies:
While all of you, in the city, are brothers, we will say in our tale, yet god, in fashioning those of you who are fitted to hold rule, mingled gold in their generation, for which reason they are the most precious—but in the helpers, silver, and iron and brass in the farmers and other craftsmen.
Plato goes on to explain that, by educating successive generations in the “noble lie,” eventually the populace will believe this lie. They will take it as an article of faith that each person has a metallic nature which corresponds with his position in society; this lie will justify the caste system Plato seeks to impose. (This lie is also known as the “myth of the metals.”)
The “Big Lie” is a persistent feature in authoritarian states. In Trump’s case, the Big Lie was the “stolen” 2020 election. At every step, Trump was enabled in spreading this lie by his supporters, many of whom have come to see Trump as the only source of truth in a media environment full of “liberal elites,” and who would have no problem punishing their Republican congressional representatives for calling out Trump’s lie. So as we saw, denunciations of the lie of a stolen election were and remain exceedingly few on the Republican side. It is in the self-interest of the Republican Party to accept this lie as orthodoxy. Which fact leads more Republican voters to believe the lie, in a self-perpetuating style not unlike Plato’s myth of the metals.
In each case, accepting the Big Lie amounts to an excuse to obstruct any change to the status quo. For Plato, it meant solidifying his caste system; for the GOP, it means obstructing, to the extent possible, any action taken by the democratically elected federal government.
Small goals
For as radically as Plato seems to want to change the fundamental political structure in his utopia from the ancient Greek norm, it doesn’t appear that he will get much out of it. Russell describes the apparent upsides of Plato’s utopia in this way:
When we ask: what will Plato’s Republic achieve? The answer is rather humdrum. It will achieve success in wars against roughly equal populations, and it will secure a livelihood for a certain small number of people. It will almost certainly produce no art or science, because of its rigidity; in this respect, as in others, it will be like Sparta. In spire of all the fine talk, skill in war and enough to eat is all that will be achieved.
The low expectations that Plato has for his Republic (it’s literally his idealized society, and that’s all his goals are?!) are matched only by the paucity of vision of the modern GOP. Famously, the 2020 Republican National Convention didn’t introduce a policy platform at all, preferring to issue a statement “enthusiastically support[ing] the president’s America First agenda.” The episode confirmed the longstanding stylized fact that Republicans don’t want to push a governing agenda so much as to obstruct Democrats’ attempts at passing a governing agenda.
This was true under Trump; the major changes in US policy were, in large part, repudiations of former President Obama’s legacy. They mostly took place through executive actions that Trump himself was dubiously aware of. But cutting regulations, a mostly unchanged NAFTA, a trade war with China, etc. don’t even represent a coherent conservative ideology, much less a governing philosophy oriented at achieving actual results in the world.
And 2021 Republicans don’t seem to want to accomplish all that much, either. Here’s a list of things I have heard Republicans say they want to happen in US policy in the past year:
Lower taxes, especially on corporate income and capital gains
Abortion bans, de facto or de jure
Voter suppression laws
Lower immigration quotas, stricter enforcement on illegal immigration
…?
Indeed, I’m having a hard time even putting together a Republican wishlist! Rhetoric and obstruction of governance continue to dominate the Party. At least Plato’s Republic articulated clear governing priorities.
The GOP is anti-democratic
Plato, temperamentally, is also anti-democratic. And for admittedly good reason: as an aristocratically-born Athenian, he witnessed the long defeat of democratic Athens at the hands of authoritarian Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, and the execution of his mentor Socrates by a subsequent democratic government. For Plato, a city governed by the wise is much better than a city governed by the many.
This is also true for the modern GOP, as anyone who has paid attention to politics for the past two decades can see clearly. Since Nixon, the Republican Party has entrenched its power by anti-democratic means and sought to restrict the franchise as much as they can get away with. Partisan gerrymandering, trying to exclude noncitizens from the US Census, voter ID laws, limiting mail ballots during a pandemic; the list goes on. Indeed, in the past week one bill was introduced by an Arizona Republican that would allow the state legislature to overturn a presidential election result by a simple majority.
The difference between Plato and the GOP in this regard is intention, not strategy. Plato’s intention in his anti-democratic political philosophy was to enable good governance; the intention of the GOP’s anti-democratic movement is to retain power by kneecapping good governance.
Next time: justice.
It is relatively easy to compare and contrast the values and expression of the modern GOP with those of Plato’s Republic. More nuanced, I fear, is comparing the two on ideas of justice. Again, Plato’s mission in describing his utopia is to understand justice. By looking at the city as a whole and identifying where justice lies, we can analogize to ourselves as humans and understand what justice consists of for the individual. The Republican Party’s relationship to justice, and to power (which has to do with one of Plato’s dismissed theories of justice), deserves more thought than I can give at the moment.
So I will leave it for next time. Until then, I’d like you to meet my dog, Juno.