This post carries the thread from my last one, Plato vs. GOP. I suggest reading that one before continuing on.
Let’s recall the implied purpose of the entire Republic. Plato opens with a scene at the Piraeus, a port area in Athens famous for its lively (by 4th century BCE standards) entertainment. Soon enough, Socrates, through whom Plato speaks, gets into a conversation with many of his friends about the nature of justice.
Each friend of Socrates’ has a different, and in his view mistaken, understanding of justice. Cephalus thinks that justice is "keeping one’s own, and paying one’s debts.” Socrates claims this definition is too narrow, and riddled with exceptions - is it just to return a borrowed weapon to a friend who has gone mad? Polemarchus takes up the argument from there, arguing that justice is “rewarding one’s friends and punishing one’s enemies.” Socrates’ rejoinder here is that we can never bee quite sure of who our friends and enemies are - we are sometimes bad judges of character! And besides, justice can never do harm, definitionally. This latter argument is much disputed, and it’s a premise that Plato more or less sidelines throughout the Republic.
Thrasymachus has what I see to be the definition of justice that is most relevant to US politics in 2021, and more specifically the Republican Party. According to Thrasymachus, justice is “nothing more than the advantage of the stronger.” In this line of reasoning, justice is a tool wielded by those who have power. It allows them to maintain their power and punish those who might challenge them.
The resonance between this power-oriented definition of justice and the modern Republican Party is obvious. Countless examples abound of the GOP using bare-knuckle, norm-violating moves in order to retain and gain power in the past few years. Mitch McConnell refused to seat Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court in 2016 just because he could; in 2020, he chose to seat Amy Coney Barrett, just because he could. Republican members of Congress are issuing hypocritical paeans to “bipartisanship” and “unity” as a way of shaming Democrats away from taking any adverse policy action.
Republican-led state legislatures have created gerrymandered representational maps such that Wisconsin, for example, has only 12 out of 33 Democratic state senators in an election in which 47% of the votes for state senate candidates went to Democrats. And this year, the gerrymandering bloodbath is likely to get worse, with Republicans in control of such states as Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, all of which will gain House seats due to the 2020 census.
The elephant in the room, the ultimate evidence of a power-oriented theory of justice within the Republican Party, is the Big Lie of election fraud and the willingness of the vast majority of Republicans to go along with that lie. Donald Trump is the source of this particular deception, and he had been laying the groundwork to question unfavorable election results for years. But the GOP as a whole accepted this lie. Vanishingly few GOP members of Congress acknowledged the results of the 2020 election before the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Many fundraised off their opposition to certifying legitimate election results. The only Republicans who have been punished in the past month (outside of Marjorie Taylor Greene, for unrelated offenses!) are those who voted to impeach Trump, or those who spoke out in opposition.
The reason for GOP acceptance and promotion of the Big Lie is obvious: it is politically advantageous. Most Republicans still back Trump; only 11% blame him for the Jan. 6 insurrection. Of course, the majority of Americans think Trump is responsible. But the political incentives of Republican senators and House members is to win their primary. Most House seats are, from a partisan perspective, noncompetitive. If you are, say, August Pfluger, who won his race for the 11th district of Texas with 79.7% of the vote, you aren’t worried about a Democratic challenger - you’re worried about the Republican primary. From an electoral point of view, given the gerrymandered landscape and preponderance of “safe” districts nationwide, most members of Congress focus their attention on their party, their base, because they don’t need to convince anyone across the aisle to vote for them. Senate seats are not gerrymandered, of course, but the overrepresentation of small, rural, overwhelmingly Republican states in the Senate guarantees a 7+ point partisan advantage for the GOP.
The hypothesis of least surprise for the vast majority of political moves made by Republicans in the last few months is that they are trying to maintain a grip on power, and doing so by focusing overwhelmingly on their core supporters, most of whom (due in large part to their representatives’ misinformation!) simply don’t believe the results of the 2020 election or the complicity of Trump in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Justice as the advantage of the stronger: you make any move you can to keep or regain power.
Plato’s Take
Thrasymachus’ definition of justice is, descriptively, the best way of understanding today’s Republican Party. But in the Republic, Socrates counters by saying that, in fact, it is to one’s advantage to be just and to one’s disadvantage to be unjust. Plato seems to believe that this answers Thrasymachus’ definition thoroughly enough, as he carries on the discussion with another of his hangers-on, Glaucon.
Glaucon’s argument is that justice is only good for its good consequences. If being unjust led to good consequences, then justice would be useless. He uses the Ring of Gyges parable to illustrate this point. In brief, a shepherd finds a ring that can turn him invisible, uses it to kill the king and take the queen as his wife, and is never punished. Socrates disagrees; he claims that justice is good in itself, regardless of the consequences.
Much of the rest of the Republic is Plato’s attempt at proving this premise. The entire discussion of his utopia serves the purpose of proving what justice is, and what it is not. Russell summarizes Plato’s eventual definition of justice as follows:
It consists, we are told, in everybody doing his own work and not being a busybody: the city is just when trader, auxiliary, and guardian, each does his own job without interfering with that of any other class.
How far does this definition apply to the Republican Party of 2021? This definition is certainly conservative in that it values the status quo. It allows for inegalitarian differences between people to exist, making no special fuss about, say, the astronomical and widening inequality in America. The libertarian wing of the Republican Party might find much to attract them to this definition, as ideologically they are committed to the state essentially doing as little for people as possible. In this line of thinking, we don’t owe anything to each other; we are just to work hard, keep our heads down, maintain the course. And while I think that many of today’s GOP leaders don’t exhibit these qualities of humility and temperance themselves, it remains a dominant, if fading, aspect of their ideological structure.
However, for this theory of justice to work out well for those involved, you have to have a good selection mechanism for what “keeping one’s own” is all about. There has to be a good way, from the start, to select wise leaders in particular. And as I wrote about here, it’s actually very difficult to work out a good system for selecting wise leaders. The freshman class of Republican members of Congress is more than enough evidence of that (see e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Ronny Jackson).
What Plato gets wrong - and the GOP gets right
Even if we could solve the wisdom selection dilemma, there is a fundamental difference between a descriptive theory of justice and a normative theory of justice. Plato’s theory is the latter. In the Republic, he describes what he thinks justice ought to be. Thrasymachus, the interlocutor dismissed in the very first book of the Republic, gives in contrast a descriptive theory: in the real world, justice is power. Plato’s definition relies on the creation of a society based on strict ethical norms. Thrasymachus’ definition describes what societies, in general already look like.
Including our own. Republicans, in accordance with the descriptive, justice-as-power definition, generally don’t stop to worry about the ethics, or even the optics, of their manipulation of rules and norm-breaking if it serves their political interests. They have no special allegiance to any ideology (or even a policy platform!) beyond fighting tooth and nail against the Democrats. Michelle Obama famously invoked Democratic principled action with the line “When they go low, we go high.” And frankly, as a stylized fact, that’s exactly the problem; we stick to our principles, seek bipartisanship with an unscrupulous negotiating partner, and cede power readily.
I don’t love Plato’s theory of justice even as a normative idea; I certainly think we could strive for more than “keeping one’s own”! (I’m partial to John Rawls’ conception of Justice as Fairness.) But the cards that we are dealt, the real world political situation in which we find ourselves, bears little relationship to the idealized structure of Plato’s utopia that allows him to propose such a theory of justice in the first place. We don’t have a society organized around a homogenous ethical, religious, or traditional core. We have a pluralistic pseudo-democracy, with competing constituent bodies and featuring a wide variety of material needs and ideological principles. That’s the real world, baby!
And in order to promote our principles of justice in the real world, the party oriented more fully toward justice has to be willing to obtain and maintain power. Democrats have to use their brief moment of control—use their power—to enact such priorities as sweeping coronavirus relief legislation, abolishing the filibuster, federally expanding voting rights, adding DC and Puerto Rico as states, etc. Otherwise, the Republican Party with its more clear-eyed understanding of justice in the real world, justice as power, will regain that power and continue to thwart the implementation of a more principled, ideal form of justice.
Anyway…
Here’s another pic of Juno, along with a direct quote from her: “Go call Joe Manchin and yell at him about the filibuster or something.”
(PS. One consideration beyond the scope of this post, but worth chewing on for awhile, is the broader ontological distinction between Thrasymachus and Socrates. Russell frames the territory as follows:
It raises the fundamental question in ethics and politics, namely: Is there any standard of “good” and “bad,” except what the man using these words desires? If there is not, many of the consequences drawn by Thrasymachus seem unescapable. Yet how are we to say that there is?
…Plato thinks he can prove that his ideal Republic is good; a democrat who accepts the objectivity of ethics may think that he can prove the Republic bad; but anyone who agrees with Thrasymachus will say: “There is no question of proving or disproving; the only question is whether you like the kind of State that Plato desires. If you do, it is good for you; if you do not, it is bad for you. If many do and many do not, the decision cannot be made by reason, but only by force, actual or concealed.
Plato’s belief in the objectivity of justice, the provability of his normative theory, was the dominant view in Western philosophy for a long time. The question remains open, though evidence for Thrasymachus’ descriptive, purely-a-matter-of-power theory of justice seems to be accumulating, especially in modern American politics.)