No, Trump Is Not the End of US Democracy. It Never Existed.

When Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election, the media filled with breathless headlines about the collapse of democracy. Trump’s victory was certainly the collapse of something, but commentators trying to put their finger on exactly what this was missed the mark. Now, as Trump is once again at the threshold of the White House, the point bears reexamining.
Trump, we were told, was just what Plato had predicted 23 centuries ago in his famous dialogue, the Republic: that democracy will inevitably cave in upon itself and birth a tyrant. Trump, supposedly, is that tyrant.
Vox’s Sean Illing told us that “the character of Trump and the reasons for his rise are explained in remarkably prescient terms by Plato over two thousand years ago.” He was echoing a similar notion Andrew Sullivan propounded the year before in New York Magazine. UPenn professors Eric W. Orts, Peter T. Struck and Jeffrey Green, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, promised us that we could understand Trump’s character and motivations by fitting him “into a template of tyranny” derived from the Republic. The Washington Post’s David Lay Williams joined the chorus too with a piece entitled, “Here’s what Plato had to say about someone like Donald Trump.”
The meme spread, giving a patina of intellectualism to our collective anxieties about the erratic president. Those anxieties are justified — but the reading of Plato is not. Now, it might seem petty to quibble about the classics when great matters of state are at hand, but at times of crisis, we need the classics to fall back on to give us perspective and wisdom. If we do not listen to Plato carefully, we may miss what he really does have to tell us. If we instead shoehorn our own anxieties into his words, we will only really be listening to ourselves.
The fact of the matter is that America’s current civil crisis, while terribly real, is not the crisis of democracy as Plato understood it. Nor is Trump the tyrant from Plato’s dialogue. The reason for this is that America is not really a democracy at all.
Plato recognized that what is most important about human behavior, and thus about political behavior, is the good that humans seek. What do we value? What are we looking to gain when we act, personally or politically? This is the most basic thing; the forms and processes of politics are secondary, because we can use a variety of systems to achieve the same goals as long as we agree on what we want. For this reason, it is a matter of indifference to Plato whether the ideal state is a monarchy or an aristocracy. What matters is that the people in charge, whether they be one or many, are lovers of wisdom and rule with an eye to virtue.
For this reason, two states with quite dissimilar systems can behave in a very similar manner if they value the same things. The United States is a republic with a tripartite national government as well as a federal union of sovereign states. The United Kingdom is a unitary monarchy with a sovereign parliament and a largely unwritten constitution. Yet, the two states behave as the best of friends, coordinating their operations internationally and influencing each other domestically. They do this because their political cultures are the same; they (largely) have the same vision of what a state should look like and value.
Human beings are complex, but not infinitely complex. They have patterns that we can discern. Plato divided the five basic kinds of political character into five types based on their chief values. He called them aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny.
The “aristocratic” character is philosophical. This character values transcendent and eternal things: the gods, the objects of mathematics and the unchangeable essences of things. The second character, called “timocratic,” loves honor, is concerned with the esteem of peers and seeks traditional respectability and military glory. The “oligarchical” or plutocratic character loves wealth. An oligarch amasses wealth in great quantities and excludes others. The “democratic” character is concerned with the satisfaction of the here and now, the personal pleasures of feasting and revelry. The most important thing is the vote — the expression of each individual’s will. Finally, the tyrannical character loves a pleasure that is lawless and goes beyond the bounds of human nature.
Plato did not draw up these characters at random. They were all too plain to see in Plato’s Greece, which knew the honor-loving and militaristic Spartans and the tumultuous and democratic Athenians. Greece saw its fair share of merchant oligarchies that made themselves fabulously wealthy. Unfortunately, it also produced depraved and lawless tyrants at times. And Plato himself had the blessing of meeting high-minded and philosophical rulers as well. Archytas, the Pythagorean leader of Taranto, may have inspired Plato’s portrayal of the philosopher-king in the Republic.
Politics are an expression of choices, and choices are an expression of values. So, the five types correspond to the five possible kinds of value. Values can either be spiritual or physical, and if physical, either external or internal, that is, bodily. The philosopher loves the spiritual good; the timocrat loves an external good, reputation. Further, bodily goods can either be natural or unnatural, and natural goods can either be moderate or immoderate. (There is no moderate amount of unnatural “goods.”) The oligarch loves bodily goods in moderation; a wastrel cannot amass wealth. The democrat loves bodily good without moderation; satisfaction of individual desire is paramount. Finally, the tyrant loves something that not only exceeds the limits of nature but is repugnant to them.
The philosopher and the tyrant are both exceptional characters. Philosophers transcend nature to contemplate the universal laws that are beyond it. The tyrant, too, goes beyond nature, not by transcending it but by violating it. Because they are exceptional, they both are very rare. Most human beings are in the middle. The mass of mankind is neither very good nor exceptionally evil.
Spiritual behavior drives political behavior. For this reason, a state will become what it loves. A money-loving state will become an oligarchy — i.e., it will have few rulers — because only a few can amass great wealth. They hoard everything they can and reduce their fellow citizens to beggars. Likewise, a state where the citizens are most concerned with satisfying their immediate, selfish desires will seek to give the most liberty to the greatest number of individuals. This is necessary for each to follow one’s own passions.
A state may appear to have a very democratic constitution on paper but function as an oligarchy in practice. (Examples of this situation are probably too common to be worth listing.) Or a state may appear to be an oligarchy on paper but function as a tyranny in practice. (This was the case for the Roman Empire in its darkest moments.) What matters more than any charter is the constitution written in the hearts of citizens. In the words of another philosopher, Heraclitus, “one’s ethic is one’s fate.”
Generally, like begets like. Wise leaders will do their best to raise wise young people to carry on the constitution of the best state. Honor-loving, money-loving and freedom-loving people will pass their own values down in their own cultures. Even tyrants, in a perverse way, breed more tyrants.
Yet nothing in human affairs lasts forever. So, Plato tells us, a wise state will eventually produce a generation that conforms not to philosophy but to tradition — no longer understanding the reasons that motivated its founders to frame just laws. An honor-loving state will eventually become corrupted by money, which can have the false appearance of glory. The Greeks saw this happen in their time when Persian gold infamously corrupted Spartan agents.
According to the Republic, this downward trend continues because oligarchs ultimately dispossess most of the population and create a resentful underclass that deposes them. But the resulting democratic state is highly unstable, and so it gives over in short order to a tyranny. The tyrant is the caricature of a democrat: Loving base pleasure above all things, tyrants enslave every other citizen to give themselves maximum freedom. So, in this way, each kind of constitution arises as a corruption of the last.
Well, it’s settled then, isn’t it? America is a democracy, so, when it collapses, it will become a tyranny, and obviously, Trump is that tyrant.
Not so fast. The trappings of democracy do not a democracy make. Prosaically, what Plato had in mind was a direct democracy and not a representative democracy — although even a direct democracy has representatives (think of Pericles). More important, however, than any procedure about how votes are translated into laws is the spiritual orientation of the state. What does it value? Whom does it favor?
These days, it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy. Even former President Jimmy Carter has said it. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page detected this empirically. Popular opinion has almost no correlation with US policy; business interests do.
This doesn’t have to mean that US elections are not free and fair. What it does mean is that, even if our democratic elections are not a sham, and even if voters can decide which of the two candidates of the ruling party wins in a particular year, the people do not exercise control over their politics. The state doesn’t work for them, and it’s not supposed to. As political scientist Josep Colomer pointed out in a March interview with Fair Observer, the US was designed not to be a democracy. By all appearances, I would add, its constitution is still working as intended.
There is no need to belabor this point much further. If you are a US citizen and not a member of the wealthy elite, ask yourself: Do you feel in charge?
Our next conclusion follows in due course. Is Trump the tyrant to America’s democracy? No; he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy. After all, tyrants are very rare. But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.
The man Republicans picked to “drain the swamp” is himself a swamp creature. As a political donor, Trump rubbed elbows with his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and even his current opponent Kamala Harris. Not too long ago, either. So why has the Washington system tried to spit out Trump the way an organism tries to expel a foreign body? He is an outsider, sure. An outsider to the party, an outsider to Washington. But not an outsider to the culture. He is, as terrifying as it is, one of us.
Not every conflict is a conflict between basic political constitutions. Far more common is a conflict between factions within the same constitution. Russia recently saw one militarist thug try to rebel against another one. Was Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion a battle for the soul of Russia, or just for who would be in charge in Moscow? Our own oligarchs may not be driving tanks at each other, but Silicon Valley billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have been known to throw a few bombs. More recently, the Washington oligarchs have taken to lawfare rather than outright violence as their weapon of choice.
A conflict between good and evil? More like sand tiger sharks eating each other in the womb. The fact that they’re killing each other doesn’t mean that they come from different species.
There is one other argument that buttresses the thesis that Trump is a tyrant. In brief: Trump is a fascist, and fascists are tyrants. This is deceptively simple, since “fascist” and “tyrant” are nearly synonyms. But even here, the spiritual orientations that drive politics belie our easy comparisons.
The utter vagueness of the word “fascist” makes its use as the major term of any syllogism problematic. By now, nearly every political movement has been described as “fascist” by its opponents. I have my doubts that the term can usefully be expanded beyond the militarist-nationalist authoritarian regimes of interwar Europe; even then, naming Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement after Benito Mussolini’s Fascism can be more confusing than clarifying.
Policy-wise, Trump is a Republican. Sure, he represents a more isolationist, populist strand of conservative ideology rather than the neoconservative version which was previously hegemonic within his party. That doesn’t make him Hitler, even though his Democratic opponent would like to tie him to the German dictator. (Democrats have been calling Republican candidates Hitler since at least 1948.)
Still, the term “fascist” does retain some utility. If Trump is a fascist, his fascism would seem to consist primarily in his embrace of political violence and his willingness to accept the support of thugs, from the Proud Boys he told to “stand by” in 2020 to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill rioters that tried to stop the electoral count and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” I doubt that Trump really wanted rioters to lynch his own vice president, but he certainly seemed to be pleased with the idea that his supporters would go outside the law for him, whether or not he incited them to do so in a legal sense. And a New York jury has found that Trump was willing to break the law himself in order to boost his own chances in the 2016 election.
If a fascist is a politician who is willing to break the law and use violence to win, then Trump is a fascist. For that matter, if looking the other way on or encouraging political violence makes one a fascist, then a good proportion of the US political and media establishment is fascist. But not only tyrants are violent. Timocrats, oligarchs and democrats throughout history have employed violence to intimidate, expel or eliminate their political opponents. If you want a fun read, historian Paolo Grillo can walk you through a litany of violent clashes and partisan expulsions in the medieval Italian republics that will make your head spin.
If nothing else, Grillo’s book is a fascinating (and sobering) reminder that Western democracy is a lot older than 1776. But perhaps you prefer your democracy post-Enlightenment. Don’t forget that, already by 1793, French democrats were lopping people’s heads off with industrial efficiency. And even the American Revolution was marred with plentiful scenes of brutal violence that we rarely like to talk about.
Finally, as Plato never lets us forget, it was a democratic vote that sentenced Socrates to drink poison for the crime of doing philosophy.
I say none of this to make a “whataboutist” argument that Trump is no better or worse than anyone else. But we should be aware that an oligarch is perfectly capable of violence. Trump might be a particularly nasty oligarch, but he is one. So, there is no need to jump to conclusions: Trump’s existence does not mean that our democracy is now dead. Much more likely, it means that our exploitative, ugly oligarchy is continuing to grind on much as it always has, right on top of you and me.
Of course, we can’t take it easy just because Trump isn’t a tyrant. Tyranny is the worst possible scenario, but there are many other evils in between the good and the worst.
The concept of tyranny terrifies us because it is the total bankrupture of the state, and whenever we see someone like Trump undoing previously sacred norms, we rightly get nervous. Tyranny arises from chaos, and chaos arises from order gone wrong. Oligarchy is that order gone wrong, and we are in the thick of it.
Remember that every constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those seeds sprout and grow as the old order begins to die away. The seeds of democracy — mob rule, the breakdown of legal order — are already present in the United States. Trump and his populists may well represent this tendency.
Trump is an oligarch with a tinge of the democratic. A perfect oligarch has only one spouse; that’s the best way to balance a checkbook. Even our best oligarchs have been having trouble keeping their households together lately. Trump is a serial marrier and a philanderer besides. A lot of good Christian voters have forgotten Trump’s boast about “grab[bing women] by the pussy.” That is a mistake. When sleaze enters the highest levels of politics, things are going to the dogs. People who can’t keep their own lives together can’t well be expected to keep the state together.
Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither was it destroyed. Trump may not be our Caligula, but he could be our Sulla, if first-century BC Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla is willing to bear the comparison. Sulla did not destroy the Republic, but he weakened it fatally. By employing political violence, he brought a crassness and lack of collegial respect into the senatorial class that precipitated the disastrous civil wars of Pompey and Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian. This destabilization led to the establishment of the Empire.
I, for one, am not calling the time of death of the American republic just yet. It may limp on, perhaps for centuries, just as Rome did. But I fear that Trump may already have dealt it a wound from which it will never completely recover. Whichever way the results of today’s voting turn out, it may take decades before historians can tell us whether Trump, and today’s coarser, more fractious politics more generally, were a sickness unto death or just a bad cold.
Lord preserve us.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.