The news that wasn’t: Donald Trump the presumptive Republican nominee for President.
At the beginning of every semester, at the beginning of every class, I hold a seminar titled “Gymnasium in a Box.” In the space of sixty minutes students review 2400 years of history and, more importantly, the they review the concepts out of which social scientific discourse is composed. Of course, not long ago it was impossible to receive a diploma without some rudimentary grasp of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, to which I have added Marx. How else could one make sense of freedom-necessity, leisure-labor, public-private, politics-economy?
Which means that nearly every economics student for the past four years knows why Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee (although, truthfully, the same would hold true for any of the Republican candidates). They have read Plato’s Gorgias and Thucydides’ Peleponnesian War and so they know how Pericles seized power and why the oligarchy was powerless to prevent him. Pericles filled public offices and extended the franchise to individuals deprived of sufficient education and financial resources by the very oligarchy that now complained bitterly against Periclean “democracy.” Now Pericles had “empowered” them and in gratitude they lent their support to his campaign for personal wealth, power, and glory. My students at least have heard this story before.
They have also read Plato’s Republic, in which a “noble lie” allows the Guardians to differentiate between those who do not know they are being lied to (and are therefore unfit to govern), those who know they are being lied to but, like Socrates, unwisely publicize their discontent (and therefore are unfit to rule), and those who not only recognize the lie, but also wisely understand why the public is ill-prepared to handle the truth. Plato’s defense of rule by deceit forms the underlying premise of Thucydides’ account of the corruption and collapse of classical Athens.
And they have read Aristotle’s Politics, wherein the ideal of an equally healthy, wealthy, and wise public is held forth as the only sure bulwark against despotism (from δεσπότης, literally “managerialism”) and tyranny, τύραννος, literally the rule of the violent. And so they know why a public systematically deprived of health, education, and welfare might favor a modern Pericles.
Like the Agrarian and Christian Democrats in 1932, the establishment Republicans believed they could have it both ways: deprive the public the goods they have reason to value — health, education, and welfare — and yet somehow expect the basic core of the oligarchy to remain intact. They are now learning that it doesn’t work that way. A public deprived of the basic capabilities necessary for self-government will gladly abdicate to a “benevolent” dictator.
We should be throwing all our resources at creating and sustaining a people fit to self-govern. Instead we ask how close we can hug the margin without self-destructing. That’s the wrong question. But now it is too late.