FROM SOCRATES TO TRUMP
A POLITICAL PROPHECY: Deciphering a 21st Century Phenomenon Through Ancient Athenian Events
Eurydice Eve
Deciphering a 21st Century Phenomenon Through Ancient Greek History
In 399 BC, trumped up charges of corrupting social norms were brought against Socrates by three orators who indicted him on the grounds that his criticism of institutions endangered democracy. Athens had just wasted vast resources in a foreign proxy war that left its empire weakened and city leaders disliked internal dissent. Socrates, who fought in that war, became famous for trolling the agora asking embarrassing questions that exposed the ruling elites’ duplicity. In chance encounters, speeches, and dinners (symposia), he challenged Athenians to put their learned beliefs through the test of reason. He urged people to live in constant pursuit of knowledge to be worthy of participating in self-rule. He thought questioning the status quo was mandatory for every citizen. He taught by example, using interrogatory deduction to minimize the corruption of corruptible men.
At his trial, envious past associates gave perjured salacious testimony. Prosecutors accused him of corrupting the youth by teaching the youth to think for themselves rather than obey the rules. Witnesses called Athens’ ‘gadfly’ a shameless know-it-all. Socrates said his accusers were so eloquent that he almost believed their lies himself. He didn’t plead for mercy or clemency, nor admit wrongdoing. Asked what he would consider fair punishment, he said that the state should pay him a UBI. Infuriated, the jury found him guilty. 140 jurors condemned him to pay a fine. 360 jurors condemned him to death. They expected him to flee to exile as most prominent Athenians who fell out of favor. What he did next made Socrates democracy’s timeless martyr.
Overcoming the personal for the communal is the goal of all civilization. A successful civilization convinces humans to sacrifice their lives for it. A demos is a group of people who agree to abide by the same rules and value the right to majority rule more than their personal interest. A democracy is a nomocracy (“rule of law”). Law is the scaffolding on which every civilization is continuously woven. The survival of a democracy depends on the fairness of its laws and their application. Socrates had devoted his life to the open disinterested application of reason on behalf of fairness. The unjust verdict turned this pompous skeptic into a sympathetic scapegoat. Ever insubordinate, he now upheld the law. He obeyed the state that he was convicted of disobeying. He chose to take the hemlock and defend the rule of law that the lawfare against him defied. His death proved his innocence and his detractors’ hypocrisy.
The unexamined life is not worth living.
I am a feminist progressive intellectual with three graduate degrees. I have voted straight-ticket Democrat since I took the oath of US citizenship. No matter how much I disagreed with the Democrats, I judged Republicans to be worse. I saw Trump as an inflammatory, opportunistic demagogue whose success showed the body politic’s disenchantment with the globalist status quo. On January 6 2021, I watched on TV pro-Trump protesters break into the U.S. Capitol. I was dismayed by people’s mistrust in the government but I didn’t think democracy was in peril. I know the sound, smell and look of an insurrection because when I was eight, I briefly walked into one. On November 17 1973, I watched military tanks roll into Athens bearing young Greek soldiers ordered to shoot to kill young Greek Polytechnic students. Having grown up in a junta, I knew the difference between a tyrant and Sasha Cohen Baron, or Charlie Chaplin before him, playing one on TV. Trump struck me as the former.
Then on August 8th 2022, unmarked FBI agents raided Mar a Lago with orders to shoot to kill. On March 25th 2023, the mass incarceration system that hunted down Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, turned against Trump. His prosecution by the police state in a cascading, suspiciously timed, series of indictments humanized him. To my surprise, like Socrates, and unlike Bernie, Trump did not capitulate to it.
After his third indictment, I went back and played Trump’s speeches, wondering why the establishment feared him. I fought my disdain for his tropes out of respect for the demos’ loyalty to him. Loyalty is a high virtue in a low-trust, profit-driven immigrant society. His standup routine reminded me of Norm McDonald making Hillary jokes on SNL. I realized that he spoke in the satirical hyperbole of the oral tradition, doing a stream of consciousness comedic bit that amplified what his crowds chanted under cover of anonymity. His crowd appeal was that he spoke for the crowd. Acting the fool made him their hero. When he broke a taboo, the crowd roared at his irreverence. When he vowed to end wars, build walls, fire bureaucrats, the crowd exploded in cheers. He never lost his audience because he understood the function of celebrity to be a pliable mimetic vessel for the masses. Like an actor in a play by Aristophanes, he was an outlet for a people’s repressed resentments, an unconstrained conduit for the collective id, a willing instrument of the people’s will. He had unwittingly enacted the core transaction of representative democracy: he agreed to be a pliable mimetic vessel for the masses, the cognitive mouthpiece of multitudes.
I reconsidered the only time I met Trump, at a party for George magazine, when he had stared at my cleavage as I was speaking and then replied with a caustic crack at our glittery hosts. I now recognized his people instincts: like me, he didn’t belong in John’s aristocratic circle, and he articulated our commonality. He was an unapologetic Everyman in rarefied NYC. Even then, Trump used his name recognition as his asset and made his money subcontracting it to whomever paid him the highest fee. He saw that fame is currency in a democracy. When his fame expanded, his fees grew. He used reality TV, beauty pageants, sports, and finally politics to enhance his fame.
Self-funding his campaign and sounding his mouth off endeared him to citizens who no longer trusted scripted articulate politicians. But his general election victory odds were so low that few donors cared to corrupt him. He had to use his money to promote himself. To mitigate his cost of staying in the race, he struck a deal with millions of citizens: he put his megaphone to their use in exchange for their donations and votes. He wanted fame. The people wanted a promoter to promote their interests. Democracy is transactional: regardless of his views, a politician echoes the millions he represents.
After his unexpected victory, Trump expected to be America’s favorite promoter, to personify America. But the permanent state outbullied the performer bully. He fought just to keep his post. Insiders did not know what he would do next, since he did not. He was moment to moment, reading the zeitgeist. This ‘despotism’ infuriated the entrenched interests that bank on predictability. Afraid that the frontman could bring down the power structure just to get re-elected, or get his likeness on Mt. Rushmore, the establishment portrayed him as a tyrant and discounted the millions who voted for him. As John Bolton said, “He does not have a political view of the world — he doesn’t think in policy terms; he thinks of everything through the prism of what will benefit Trump.” But what benefited Trump was what benefited the people who elected him.
In 2020 Trump ran a cliché campaign and lost to another establishment candidate. Liz Cheney moved to usurp GOP control as Bush’s anointed successor; John Bolton told CNN he had voted for Dick Cheney. Trump went back to the working class, who still needed an instrument against a government that prioritized the donor class. His civil defiance caused the Jan 6 fiasco which gave America drama worthy of the Iliad. The people rehired Trump as their spokesman, wagering that his manic sense of destiny could cut America off the old-world knots that immigrant generations had escaped from and end the global empire that betrayed America’s founding. Trump’s narcissism became the people’s superpower. If he wanted the world stage, he had to speak for the people, going against his mortal interest to gain immortal fame. A new tougher deal was struck. He announced his candidacy. Immediately, the lawfare began.
Trump continued to run his mouth off, like Socrates. On February 24th, in his CPAC address, Donald Trump said, “I stand before you as a proud political dissident” on a “mission to liberate the United States.” On May 18th, at a NRA rally in Dallas, he said, “You can’t talk about this, can’t talk about that; but those are the best things: when we talk about the things we can’t talk about.” “If you vote for me, I will free Ross Ulbricht,” he told the Libertarian convention on May 25th and the crowd that had been booing him erupted in applause. On May 29th, at his criminal trial, he declared, “Mother Teressa couldn’t beat these charges,” resigned to the irony that his private misfortune aided his public fortune. As the man suffered, the politician resurged. His persecution made the personal political. On the day of his conviction, his campaign raised a hundred million dollars. Like Socrates at his trial, Trump now embraced his fate, not as the man his family, friends and enemies knew, but a symbol.
In The Republic, Plato describes a debate on the meaning of justice between Socrates and Thrasymachus, a sophist who argues that justice has no intrinsic meaning and is a pretty word for what is in the interest of the stronger party. “Injustice, on a large scale, is stronger, freer, more masterly than justice,” Thrasymachus says. Socrates warns Thrasymachus that justice must be fair because the citizens’ lives belong to the state, not to themselves. Socrates dramatized this when he drank from the poisoned cup of democracy. His execution was the price of his citizenship. Socrates’ majority-voted death convinced Plato that democracies were doomed to devolve into mob rule. Later, in his forms of government, Plato ranked democracy only above tyranny, which he thought democracy becomes if citizens pursue selfish interests over the common good. “Out of the highest freedom comes the most widespread, savage slavery,” Plato warns. The Athenians soon regretted their condemnation of Socrates and exiled his accusers. But the clash between democracy and plutocracy destroyed Athens.
It now threatens the West. The post WWII boom in industrialization, corporatization, scientification that allowed women, servants and migrants to join the taxable job market, raised the value of the sovereign individual and popularized democracy, the populist counterpoint to a Republic where a few select citizens of superior means, birth, education and character vote on behalf of the electorate, legislating the contempt of the educated for the uneducated. As democrats and plutocrats fight for control of the law, and of common sense, America swings between democracy and plutocracy.
Civilization needs people to embody it. Trump is a meta politician, a mock dictator, whose victory confirmed the impact of postmodernity on the human condition, and the collapse of the grand narrative of the old regime. But until he was impeached, arraigned, humiliated, paraded before court after court, Trump was Thrasymachus, driven by self interest. Trump’s reversal of fortune only escalated when he was shot to the head on live television in what would have become a live execution for the whole world to see and learn, if he had not turned his head. The failed assassination attempts, by prowar fanatics featured in Blackrock commercials, on July 13th in Butler PA and Sep 15th in Palm Beach FL., further moved Trump out of reality TV into stark reality.
His supporters now hope that, if elected, he will protect democracy from plutocracy. His opponents fear that he will become a Platonic tyrant. He will be sentenced in NY on November 26th. His detractors, my fellow Democrats, should be careful what they wish for. If he wins, it’ll be likely because the Feds turned him into an underdog, and he will get no jail time. If he loses, he may spend the rest of his life as a dissident or an exile. If he is jailed, he may become America’s Socrates. If he takes the hemlock in his final act, he may inspire America’s Plato. And if he is assassinated, he will become a martyr. Trump knows, by instinct, that he’s more powerful dead than alive.
Eurydice Eve (@eurydiceeve) is the author of “Satyricon USA” https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Satyricon-USA/Eurydice/9780684862491 among other books. She writes the Universal Mother Income newsletter https://eurydice.substack.com/.
@EurydiceEve
