The Ancient Enemy

One course I particularly enjoyed putting together and teaching was a course on ancient Greek democracy. By happy chance, the first semester I taught it Trump was running for the Republican nomination in 2016. When we got to the historian Thucydides' account of the fall of the Athenian democracy,* it hit like a ton of bricks. Thuc (as we in the biz call him) one of the smartest guys in all of western civilization IMHO, said the decline of Athens began with the rise of the demagogue Cleon, a thoroughly unpleasant chap with a forceful and bullying style of oratory, anti-intellectual and anti-elitist, who curried favor with the masses by telling them what they wanted to hear.  He took an aggressive "Athens first" stance which involved heavily taxing Athens' allies to the benefit of the Athenian underclass--and his own power--a move which eventually led to their revolt and the fall of the Athenian Empire in the Peloponnesian War with Sparta. Cleon was adamantly against any peace deal with Sparta since, as Thuc writes, "if peace were restored, his crimes would be more open to detection and his slanders less credited" (Hist. of the Pelopon. War, book 5, chap. 16).

Likewise Aristophanes, the comic genius who also loathed Cleon, writes of him and his partisans: "You are like those who fish for eels; they catch nothing in still waters, but if they vigorously stir up the slime, their fishing is good; in the same way it's only in troubled times that you can line your pockets" (Knights 864-867).

All of this was 2,400 years ago. My point here is less the parallel with our current political climate than to point out that from the very beginning, demagoguery has been the bane of democracy, and has raised its ugly head time and time again in the history of democracies, and certainly in our own history as a nation. It is the old and recurrent enemy; it is nothing new. Yet time and again, democracies fail to be on guard against it.

* History of the Peloponnesian War, books III, IV,& V.