What Would Plato Have Thought Of Donald Trump? – Analysis www.eurasiareview.com /02042016-what-would-plato-have-thought-of-donald-trump-analysis/ Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim Were Plato to have witnessed the surprising rise of Donald Trump from celebrity businessman to potential President, he would probably have seen this as yet another vindication of his suspicion of democracy, in particular, his insight that democracy suffers from a dangerous potential to collapse into tyranny, a weakness which he vividly discussed in The Republic. Before I begin my discussion of Plato’s argument for the inherent weakness of democracy, I first have to clarify what is meant by “democracy” in the context of The Republic. By “democracy” Plato was not referring to modern democracy, a political system which he would have perceived as alien, nor was he referring to the actually-existing democracy of Athens. In The Republic, Plato characterizes democracy as being “the extreme of popular liberty,” where “slaves—male and female—have the same liberty as their owners” and where there is “complete equality and liberty in the relations between the sexes” (563b). Democracy as the “extreme of popular liberty” is further described in The Republic as follows: “Then in democracy,” I went on, “there’s no compulsion either to exercise authority if you are capable of it, or to submit to authority if you don’t want to; you needn’t fight if there’s a war, or you can wage a private war in peacetime if you don’t like peace; and if there’s any law that debars you from political or judicial office, you will none the less take either if they come your way. It’s a wonderfully pleasant way of carrying on in the short run, isn’t it? “In the short run perhaps.” “‘And isn’t there something rather charming about the good temper of those who’ve been sentenced in court? You must have noticed that in a democracy men sentenced to death or exile stay on, none the less, and go about among their fellows, with no more notice taken of their comings and goings than if they were invisible spirits.” (557e-558a) Annas notes that this depiction of “the extreme of popular liberty” in democracy conspicuously fails to match the absence of it in actually-existing Athenian democracy: “Plato presents democracy as defined by tolerant pluralism, but Athens was a populist democracy, with a clearly defined way of life separating those with power from those without, and about as tolerant of openly expressed nonconformity as McCarthyite America. Plato knew that Athenians were not free to disobey the law (Socrates could hardly ignore his death sentence!); that Athens was one of the worst cities in the Greek world as far as concerned equal freedoms for men and women. (563b is absurd if Athens is in view); and that not only were foreigners like Protagoras and Anaxagoras driven out for expressing unpopular views, but even citizens who, like Euripides, publicly held unorthodox opinions had life made so miserable for them by public vilification that they often left Athens to escape the pressures.”1
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