http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/02/andrew-sullivan-on-trump-and-tyranny/ Andrew Sullivan on Trump and Tyranny MAY 2, 2016
Ross Douthat
Andrew Sullivan has returned to journalism (blow, ye trumpets!) with an essay that dovetails in certain ways with my own Sunday column, which made the case that Americans both Trumpist and anti-Trump are basically pining for a king. Sullivan’s essay puts a political-philosophy spin on the same phenomenon, portraying Donald Trump as the quintessence of Plato’s tyrannical soul (a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others …”) and our society as a hyper-egalitarian and hyper-libertarian fulfillment of Plato’s warning about the ease with which democracy can succumb to tyranny:
"This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy … And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
"He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt. If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee. Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities. He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself."
This is an excellent description of Trump’s progress in the Republican primary. But I think the stunning ease of that progress, the “strange defeat” of the GOP elite, might be encouraging Sullivan (and others) to overestimate the weakness of the American ruling class writ large, and overstate the vulnerability of our cultural-political power structure — our “Cathedral,” to borrow from the neoreactionaries I’ve been writing about of late — to a purely populist insurgency.
Yes, maybe that wider elite, too, has lost the ability to coordinate against a demagogue; maybe it, too, is so disdained and dismissed by We the People that the public can be persuaded to replace our overclass en masse with Corey Lewandowski and his epigones. But despite (or because of?) its many vices, our power elite actually seems pretty unified and confident in its own cosmopolitan virtue, pretty good at steering public opinion on many controversial issues (including issues in which Sullivan has helped with the steering, from Iraq War cheerleading to anti-Iraq War backlash to Obamamania to the gay marriage juggernaut), pretty confident in its own virtue, and pretty determined to keep a force like Trumpism at bay. Which is to say that I’m not sure our democratic culture translates to the kind of uber-democratic politics that Sullivan discerns: I doubt that democratic passions can really carry all before them, and I think to overthrow an elite you can’t just mobilize against it; you need that elite to be already paralyzed and fractured, as the G.O.P. elite has been in the face of Trump.
And that kind of elite fracturing just seems unlikely once this contest moves from the primary to the general election. Which major donor to the left of Michael Bloomberg is going to sit on their hands rather than give to Hillary, the way that many Republican donors sat on their hands rather than go all-in for Cruz and Kasich and even Rubio? How many mainstream media figures are going to go all-in for Trump in the style of Sean Hannity or certain segments of talk radio? (Trump will get obsessive mainstream media coverage, but he already gets that, and all those hours of CNN and the nightly news have delivered him a 30 percent approval rating.) Which apolitical gurus are going to go to work to build his turnout operation, his voter targeting, his web presence, his ad campaign? Which retired generals and foreign policy hands are going to line up behind him, vouching for his soundness of mind and seriousness of purpose? Which pundit-intellectuals are going to channel their Hillary-skepticism into a full-throated support for Trump? (Not Sullivan, clearly …)
Maybe none of this matters; maybe the insurrectionary potential of mass democracy is sufficient to propel a demagogue forward against a largely unified elite. But I think Sullivan inadvertently puts his finger on what a Trumpish figure would actually need in order to complete his conquest, when he compares Trump with Barack Obama circa 2008:
Obama would never have been nominated for the presidency, let alone elected, if he hadn’t harnessed the power of the web and the charisma of his media celebrity. But he was also, paradoxically, a very elite figure, a former state and U.S. senator, a product of Harvard Law School, and, as it turned out, blessed with a preternaturally rational and calm disposition. So he has masked, temporarily, the real risks in the system that his pioneering campaign revealed …
The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.
But surely the fact that Obama was a hugely popular figure who swept to a polarized country’s equivalent of a landslide while Palin and now Trump have extremely low approval ratings suggests that we weren’t just “lucky” that Obama was fundamentally an establishmentarian; he was lucky, because even in a late-stage democracy, having the establishment in your corner (up to and including elite centrist journalists like, well, Andrew Sullivan) is still crucial to riding a populist wave into actual real-world power.
So if we’re worried about the risks of tyranny, what we should fear is a Trump-like figure who could also get the kind of media coverage from allegedly neutral journalists that Obama earned in 2008, who could have every A-list celebrity in his corner and not just the National Enquirer and Bobby Knight and Mike Tyson, who could have all the brightest minds in tech clamoring to be on his team and not just rely on free media (as powerful as that can be), who could be endorsed by Oprah and Colin Powell and Michael Bloomberg and not just a parade of has-been hacks, and who could enter office with a compliant establishment ready to back him even to an extra-constitutional hilt.
If the republic is lucky, such a figure simply couldn’t exist, because the power elite simply wouldn’t go for someone as angrily demotic as Trump, and there’s no easy way to combine his “plague on both your houses” constituency with the support from the mandarin class that you’d need to be an effective Caesar. But this is why I found Jim VandeHei’s much-maligned Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for a third party alternative to Trump and Clinton so noteworthy, because in the course of imagining a post-partisan ticket uniting someone from the military with someone from Silicon Valley — a Facebook-Pentagon merger, if you will — he captured the reality of what you’d need to elect and protect our republic’s very own Augustus: Not just a wave of popular discontent, but sustained support from some important and officially-apolitical segments of the nation’s establishment, like the military and the tech industry.
Trump won’t have that. Figures as opportunistic as Hannity and Huckabee (and Huntsman!) exist beyond the G.O.P., but centrist and center-left opportunists aren’t going to see the same advantage in joining his rhinoceri as their Republican equivalents. Which is why I keep referring to this entire experience as a kind of dress rehearsal for a darker future, showing us how authoritarian politics can work, but with the Republican Party rather than the entire republic as the stage — a Republican Party that precisely because it’s so vulnerable to a hostile takeover is also a poor launching pad for a takeover of the system as a whole.
Now let’s just hope I’m right.
