Of all the journalistic essays published as Donald Trump emerged last year as a serious presidential contender, perhaps the most haunting was Andrew Sullivan’s New York article, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny.” It explored the Trump phenomenon through the prism of Plato’s Republic and the Greek philosopher’s observation that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” Sullivan explores Plato’s critique of late-stage democracy, when the rich are attacked, barriers to equality are crushed, deference to authority withers, multiculturalism and sexual freedom create a polity “decorated in all hues,” the foreigner is equal to the citizen, and shame and privilege become anathema. Writes Sullivan: “And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.”
For Sullivan, who read the Republic in graduate school, Plato had planted in his mind “a gnawing worry” about the mortality of democratic regimes caught in this vortex of late-stage civic and personal excess. “It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times,” writes Sullivan, “and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.”
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