Trump, we were told, was just what Plato had predicted 23 centuries ago in his famous dialogue, the Republic: that democracy will inevitably cave in upon itself and birth a tyrant. Trump, supposedly, is that tyrant.

Vox’s Sean Illing told us that “the character of Trump and the reasons for his rise are explained in remarkably prescient terms by Plato over two thousand years ago.” He was echoing a similar notion Andrew Sullivan propounded the year before in New York Magazine. UPenn professors Eric W. Orts, Peter T. Struck and Jeffrey Green, writing in Lapham’s Quarterly, promised us that we could understand Trump’s character and motivations by fitting him “into a template of tyranny” derived from the Republic. The Washington Post’s David Lay Williams joined the chorus too with a piece entitled, “Here’s what Plato had to say about someone like Donald Trump.”

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The meme spread, giving a patina of intellectualism to our collective anxieties about the erratic president. Those anxieties are justified — but the reading of Plato is not. Now, it might seem petty to quibble about the classics when great matters of state are at hand, but at times of crisis, we need the classics to fall back on to give us perspective and wisdom. If we do not listen to Plato carefully, we may miss what he really does have to tell us. If we instead shoehorn our own anxieties into his words, we will only really be listening to ourselves.

The fact of the matter is that America’s current civil crisis, while terribly real, is not the crisis of democracy as Plato understood it. Nor is Trump the tyrant from Plato’s dialogue. The reason for this is that America is not really a democracy at all.

What did Plato mean by democracy and tyranny?

Plato recognized that what is most important about human behavior, and thus about political behavior, is the good that humans seek. What do we value? What are we looking to gain when we act, personally or politically? This is the most basic thing; the forms and processes of politics are secondary, because we can use a variety of systems to achieve the same goals as long as we agree on what we want. For this reason, it is a matter of indifference to Plato whether the ideal state is a monarchy or an aristocracy. What matters is that the people in charge, whether they be one or many, are lovers of wisdom and rule with an eye to virtue.

For this reason, two states with quite dissimilar systems can behave in a very similar manner if they value the same things. The United States is a republic with a tripartite national government as well as a federal union of sovereign states. The United Kingdom is a unitary monarchy with a sovereign parliament and a largely unwritten constitution. Yet, the two states behave as the best of friends, coordinating their operations internationally and influencing each other domestically. They do this because their political cultures are the same; they (largely) have the same vision of what a state should look like and value.

Human beings are complex, but not infinitely complex. They have patterns that we can discern. Plato divided the five basic kinds of political character into five types based on their chief values. He called them aristocracy, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and tyranny.

The “aristocratic” character is philosophical. This character values transcendent and eternal things: the gods, the objects of mathematics and the unchangeable essences of things. The second character, called “timocratic,” loves honor, is concerned with the esteem of peers and seeks traditional respectability and military glory. The “oligarchical” or plutocratic character loves wealth. An oligarch amasses wealth in great quantities and excludes others. The “democratic” character is concerned with the satisfaction of the here and now, the personal pleasures of feasting and revelry. The most important thing is the vote — the expression of each individual’s will. Finally, the tyrannical character loves a pleasure that is lawless and goes beyond the bounds of human nature.

Plato did not draw up these characters at random. They were all too plain to see in Plato’s Greece, which knew the honor-loving and militaristic Spartans and the tumultuous and democratic Athenians. Greece saw its fair share of merchant oligarchies that made themselves fabulously wealthy. Unfortunately, it also produced depraved and lawless tyrants at times. And Plato himself had the blessing of meeting high-minded and philosophical rulers as well. Archytas, the Pythagorean leader of Taranto, may have inspired Plato’s portrayal of the philosopher-king in the Republic.

Politics are an expression of choices, and choices are an expression of values. So, the five types correspond to the five possible kinds of value. Values can either be spiritual or physical, and if physical, either external or internal, that is, bodily. The philosopher loves the spiritual good; the timocrat loves an external good, reputation. Further, bodily goods can either be natural or unnatural, and natural goods can either be moderate or immoderate. (There is no moderate amount of unnatural “goods.”) The oligarch loves bodily goods in moderation; a wastrel cannot amass wealth. The democrat loves bodily good without moderation; satisfaction of individual desire is paramount. Finally, the tyrant loves something that not only exceeds the limits of nature but is repugnant to them.

The philosopher and the tyrant are both exceptional characters. Philosophers transcend nature to contemplate the universal laws that are beyond it. The tyrant, too, goes beyond nature, not by transcending it but by violating it. Because they are exceptional, they both are very rare. Most human beings are in the middle. The mass of mankind is neither very good nor exceptionally evil.

Spiritual behavior drives political behavior. For this reason, a state will become what it loves. A money-loving state will become an oligarchy — i.e., it will have few rulers — because only a few can amass great wealth. They hoard everything they can and reduce their fellow citizens to beggars. Likewise, a state where the citizens are most concerned with satisfying their immediate, selfish desires will seek to give the most liberty to the greatest number of individuals. This is necessary for each to follow one’s own passions.

A state may appear to have a very democratic constitution on paper but function as an oligarchy in practice. (Examples of this situation are probably too common to be worth listing.) Or a state may appear to be an oligarchy on paper but function as a tyranny in practice. (This was the case for the Roman Empire in its darkest moments.) What matters more than any charter is the constitution written in the hearts of citizens. In the words of another philosopher, Heraclitus, “one’s ethic is one’s fate.”

Generally, like begets like. Wise leaders will do their best to raise wise young people to carry on the constitution of the best state. Honor-loving, money-loving and freedom-loving people will pass their own values down in their own cultures. Even tyrants, in a perverse way, breed more tyrants.

Yet nothing in human affairs lasts forever. So, Plato tells us, a wise state will eventually produce a generation that conforms not to philosophy but to tradition — no longer understanding the reasons that motivated its founders to frame just laws. An honor-loving state will eventually become corrupted by money, which can have the false appearance of glory. The Greeks saw this happen in their time when Persian gold infamously corrupted Spartan agents.

According to the Republic, this downward trend continues because oligarchs ultimately dispossess most of the population and create a resentful underclass that deposes them. But the resulting democratic state is highly unstable, and so it gives over in short order to a tyranny. The tyrant is the caricature of a democrat: Loving base pleasure above all things, tyrants enslave every other citizen to give themselves maximum freedom. So, in this way, each kind of constitution arises as a corruption of the last.

Interpreting Donald Trump through the lens of Plato

Well, it’s settled then, isn’t it? America is a democracy, so, when it collapses, it will become a tyranny, and obviously, Trump is that tyrant.

Not so fast. The trappings of democracy do not a democracy make. Prosaically, what Plato had in mind was a direct democracy and not a representative democracy — although even a direct democracy has representatives (think of Pericles). More important, however, than any procedure about how votes are translated into laws is the spiritual orientation of the state. What does it value? Whom does it favor?

These days, it is no longer a secret that the US is not a democracy, but an oligarchy. Even former President Jimmy Carter has said it. Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page detected this empirically. Popular opinion has almost no correlation with US policy; business interests do.

This doesn’t have to mean that US elections are not free and fair. What it does mean is that, even if our democratic elections are not a sham, and even if voters can decide which of the two candidates of the ruling party wins in a particular year, the people do not exercise control over their politics. The state doesn’t work for them, and it’s not supposed to. As political scientist Josep Colomer pointed out in a March interview with Fair Observer, the US was designed not to be a democracy. By all appearances, I would add, its constitution is still working as intended.

There is no need to belabor this point much further. If you are a US citizen and not a member of the wealthy elite, ask yourself: Do you feel in charge?

Our next conclusion follows in due course. Is Trump the tyrant to America’s democracy? No; he is an oligarch from America’s oligarchy. After all, tyrants are very rare. But oligarchies like America produce Donald Trumps like cherry trees produce cherries.

The man Republicans picked to “drain the swamp” is himself a swamp creature. As a political donor, Trump rubbed elbows with his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton and even his current opponent Kamala Harris. Not too long ago, either. So why has the Washington system tried to spit out Trump the way an organism tries to expel a foreign body? He is an outsider, sure. An outsider to the party, an outsider to Washington. But not an outsider to the culture. He is, as terrifying as it is, one of us.

Not every conflict is a conflict between basic political constitutions. Far more common is a conflict between factions within the same constitution. Russia recently saw one militarist thug try to rebel against another one. Was Yevgeny Prigozhin’s rebellion a battle for the soul of Russia, or just for who would be in charge in Moscow? Our own oligarchs may not be driving tanks at each other, but Silicon Valley billionaires Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook have been known to throw a few bombs. More recently, the Washington oligarchs have taken to lawfare rather than outright violence as their weapon of choice.

A conflict between good and evil? More like sand tiger sharks eating each other in the womb. The fact that they’re killing each other doesn’t mean that they come from different species.

But isn’t Trump a fascist?

There is one other argument that buttresses the thesis that Trump is a tyrant. In brief: Trump is a fascist, and fascists are tyrants. This is deceptively simple, since “fascist” and “tyrant” are nearly synonyms. But even here, the spiritual orientations that drive politics belie our easy comparisons.

The utter vagueness of the word “fascist” makes its use as the major term of any syllogism problematic. By now, nearly every political movement has been described as “fascist” by its opponents. I have my doubts that the term can usefully be expanded beyond the militarist-nationalist authoritarian regimes of interwar Europe; even then, naming Adolf Hitler’s Nazi movement after Benito Mussolini’s Fascism can be more confusing than clarifying.

Policy-wise, Trump is a Republican. Sure, he represents a more isolationist, populist strand of conservative ideology rather than the neoconservative version which was previously hegemonic within his party. That doesn’t make him Hitler, even though his Democratic opponent would like to tie him to the German dictator. (Democrats have been calling Republican candidates Hitler since at least 1948.)

Still, the term “fascist” does retain some utility. If Trump is a fascist, his fascism would seem to consist primarily in his embrace of political violence and his willingness to accept the support of thugs, from the Proud Boys he told to “stand by” in 2020 to the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill rioters that tried to stop the electoral count and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” I doubt that Trump really wanted rioters to lynch his own vice president, but he certainly seemed to be pleased with the idea that his supporters would go outside the law for him, whether or not he incited them to do so in a legal sense. And a New York jury has found that Trump was willing to break the law himself in order to boost his own chances in the 2016 election.

If a fascist is a politician who is willing to break the law and use violence to win, then Trump is a fascist. For that matter, if looking the other way on or encouraging political violence makes one a fascist, then a good proportion of the US political and media establishment is fascist. But not only tyrants are violent. Timocrats, oligarchs and democrats throughout history have employed violence to intimidate, expel or eliminate their political opponents. If you want a fun read, historian Paolo Grillo can walk you through a litany of violent clashes and partisan expulsions in the medieval Italian republics that will make your head spin.

If nothing else, Grillo’s book is a fascinating (and sobering) reminder that Western democracy is a lot older than 1776. But perhaps you prefer your democracy post-Enlightenment. Don’t forget that, already by 1793, French democrats were lopping people’s heads off with industrial efficiency. And even the American Revolution was marred with plentiful scenes of brutal violence that we rarely like to talk about.

Finally, as Plato never lets us forget, it was a democratic vote that sentenced Socrates to drink poison for the crime of doing philosophy.

I say none of this to make a “whataboutist” argument that Trump is no better or worse than anyone else. But we should be aware that an oligarch is perfectly capable of violence. Trump might be a particularly nasty oligarch, but he is one. So, there is no need to jump to conclusions: Trump’s existence does not mean that our democracy is now dead. Much more likely, it means that our exploitative, ugly oligarchy is continuing to grind on much as it always has, right on top of you and me.

The spiritual significance of Donald Trump

Of course, we can’t take it easy just because Trump isn’t a tyrant. Tyranny is the worst possible scenario, but there are many other evils in between the good and the worst.

The concept of tyranny terrifies us because it is the total bankrupture of the state, and whenever we see someone like Trump undoing previously sacred norms, we rightly get nervous. Tyranny arises from chaos, and chaos arises from order gone wrong. Oligarchy is that order gone wrong, and we are in the thick of it.

Remember that every constitution contains the seeds of its own destruction. Those seeds sprout and grow as the old order begins to die away. The seeds of democracy — mob rule, the breakdown of legal order — are already present in the United States. Trump and his populists may well represent this tendency.

Trump is an oligarch with a tinge of the democratic. A perfect oligarch has only one spouse; that’s the best way to balance a checkbook. Even our best oligarchs have been having trouble keeping their households together lately. Trump is a serial marrier and a philanderer besides. A lot of good Christian voters have forgotten Trump’s boast about “grab[bing women] by the pussy.” That is a mistake. When sleaze enters the highest levels of politics, things are going to the dogs. People who can’t keep their own lives together can’t well be expected to keep the state together.

Rome wasn’t built in a day; neither was it destroyed. Trump may not be our Caligula, but he could be our Sulla, if first-century BC Dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla is willing to bear the comparison. Sulla did not destroy the Republic, but he weakened it fatally. By employing political violence, he brought a crassness and lack of collegial respect into the senatorial class that precipitated the disastrous civil wars of Pompey and Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian. This destabilization led to the establishment of the Empire.

I, for one, am not calling the time of death of the American republic just yet. It may limp on, perhaps for centuries, just as Rome did. But I fear that Trump may already have dealt it a wound from which it will never completely recover. Whichever way the results of today’s voting turn out, it may take decades before historians can tell us whether Trump, and today’s coarser, more fractious politics more generally, were a sickness unto death or just a bad cold.

Lord preserve us.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post No, Trump Is Not the End of US Democracy. It Never Existed. appeared first on Fair Observer.

Then, Atul asked me another question. “I never understood why there needed to be so much suffering,” he said. “Why did God want Jesus undergo all that torture?”

I was dumbstruck. All of a sudden, I had nothing to say. It was not because I had never thought of the question before; indeed, I have been pondering the meaning of Jesus’s death all of my life. But how does one even begin to express the answer to that question in a sentence or two, without it falling flat like some stolid answer from a theology textbook?

It’s a little bit like when a woman asks a man why he loves her. The obvious answers just don’t seem to do the question justice.

Yet Atul’s is a question that deserves to be answered. Is the central drama of the world’s most widespread religion simply absurd? How can the religion that preaches a message of love really teach that God demanded his own son to suffer and die on a cross to satisfy the demands of his justice?

God is not a sadist

When I finally did manage to stammer out an answer, it was something along the lines of, “Well, that would be what the Calvinists would say.” An unsatisfying answer, sure, but one that was true enough. The Calvinist tradition has proposed a theory of the Crucifixion which, I think, is the cause of a lot of the concern that underlay Atul’s question. In many ways, it is the concept that the rest of the world has perhaps now come to see as the Christian idea of redemption. The name of this theory would be penal substitution.

According to the theory of penal substitution, what Jesus did on the Cross was take all of the punishment that was really ours, the wrath of God that we had merited by our sins. God imputes the sins of humanity to Christ, and he punishes him with all of the fury that his divine holiness has for the wickedness that we commit. In a paradoxical way, God treats his own son like a sinner and unleashes his wrath on him.

There is something about this picture that does not sit right with our ideas of what Christianity should be. God is so angry that he needs to take it out on somebody, and that somebody turns out to be Jesus? Is God really pleased by the suffering of an innocent man? Sure, you can say the innocent man voluntarily accepts his suffering. But one still finds it hard to accept. In this picture, God seems to be acting more out of wrath than out of love, or even justice.

That is not the God of scripture, the God who “is love.” The Old Testament book of Wisdom tells us that “God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” And God loves none of the living, human beings or angels, as much as he loves his own beloved Son. Jesus is the offspring of the very bosom of Father’s divinity, the son whom he loves more than the entire created universe. No, God is not pleased by the torturing of his son.

This theory is a distortion of the biblical truth: Jesus did the will of his Father by bravely accepting death in an act of pure love, obedience and self-sacrifice that is worth more to the Father than the sins of the whole world. Jesus paid the debt for evil men, not by taking the punishment they deserved — which would be Hell — but by showing the Father a love that was greater than all of the worship that sinners had denied him throughout the ages. This is why Jesus is our ransom and our justification and our savior — not our whipping-boy.

A sacrifice of love

It is love that God desires, more than anything; Jesus earned our salvation by his love, because love deserves a reward, and love covers a multitude of sins. But then, one might justifiably ask: Why did Jesus have to die? Was not his love enough?

In a way, this is true. One single act of Jesus’s perfect love is worth more to God than the sins of the whole world. He could have merited our salvation with a single prayer, a single day of fasting or a single act of mercy for the poor. And indeed, Jesus spent his entire life sanctifying the world with acts of unspeakable love. Yet God desired our salvation to be accomplished by the greatest act of love — and there is no greater love than this, which is to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

We will never fully unpack the mystery of the supreme act of saving love that Jesus poured out on the Cross. Perhaps God desired to show his infinite love for us by saving us in a gratuitous way, something more than was strictly necessary. Perhaps God wanted to show us how Jesus was betrayed by Christians, accused by Jews and tortured by Gentiles, to teach us that we all have a part in rejecting God’s goodness. Perhaps it was fitting that God had turned death itself, which had been the weapon the Devil used to oppress humankind, into his own instrument for frustrating the evil one’s plans. Thomas Aquinas lists five reasons. He could have listed five hundred more.

I will try, in my own little way, to offer three reasons that I hope will answer Atul’s question.

Why did Jesus have to die for the salvation of mankind? Because doing so was the greatest act of sacrifice, of sincerity and of solidarity.

Sacrifice is an ancient concept. Nearly all human cultures have had sacrifice as a way of displaying devotion to the gods. Today, with the spread of Christianity and Islam worldwide, animal sacrifice has become much rarer than it was in ages past. Yet the basic idea is universal: Human beings, who owe everything to the divine, must out of gratitude give back in some way. We do this by sacrificing, because, as an ancient Sumerian proverb expressed, “What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away.”

The Jewish religion was full of animal sacrifices, especially bloody sacrifices of cattle, sheep and goats. The essential act was not merely the killing of the animal, which could be done by laymen, but the offering of its blood upon the altar by an ordained priest. In this way, the animal was dedicated to God. Christians believe that Jesus is our priest, and that, while he was slain by the hands of other men, it was by offering his own blood on the altar of the Cross that he gave God an act of pure, saving worship.

What has been destroyed belongs to a god. No one is able to take it away. Jesus gave up everything to God on the cross, accepting the abandonment of his friends, the stripping of his possessions, the defamation of his good name and the loss of his very life. In doing so, he showed us that he held nothing back in order to save us. At the same time, he taught us to hold nothing back from God, but to offer ourselves wholly. And, in time, God was to restore to Jesus everything that he had offered a hundredfold, precisely because he had given it up so freely.

Why do I bring up sacrifice? It seems an archaic concept, and perhaps an excessively technical one. But it’s important to remember because sacrifice is the biblical concept that was distorted and made unrecognizable by the theory of penal substitution. Jesus is not so much the scapegoat of Yom Kippur as he is the lamb of Passover. And that is why this day, Easter, is called the Pasch — pascha, פֶּסַח, the Passover, when the blood of the Lamb rescued God’s people from destruction.

An act of honesty

Even beyond this perhaps esoteric conception of sacrifice, I believe that something far simpler is too at the heart of the Crucifixion. That is the plain fact that to die is hard.

This world is full of false prophets, would-be messiahs and cult leaders. It is easy and profitable to make yourself look holy and sound profound. With it come fame, wealth and even, a lot of the time, sex. (One sure way to tell that you have a cult leader is to see that he has a lot of girlfriends.)

We are much more willing when we believe preachers who are capable of denying themselves. The Buddha and St. Francis made themselves credible by casting away their wealth, not by amassing it like televangelists do. Yet perhaps even for selfish reasons one might cast away one’s wealth. After all, a good reputation is worth more than gold. Someone might prefer to be revered rather than be rich. What someone will not do, unless they are insane, even for the sake of fame is die.

Jesus is a preacher who tells me that he came down from heaven, that he comes bearing God’s message for human beings, that I must call upon him to be saved, love him more than my own kin and deny myself and be willing to die for him. This is not just a purveyor of good advice, to whom I might listen and gather some pearls of wisdom and go on my merry way, even if the rest of his sayings are not trustworthy. I can glean pearls of wisdom from a Christian televangelist or a Hindu self-named guru. But I cannot trust them. With the demands that Jesus makes of me, unless I can trust that this man means what he is saying, I cannot listen to him.

I daresay that if Jesus had not died on the Cross, he would not have had many followers. But this is a man who is willing to go the whole nine yards. This is someone who is willing to give it all up — everything — suffer the betrayal of his followers, the condemnation of his own people and the most humiliating and cruel form of torture-execution designed by the Romans, who were masters of cruelty. And he tells me that he is doing it all for me.

Because Jesus died on the Cross, because he withstood horrible tortures and refused to recant or make excuses, I know that he meant everything that he said. His suffering proves his sincerity. And his wisdom proves his sanity. This was no lunatic with a death wish, but a wise, compassionate, strong and capable man who gave it all up for the truth.

Only such a man will I trust with my immortal soul.

A savior who was not ashamed to be like me

The sacrifice of the crucifixion tells us something about God. The sincerity of it tells us something about Jesus. But what does it tell us about ourselves, and about our own suffering?

On the Cross, God the Son embraced suffering. He took it into himself. He bore what all human beings bear — pain, humiliation, death. Jesus did not consider these things to be beneath himself.

Jesus lived an entire human life, complete with all of the things that a human life includes, except for sin. We can miss the profoundness of this truth for how obvious it is: Everyone suffers.

God created this entire world, with suffering in it. He did not create evil, but he did not disdain from making even those creatures which he knew would experience evil. He creates human lives, fully knowing all of their joys and their sorrows, their successes, failures, deprivations, long lonely nights, heartbreaks. God looks at the entirety of a human life and, in his all-knowing decree, he says yes.

Jesus did not select some parts of our humanity, the pretty ones and the pleasant ones, to take to himself. He did not disdain any part of it, consider it unworthy of his dignity. He took it all. Thus, he testifies to the truth that human life is worth living, human life is fundamentally good, despite and even within suffering.

Even more: Jesus chose suffering. Even suffering itself then is not without value, without meaning. When I suffer, I am not experiencing the absurd uncaringness of a cold universe. Nor am I experiencing simply something unfortunate, a mere flaw in the universe that God simply did not feel like fixing, something not meant to be.

No, even suffering has meaning, because Jesus embraced suffering. So I will embrace suffering, too. I will take on all that my human life has to offer me, not shrink from pain out of fear, not fly from humiliation because I have an inflated sense of how dignified I should be. I want to live it all. I want the world that God created. Wrinkles and all.

And Jesus shows me that suffering is part of the story, but not the end. He gave everything to God in an act of utter self-emptying. And yet God gave still more back to him, because of his love. God raised Jesus, today, not reversing his sacrifice but completing it: A man, fully alive, fully devoted, full of truth and of love, having given up his life for others, now becomes the fountain of life for all of them.

Evil does not have the last word. Suffering is more than evil: It is what the soul does when it confronts evil, wrestles with it in order to defeat it. And in the end, life wins. After all the suffering of Good Friday, the morning of Easter comes.

Why did Jesus need to undergo so much suffering? Because he is the way of self-sacrificing love. He is the truth of honest teaching. And he is the life that embraces suffering, and even overcomes it.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Would God Want Jesus to Suffer a Painful Death? appeared first on Fair Observer.

“It is in changing that things find repose,” says the philosopher Heraclitus. The world that we live in is a world of flux, and things that resist this flux die. Mountain ranges wear down because they attempt to stand still against the wind and the rain. Biological life, which at first glance seems much more fleeting than geological features, has survived on this earth for billions of years while the mountains wear away. Land plants and the Appalachian Mountains both formed in the same geological period, but now the Appalachians are eroded hills while plant life grows thick on top of them, eroding them further.

Without belaboring the point too much, we can say that life is not just change, but organized change, change according to a definite plan. An organism must react to its environment and modify itself and its behavior in order to survive, but it does so while preserving the nature that it has from birth. Even evolutionary history, which enacts no preconceived plan, does not simply change without direction. Mutation is without direction, but evolution is mutation guided by selection. This is why crustaceans turn into crabs, and mammals do not. What we will become is guided by the nature and the needs of what we are. What life enacts is not random change, but change that preserves its existence and, so to speak, mission. Deer developed antlers so that they could keep being deer.

To survive is to change

A state is like an animal, but it is most like that rational animal, man. It is capable of understanding its core principles and values and of planning and enacting deliberate change in order to live up to those values. We are not called to evolve blindly, but by deliberation and understanding to move forward into history with our eyes wide open. Using reason—our ability to conceptualize, to dialogue, and to plan—we humans do what all life does, but intentionally. And when we cease to do this, we die.

States die. Civilizations die. History is all too full of tales of the calamities, wars, and devastations that occurred when statesmen and citizens became either too complacent, too divided, or otherwise too unequipped to take account of reality and affect adequate change. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, infamously crippled by the broad right of individual nobles to veto legislation, precipitating a humiliating and disastrous partition between its land-hungry neighbors and over a century of suffering for the Polish people. The same pattern has played out time and time again in human history from the dynasties of China to the republics of Latin America as corruption, factionalism, and poorly functioning political processes paralyze states, rendering them unable to reform.

I stand here with the strange privilege of living in one of the most successful and powerful states that have existed in the history of this planet, the United States of America. This country has astounded the world more than once with its capacity for innovation and dynamism, finding solutions hardly imagined by generations past. But there is a sickness in this country, an ideologization of what are taken to be our values that is slowly killing that dynamism, which is meant to come to the defense of our core values and is indeed one of them. What I am talking about is the notion, so much in vogue in the current popular discourse but so alien to the founders of this nation, that every jot and tittle of the Constitution—not only its principles and values, but the mechanisms that were originally crafted to enact those principles—is so imbued with the wisdom of that founding generation that it cannot be changed.

Everyone understands, perhaps, that on a basic level no commonwealth can exist very long without some change. “Even the barley-drink,” says our friend Heraclitus, “will separate if it is not stirred.” Yet was it not that same philosopher that admonished a republic to “fight for its laws as it does for its walls”? For what could protect it from upheavals of a social, economic, military nature or otherwise if, without its laws, it were no community of citizens but just an unorganized mob of men and women? Only a fool would argue for a nation with no respect for the laws that have created it and guided it, but all the same it would be folly, too, to forget that it was reason that crafted those laws, and it is still reason—the reason of the living, communicating, rational animals that we are—that must judge those laws and modify them, in an orderly way and for the common good.

The United States has a legislation problem

American law is in many ways uniquely hard to change. Even ordinary legislation must pass through an intricate path of checks and balances in which, at every step of the way, there are barriers that can stop proposed legislation in its tracks. It may die in committee, fail to pass on the floor of the chambers of Congress which often operate on razor-thin partisan majorities, fail to achieve the agreement of the House and of the Senate, experience filibuster in the Senate, suffer veto by the president, and so on…it is a wonder that any laws ever get passed at all. Of course, this kind of legal process is going to be an essential part of lawmaking in any democracy, but the American process has so many choke points that it is far easier to kill a bill than it is to pass one.

This creates a bias in favor of old legislation rather than new legislation which is, on the face of it, irrational, since the time at which a law was crafted has no essential bearing on whether or not it is wisely framed. The new is not automatically better than the old, but neither is the old automatically better than the new. If old laws are to continue, it should be because human minds, in a legally structured process, have considered them and judged them prudent to continue, not because of an institutional structure so full of snags that the previous way of doing things is mindlessly approved simply because it is too difficult to do anything else.

“Ah,” I can hear the reply coming back, “but this is by design. A government that governs less governs best, after all, and the founders intended to make it very difficult to pass new laws.”

If this is the founders’ intent, it is ill-served by this mechanism. New laws do not always mean more government; indeed, there are good reasons to think that the growth of government can be fostered by the rigidity of laws, rather than hampered by them. More of this anon. But the more basic notion is this: if small government, or any other ideal that we prize, is to be the aim when we are deciding how to craft our laws, then we must do so consciously, keeping that ideal in mind when we make laws and adjusting every measure to best suit it. We can only do this consciously, not by trusting unconscious processes like legislative inflexibility to do the work for us. We must choose to be what we will be: A republic cannot better itself by hindering its own ability to make choices. Only a nation self-conscious of its own activity can keep itself free. Legislative snarls will not keep you free.

The most fundamental reason underlying the fact that unconscious processes will not keep one free, or serve very many other useful purposes, is that what is done unintentionally will inevitably have unintentional consequences. Of course, all human endeavors on this side of heaven will have unintentional consequences, but the surest way to multiply them is to hinder reason’s ability to monitor, to anticipate, and to forestall negative events by assessing and readjusting its methods.

Legislation problem expands executive and judicial power

If Congress does not issue its own guidance in the form of laws, the president will find his own way. This leads to the expansion of executive power, about which enough ink has been spilled that I need not continue the subject here. The bureaucracy will find its own way, and what ought to have been laws, deliberated by civil society and enacted by the people constitutionally empowered to make laws for the republic, instead become regulations, of dubious democratic merit and perhaps of opaque origin. The courts will find their own way, concocting in legal decisions directives which often have very little to do with the text, history, or intent of the laws that they claim to find their source in. But the executive and the courts are not simply being irrational or selfish. They are making do in a system where the direction that ought to be given by law is found lacking. And this is because the legislature cannot act.

I don’t think either liberals or conservatives are thrilled with an imperial presidency or with judge-made law.  Such channels can provide temporary wins, but each side can count just as many smarting losses. In the end the real loser is an America which is seeing her ability to deliberate clearly and openly and to make laws that best suit everyone weaken with every year.

Nowhere is this country’s inability to legislate more acute than in that most vital legislation of all, our Constitution. Here, Article Five mandates that in order to make any change at all to the Constitution, in addition to proposal by a supermajority in both houses of Congress (aside from an alternative convention process which in 234 years has never been used), a proposed amendment must be ratified by a whopping three quarters of states or state conventions.

This extraordinarily high bar hearkens back to the confederal origins of the union, in which the nation’s first constitution behaved more like a treaty, requiring unanimity, than like the constitution of a republic. But the United States is a republic, in spite of the many and time-honored aspects of federalism that it possesses. It is conceived both by its own citizens and by the global community as a nation among nations, not a supranational organization, and as a nation it ought to have the constitution of one. It should be able to decide its own destiny, by common as well as by fundamental law, and it should not be subjected to the levels of paralysis, often more reminiscent of the EU or even the UN, that do indeed more befit a treaty organization than a constitutional republic.

US constitutional law is in disarray. Judges and legal commentators, all the way up to the high court, seem torn between a rigid originalism which would tie the world’s hegemonic power to the legislative framework framed for a league of thirteen recently liberated and mostly agrarian colonies, and a “living constitution” model which seems to be employing a biological metaphor not in support of an ordered and self-conscious development of a political community operating through rational laws, but to support the departure from those laws into a zone of individualistic, moralizing, often ad-hoc judicial oligarchy. Neither of these will do and indeed neither should we expect that any judicial philosophy should. The problem is not with those who interpret the laws, but with those who make the laws.

We need a different system. We need to stop hiding behind institutions and processes which no longer work for any of us as an excuse not to step up and take control of our future. We need to stop using processes as a way to bludgeon each other and exploit thin majorities which will inevitably reverse and learn to reason with each other and develop genuine consensus. Only genuine consensus can save us, and only genuine consensus is worthy of the kind of social and rational beings that we are.

I am proposing that we make amendments easier. What I am not proposing, however, is that some new clever set of norms and processes will make all of the difference. Ultimately, the change will not come from some new system but from a new mindset which will make new systems necessary. We need to start to talk to each other. And we need to listen.

Going down a dangerous path

In ancient times, the most powerful republic in the world was the one that belonged to the Romans, a people more famous for devotion to their laws and their constitutional customs than we. Through it all, the wisdom of the senate, the energy of the people, and the ingenuity of the magistrates guided Rome from a tiny vassal city to the Etruscans to a superpower that dominated the entire classical world. Its laws were singularly well-developed, intricate, and socially entrenched, but at the same time the republic—ultimately, unlike ours, a direct democracy—could modify its most basic laws with a single act of legislation, something it did time and time again to resolve the numerous social and military crises the city was beset with in its long history.

When the Roman democracy finally did come to an end, it was not because of its mechanisms of flexibility, but rather because of the degradation of them. The republic did not end because a demagogue whipped the people up into a fury and convinced them to vote away their democracy—although this sort of thing certainly can happen—but through a much longer, slower process of loss of political consensus-building, the increasing abuse of its institutions through partisan corruption and obstructionism, which eventually necessitated the use of illegal force as a brute substitute for consensus in order to stabilize the state.

After a century of strongmen—Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antony—tried and failed to use military authority to shore up a republic that no longer knew how to govern itself, the empire was founded when Octavian, using his personal prestige, took control ultimately not as a legally appointed dictator but as a private citizen granted extraordinary powers to do what the magistrates and the senate could not do. Even Tiberius, his successor, was surprised to find the senate so unwilling to govern that he was caused to continue this unorthodox arrangement. Eventually, the imperial role would evolve into an unfettered despotism.

This is how a republic dies. When it forgets how to deliberate, it degenerates into political gamesmanship. When political gamesmanship degenerates, as it inevitably does, the door is opened to violence. And violence can only breed more violence.

We cannot allow this to happen. If we are to avoid this fate, we must learn how to legislate. And to do that, we must rediscover how to debate, and how to think.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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