Jason Stanley is professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Photo/Courtesy
Like others, since late Tuesday night, my phone has been blaring with text messages asking how this could have happened (as some of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances know, I had been fully convinced that Donald Trump would win this election handily). Instead of responding in detail to every message, I will offer my explanation here.
For 2,300 years, at least since Plato’s Republic, philosophers have known how demagogues and aspiring tyrants win democratic elections. The process is straightforward, and we have now just watched it play out.
In a democracy, anyone is free to run for office, including people who are thoroughly unsuitable to lead or preside over the institutions of government. One telltale sign of unsuitability is a willingness to lie with abandon, specifically by representing oneself as a defender against the people’s perceived enemies, both external and internal.
Plato regarded ordinary people as being easily controlled by their emotions, and thus susceptible to such messaging – an argument that forms the true foundation of democratic political philosophy.
Philosophers have also always known that this kind of politics is not necessarily destined to succeed. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, democracy is at its most vulnerable when inequality in a society has become entrenched and grown too glaring.
Deep social and economic disparities create the conditions for demagogues to prey on people’s resentments, and for democracy ultimately to fall in the way that Plato described. Rousseau thus concluded that democracy requires widespread equality; only then can people’s resentments not be exploited so easily.
In my own work, I have tried to describe, in minute detail, why and how people who feel slighted (materially or socially) come to accept pathologies – racism, homophobia, misogyny, ethnic nationalism, and religious bigotry – which, under conditions of greater equality, they would reject.
And it is precisely those material conditions for a healthy, stable democracy that the United States lacks today. If anything, America has come to be singularly defined by its massive wealth inequality, a phenomenon that cannot but undermine social cohesion and breed resentment. With 2,300 years of democratic political philosophy suggesting that democracy is not sustainable under such conditions, no one should be surprised by the outcome of the 2024 election.
But why, one might ask, has this not already happened in the US? The main reason is that there had been an unspoken agreement among politicians not to engage in such an extraordinarily divisive and violent form of politics. Recall the 2008 election. John McCain, the Republican, could have appealed to racist stereotypes or conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birth, but he refused to take this path. McCain lost, but he is remembered as an American statesperson of unimpeachable integrity.
Of course, American politicians regularly appeal more subtly to racism and homophobia to win elections; it is, after all, a successful strategy. But the tacit agreement not to conduct such politics explicitly – what the political theorist Tali Mendelberg calls the norm of equality – ruled out appealing too openly to racism. Instead, it had to be done through hidden messages, dog whistles, and stereotypes (such as by talking about “laziness and crime in the inner city”).
But under conditions of deep inequality, this coded brand of politics eventually becomes less effective than the explicit kind. What Trump has done since 2016 is throw out the old tacit agreement, labelling immigrants as vermin and his political opponents as “the enemies within.” Such an explicit “us versus them” politics, as philosophers have always known, can be highly effective.
Democratic political philosophy, then, has been correct in its analysis of the Trump phenomenon. Tragically, it also offers a clear prediction of what will come next. According to Plato, the kind of person who campaigns this way will rule as a tyrant.
From everything Trump has said and done during this campaign and in his first term, we can expect Plato to be vindicated once again. The Republican Party’s domination of all branches of government would render the US a one-party state. The future may offer occasional opportunities for others to vie for power, but whatever political contests lie ahead most likely will not qualify as free and fair elections.
Jason Stanley is professor of Philosophy at Yale University, Project Syndicate
