Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, declassified.

Episode R8, does democracy lead to tyranny?

In the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an interesting article went viral.

A part of what made it interesting was that it discussed a topic that rarely goes viral nowadays,

namely Plato's Republic.

The article was titled, America has never been so ripe for tyranny.

In it, the journalist Andrew Sullivan made the case that, based on what Plato had written in the

Republic, especially books eight and nine of that work, America is showing all the hallmarks of a

late-stage democracy sliding towards tyranny. Now, among people who don't study the ancient world for a

living, that is to say, the broader public, this article was a bombshell. While most people, of course,

knew that ancient Athens was a democracy, they didn't know that it was a dynamic, ever-evolving

polity that had to constantly contend with factionalism, polarization, demagoguery,

inequality, and other issues we face today.

Most people had no idea that ancient thinkers carefully analyzed these phenomena and proposed

various remedies to alleviate their effects, and that miraculously, those writings have

survived over two millennia for us to read and potentially

profit from today. They had no idea because our schools no longer teach that stuff. And so for many

readers, this revelation felt like that scene in The Matrix 2, where Neal learns that everything he

and his companions had accomplished in their

struggle against the machines was a repeat of what had already happened many times before

during earlier iterations of human civilization, and that in every one of those previous iterations,

those struggles had ended in failure.

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