By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, USA | 19 January 2025 (IDN) — The Athenian philosopher Aristotle predicted Donald Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, 2025 more than 2,300 years ago. How could he do that? It’s amazing but not very complicated.
In Book V of Politics Aristotle wrote that democracies in their extreme form—a combination of oligarchy and unengaged citizenry—always end in tyranny. Demagogues take advantage of this situation to gain power and then act to make it absolute. He cited cases to show that has happened repeatedly in history to the detriment of the citizenry.
Thomas Jefferson, who obviously had read Aristotle, agreed. “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”
Aristotle first studied human nature, then surveyed the politics of numerous poleis or city-states in the Greek World of the Aegean, Black Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean. “Man is a political animal,” he famously wrote, from which we get the word politics. What he meant was simply that humans are animals that live in cities.
Those Greek cities, every one independent, experienced elections, coup attempts, factionalism, and turmoil for hundreds of years. From his intense study of the history and politics of those units, he extracted certain principles that are rock-solid even today. Thus, anybody who was paying attention could have figured out that Trump—a genuine demagogue—would succeed in being elected.
If Aristotle was right, Trump is not the problem—rather, he’s a symptom of an existing oligarchical system linked with multitudes of citizens having little commitment to or knowledge of the US constitution. Only 64% of eligible voters actually voted in 2024. Close to 90 million people didn’t vote.
It’s true that a majority of those who voted, voted for Trump. Why is that not democracy in action? It is—but because of an underlying oligarchy and willy-nilly voters, we’ll have to wait to see whether or not Trump acts as a tyrant. But conditions are ripe for a tyranny.
Changes in the US body politic over several decades show that our country has already ended its initial stage of being a Democratic Republic and become instead an oligarchy, ruled by the wealthy few. Witness the CEO salaries and the millionaires club that is the US Senate. Link that with a certain kind of uninvolved populism, and presto—you have a tyranny.
Aristotle also nailed it in describing Trumps’ cabinet nominee
Aristotle also nailed it in describing Trumps’ cabinet nominees as to whether they are worthy or not considering that several had the morals of alley cats or were otherwise unqualified. Tyrants surround themselves with bad men, Aristotle said, because they love flattery—and no one who has the least flame of freedom in his heart will lower himself in that way.
Aristotle knew another thing about Trump—that he is fond of foreign autocrats and dictators like Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi Jinping: He predicted Trump’s tendency to favor such people by noting that tyrants would rather hang around with and have meals with other dictators than with his own countrymen.
In Books VI and VII Aristotle brings politics down to where each of us lives. The preservation of a democracy, he said, depends on each one of us. George Washington likely read Aristotle too, because he praised civic virtue in almost the same words as Aristotle. Civic virtue, they agreed, depends on our individual virtue, ending in wise action. Each of us must therefore be devoted to virtue and wisdom, and translate that into action.
*James E. Jennings PhD is a former Professor of Middle East Archaeology and History who founded the aid organization Conscience International in 1991. He organized and led relief teams to over 50 countries and US Academics for Peace delegations to meet with the leaders of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Lebanon, and Jordan. He contributed to Rethinking Security in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2017). [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image: Portrait bust of Aristotle; an Imperial Roman (1st or 2nd century AD) copy of a lost bronze sculpture made by Lysippos. Louvre. CC BY-SA-2.5
