Riding a tiger

All freshman at my university were required to take a three-term course in the History of Western Civilization.  These courses were quite common among colleges and universities a few decades ago, but unfortunately less so now.

During the course, we were required to read selections from Aristotle's Politics, and discuss our readings with our instructor in small discussion groups.  Time has eroded most of what I learned, of course, but I do recall that Aristotle divided governments into three categories:  monarchy, aristocracy and polity.  Each category had a "perversion":  respectively, tyranny, oligarchy, and democracy. 

Aristotle discusses in some detail the distinction between each category and its perversion, but in general, a "true" monarch, or aristocracy, or polity rules on behalf of the entire city-state, with the goal of maximizing the welfare of all citizens.  The perversions use the same form of government to maximize the happiness of, respectively, the ruler, the oligarchy, or the impoverished and poorly-educated masses, at the expense of the other members of the community.

This is all heady stuff when you're 18, and it made for lively discussion.  But Aristotle's concerns seemed pretty abstract.  They also seemed irrelevant, to some degree, in modern America, because -- we were confident -- we had developed a government by the entire people, with checks and balances to prevent any one group from oppressing the others.  (How we believed this so firmly, knowing at least something of the "Gilded Age," eludes me now.)

Aristotle came to mind over the weekend, watching the Republican debate.  If Aristotle wanted an example of what happens when "the masses" take control for their own purposes alone, he might have pointed to the squawking and braying of the various contenders for the GOP nomination.  All consideration of contemplative and deliberative debate was thrust aside.  The melée wasn't even a "debate," properly understood.  It was a shouting match, a hurling of coarse, personal insults at one another.

What makes the entire disgusting spectacle frightening is that what we saw on Saturday night was only partially a degeneration of Aristotle's "polity" into his dreaded "democracy."  Behind the scenes, the GOP's big business interests have encouraged this strident populism, trusting that it would ultimately play out in their own favor, hoping that the populist horror of socialism would cause the masses to give our oligarchy -- an elite not of birth but of money -- everything that it wants.  We see, therefore, oligarchy fomenting a perverted "democracy" for its own oligarchical ends.

It's happened before, and in recent times.  In Weimar Germany, business interests encouraged the populist Nazis, on behalf of the frightened petit bourgeois masses, to destroy not only socialists but the labor unions.  Once the Nazis had done away with the leftists, the "right sort" of upper class leaders believed, the "establishment" would quietly ease out the bumbling Nazis and restore government by oligarchy.

Things didn't go well for the Germans.  As the Chinese proverb puts it, "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount."  I'm afraid that the business-oriented "establishment" of the GOP may discover that they have mounted a tiger they can no longer stop riding.

I hope only the GOP ends up being eaten, not the entire American people.