Editor’s note: This commentary is by Norman Arthur Fischer, a retired professor of philosophy from Kent State University who has lived in Burlington since 2015. He is the author of “Marxist Ethics within Western Political Theory: A Dialogue with Republicanism, Communitarianism, and Liberalism.”
To explain the abandonment of republicanism by the Republican Party and Trump we must go beyond the headlines back to the history of Western republicanism.
Opposition to tyranny is the central concept of republicanism in both of its forms, democratic and nondemocratic aristocratic republicanism. Indeed republicanism shares its opposition to tyranny with what the chronicler of republicanism who most influenced the Founding Fathers, the 18th century French theorist Montesquieu, called good monarchs, defined as those who oppose tyranny. Thus, the great opponents of fascist and Nazi tyranny, Georg Lukacs and Heinrich Mann, wrote movingly about anti-tyranny monarchs as educational models against fascism. Hence, it is a mistake to accuse the contemporary Republican Party of embracing Trump’s pro-monarchical tendencies, since what the Republican Party embraces is Trump’s tyrannical tendencies. Some of the Founding Fathers unfortunately actually favored the American president having some monarchical tendencies, but every single one hated tyranny, and tried to ensure that the American presidency was incompatible with tyranny. In contrast, the embrace of tyranny by the contemporary Republican Party is a betrayal of the Constitution. It is also a betrayal of the history of Western republican and anti-tyranny theory against the dark side, as shown by the following five points.
For the ancient Greek republicans, the tyrant is defined by his refusal to limit himself by either law or justice. In contrast, the Roman dictators had to follow law and justice, but were given special powers. Impartial justice is the central weapon against tyranny, and this is true for both the Greek, Plato, and for the Roman, Cicero. Greek and Roman anti-tyranny is based not just on actual laws but on Western philosophy and history.
If you want to know what impartial justice against tyranny is, read Livy on Romans keeping promises and refusing to lie, and Plato and his followers, Cicero, Plutarch and St. Augustine on how to be a just human being.
But don’t read the fakers who defended Trump in this year’s impeachment trial. Contrary to haters of republicanism Alan Dershowitz, Kenneth Starr, and Jay Sekulow, high crimes and misdemeanors as triggers of impeachment in the Constitution are crimes that only tyrants can perform. They do not have to be in the law books. Central to the concept of high crimes and misdemeanor is abuse of power. Trump’s proclamation on Sept. 23 that he wants to “get rid of the ballots” in this year’s presidential election and instead of a transition of presidential power, have a continuation of his own power shows how deep Trump’s admiration for tyranny is.
The separation of powers gives rational limits to the abuse of power by tyrants. Trump’s love of tyranny and hatred of the separation of powers is well documented by his refusal during the impeachment process to give records to Congress. If you want to understand the true glory of a good-faith interpretation of the separation of powers, read Plutarch on the tyrants Caesar and Antony, and on the republicans, Coriolanus, Cicero, the Gracchi brothers, Brutus, and Cato the younger. And wind up by reading Polybius on how Greek and Roman leadership was based on republicanism and separation of powers, and was constantly misunderstood as monarchy by anti-republican tyrants.
Republicans are committed to a rational nationalism which defines itself as opposition to subordination by foreign powers. For Trump the heroes who fought in the interest of rational nationalism and justice are suckers and losers, whereas the tyrant Putin is free to offer bounties of American soldiers, and the tyrant Mohammed bin Salman is free to dismember an American journalist.
The undermining of republicanism by Trump and the Republican Party demonstrates Aristotle’s concept of an illegitimate power grab by a ruling party. Writing in Athens in the latter part of the fourth century B.C., he presented a nuanced view of the debate between republican rule by the people and rule by aristocrat or oligarchs, and held that both parties in order not to imitate tyrants, must rule not only in their own interests but also in the interests of the other party. Trump’s tyranny lovers in the impeachment trial simply laughed at any idea that impeachment should honor impartiality.
What has happened to the Republican Party demonstrates Montesquieu’s concept of the destruction of republics by accumulation of political power through wealth.
Republican political history displays a wide range of the typical personal moral faults of tyrants. Central to these faults are lying, sadism, and brutal unfairness, as represented by the history of tyrant from Nero to Hitler, and by Trump’s lies about his failure to pay taxes and about what he knew about the pandemic; his sadism in permanently separating families at the border; and his brutal unfairness in using the power to commute sentences to commute the sentence of his own convicted crook, Roger Stone.
Tyranny involves some corruption of the people. The election is our hope against this.
