Can political theory in Western history be brought to bear on the disaster that is the Presidency of Donald J. Trump? In this article I review some of the main principles deriving from this history and apply these to the tragedy that has befallen the United States. This is not a merely nationalistic approach because a similar tragedy appears to be happening in many other countries as well.

Modern democratic political theory began in the late 17th and 18th centuries with the work of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. This work is known as “social contract theory” because these thinkers saw society as a contract in which people leave “the state of nature” (in which there is no government) and voluntarily unite to form a government which gives certain advantages over the state of nature (defined as lawless and without any governing authorities).

The Founding Fathers of the US Constitution were followers of both John Locke and French Baron Montesquieu whose key work, The Spirit of the Laws, advocated a separation of powers between the judicial, legislative, and executive branches of government. Thomas Jefferson’s “Declaration of Independence,” on the other hand, comes straight out of Locke: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

As Locke said (and Jefferson goes on to say), “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In this view human rights are prior to the authority of government, and if the government does not properly respect these rights “it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.” This was, of course, an ideal, a vision, put forth in a society that held slaves (including by Jefferson himself), that granted women no rights, that accorded indigenous peoples of the continent no rights, and that was run by a few wealthy powerful men who had much contempt for the ignorant, unlettered masses of these early 13 former colonies.

American history can be read as a progressive actualization of this visionary ideal. Slaves needed to be freed, women needed equality before the law, and racial and religious discrimination had to be overcome (because human equality was God-given, not a decree of government). The ideal was a society of free and equal people, a “government of law, not of men” as one of these founding fathers John Adams put it. The Constitution was passed in 1787 and the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791. The Constitution also protects private property in its 5th and 14th amendments.

“Aye, there’s the rub.” No limit is placed on the accumulation of private wealth, which means that by the 19th century vast accumulations of private wealth existed that contradicted the natural rights and freedoms of ordinary people in the United States. Time and again the Supreme Court upheld these rights of the wealthy to do what they wanted with their property even thought this resulted in the death, maiming, or extreme poverty for the people they employed in their factories. In 1886, the Supreme Court declared that corporations had the rights of persons under the 14th Amendment.

Hence, the ability of Corporations to avoid government control and regulation increased considerably. In 2010, the Supreme Court then decided that these “Citizen Corporations” could spend whatever they wanted to influence elections since the spending of such money was a form of “free speech” as protected by the First Amendment and, after all, corporations are persons so they must be allowed free speech just like any citizen.

There has always been an internal contradiction in the US between democracy and class-rule. During the heyday of Marxist thought, this was called the contradiction between capital and labor. The social welfare movement that culminated during the administration of President Roosevelt was hardly Marxist. Yet it had recognized that labor had certain rights that placed limits on the rights of private property. Social security was born, requirements on corporations to have pension plans, minimum wage laws, government-imposed health and safety conditions, the right to organize unions, etc. Out of this “New Deal” a partial reconciliation between labor and capital there arose the civil rights movement of the 1950s to 1970s.

The government was to protect the rights of all citizens who have the right to equality before the law and local or state laws that violated this had to be overturned and made to conform to federal premises of equality, due process, and equal rights before the law. Accused prisoners (generally the poor) had the rights (or were supposed to have the rights) of bail, legal counsel, decent treatment in custody, etc.

However, the rich and their big corporations are legally institutionalized to maximize profits (this obligation to investors is written directly into the law). Like the 1860 Supreme Court Decision making corporations legal persons, and the Citizens United decision giving corporations “free speech” to spend their millions to influence elections, so the corporations by the 1970s were becoming transnational. In a globalized world of international trade, they were becoming so huge that their ruling elites saw that the laws of any one country need not curtail their global systems exploiting people and nature in the service of the private accumulation of wealth.

In the United States they formulated “Neoliberal Economic Theory” that fostered globalization and the “right” of private property to move its productive facilities anywhere in the world that produced the greatest product at the least cost, hence maximizing profits. The US government had the authority to regulate or stop this process for US corporations, so the corporations decided they need to get presidents (and courts and legislators) to acquiesce in this initiative for corporate profit maximization. This was the beginning of the end of US Administrations (like that of Roosevelt) that could mediate between capital and labor. We got the neoliberal revolution with Ronald Reagan in 1981, followed by George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. All of them neoliberal stewards for the big corporations and the super-rich.

During this same period of the take-over of the US government (both Republicans and Democrats) by the oligarchy, they accelerated their push to eliminate the social welfare state that Roosevelt had brokered. Attacks began on social security, food stamps, Women-Infants-Children (WIC) programs, public health institutions, Democracy, Equality, and Inclusion (DEI) programs, the demand for decent medical insurance, the rights of unions, minimum wage hikes, and the rest.

The high point for workers’ wages in the US relative to inflation and the cost of living in the US was 1973, more than a half century ago. Since then, it has been downhill for the populace as the oligarchy has slowly dismantled the welfare state and colonized all three branches of government in its own interests (namely, accumulation of private wealth through exploitation of people and the environment). The industrial base has been gutted, and social welfare programs gutted. Forty percent of the population today are without health insurance, living paycheck to paycheck trying to scrape by, hoping they don’t need dental or medical care, living without real hope—until the theatrical advent of Donald Trump, full of pompous rhetoric, full of prejudices that appeal to those looking for someone to blame (Blacks, immigrants, DEI hires, socialists, etc.).

Trump claims that the way to solve all the problems (immigrants, Black Lives Matter, lack of jobs, creeping “socialism,” etc.) is to put him in power without restrictions on his power by any system of checks and balances. His oath to defend the Constitution notwithstanding, legislators and judges are chosen not by competence, experience, or their ability to carry out their legislative function, but by loyalty to him. Judges must be loyal, legislators must be loyal, heads of government agencies (like the FBI) must be loyal. The corporations and super-rich over the past half century have dismantled the system of checks and balances along with the welfare state so the option of personal loyalty is now considered perfectly acceptable.

As in Nazi Germany, the big corporations were very happy to see the rise of fascism. Removal of government checks on greed and exploitation means vastly increased profits. The billionaires who put Trump in power, clamber around him like pigs at the trough. The fantasies of the strong man will soon dash the hopes of the ordinary citizens who elected him. There is no way that any one President can change this colonized system to benefit regular people, even if they wanted to, which Donald Trump has no intention of doing. Let us now return to the very origins of Western political theory and look at this situation from one of the greatest founders of Western Civilization—Plato.

Systematic political theory began with Plato’s Republic, his attempt to define the characteristics of an ideal society. He affirmed that the first principle of such a society must be reason and wisdom. Plato envisioned a class of people that he called “Guardians” who must be rulers in any just society. He envisioned society by analogy with the structure of a human being. Our basic structure, he says, in Book IX, can be imagined as that of a man, a lion, and a many-headed monster.

The Man (any human being) is associated with our head, that is with reason, intelligence, and the wisdom of justice and moderation. The Lion is associated with the heart and the breast, which he calls the “spirited” part. It is the source of courage, stamina, commitment, and the drive to win and prevail. The Many-headed Monster is associated with the stomach and the lower urges of the body that crave pleasure, foster endless greed, and complete lack of moderation. The Monster wants to enslave the whole man to a life driven by these urges—a life of greed, lust, and self-indulgence.

Plato argues that a good society must be structured like a just human is structured. Reason, wisdom, and moderation must rule. These must be empowered and enlivened by the spirit of the Lion (with a passion and commitment for justice, balance, and harmony), and both together must keep the lusts of the monster in check (which includes the greed of the wealthy). In addition, from Plato’s Symposium, we can conclude that the energy of these lower lusts can be sublimated into love for higher things, like truth, justice, beauty, and goodness.

In Book VIII of the Republic, Plato develops a typology of 5 kinds of societies, evaluated according to their justice, wisdom, and integrity. The ideal, he says, is “Aristocracy” meaning the rule of the best, just as in a person the rule should be reason and wisdom (which are what is best about us). Any corruption of Aristocracy leads to “Timocracy,” the rule of honor (associated with the Lion or spirited part of our being). Corruption of Timocracy leads to “Oligarchy,” rule of the rich. We are now at the level of the many-headed monster region of our being, since the wealthy become so through greed.

But at least, their greed, Plato says, has some discipline to it since discipline is required to accumulate wealth. Corruption of Oligarchy leads to “Democracy.” Democracy repudiates all distinctions of higher and lower and therefore does not recognize reason and wisdom as superior to lust and profligacy. Plato uses the idea of “democracy” as a symbol of the failure to recognize reason, wisdom, and pursuit of truth as higher than emotions, lusts, and idle fantasies.

Therefore, “democracy” (under this definition) creates chaos. It does not discriminate higher (reason) from lower (lusts). It claims there is no truth and that all lusts, obsessions, prejudicial fantasies, conspiracy theories, or primal urges are equal. It demands a “free speech” in which lies are not fact checked, nor called out as destructive of the body-politics. Because of this chaos, it ends up demanding a strong-man to deal with this mess. Hence, (continuing Plato’s account of the descent of corruption in human societies) the corruption of Democracy necessarily leads to “Tyranny.” A single lustful, irrational, vindictive, and arrogant tyrant is elected to take over and proceeds to enslave the entire society to his perverted will.

The obvious analogy links with the beginning of the Trump presidency in the USA. The original ideals propounded by the social contract theory of Thomas Jefferson (of a free society in which inalienable human rights and governmental protection of these rights in a system of checks and balances) has been destroyed through the dogma of the right to the unlimited accumulation of private property (a system of greed and lust). The internal contradictions between this spurious “right” and a society “of the people, by the people, and for the people” has come to its terminal point, as Plato’s typology reveals, in a regime of tyranny, in fascism plain and simple.

A failed, chaotic democracy, characterized by corruption and endless vitriol, has brought to power an incipient tyrant who ignores the social contract behind the Constitution that embodied the principles of democracy to uphold the rule of law and equality before the law. Instead, he attempts to impose an arbitrary, lustful will on the government, the entire nation, and even the world, displacing loyalty to the Constitution with personal loyalty to himself. The rule of the oligarchs has not disappeared, of course, but they also long to impose an arbitrary order on this no-truth, no discipline, no wisdom chaos that they helped to create.

Will the USA survive four years of this madness? Time will tell. Meanwhile, the global climate continues to disintegrate, climate refugees by the tens of millions scour the world looking for a home in which to survive, and nuclear war comes ever closer as technology creates ever faster and more dangerous intercontinental delivery systems. Nevertheless, the original social contract ideal cannot be recovered in the USA or any other nation. The world has become globally interdependent and the lethal dangers its faces are also global and beyond the scope of any and all sovereign nation-states.

The democratic vision is real because human rights and dignity are real. But a metanoia is required—a transformation in the consciousness of humanity from fragmentation to wholeness. The Trump presidency has buckled down on absolute fragmentation and separation from the rest of humanity (MAGA). The greatest of the above mentioned social contract theorists mentioned above, Immanuel Kant, understood that “the vocation of man” is “to leave the lawless state of savagery and enter into a federation of peoples….a federation of nations” that establishes peace, freedom, and equality throughout the world. Indeed, this democratic vision is only possible today at the global level, embracing the whole. It is pre-visioned by the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.