To the many paradoxes surrounding the improbable political career of Donald Trump, we may add the following: we can only understand Trump, the most recent major development in American politics, by turning to the oldest tools of political analysis that our civilization offers. To get the full picture of what is happening today, we have to go back to the roots of political science, to the ancient Greeks and their view of politics and human nature.
Most people don’t think of Plato when they think of Donald Trump, but they should. Our usual forms of political analysis—both the more rigorous, like academic political science, and the more popular, like the conventional wisdom of political journalists and commentators—utterly failed to come to grips with the Trump phenomenon. They did not predict his success as a presidential candidate. To the contrary, they confidently, repeatedly, and erroneously predicted his failure.
The purveyors of contemporary political insight have done no better with Trump as president. They assured the country—and themselves—that a Trump presidency would be a disaster. Yet Trump has succeeded in doing much of what he set out to do, has held the base of supporters who got him elected in the first place, and therefore can plausibly contend for re-election in 2020. Trump is an important and persistent political phenomenon that our political experts have failed to understand. We are accordingly forced to wonder: if the most up-to-date political commentary cannot help us here, why not turn to the
