Politics of rage and paranoia takes America to the brink

Republican candidate Donald Trump is seen with blood on his face surrounded by secret service agents.

Perhaps because they were the first to think of themselves as living in political communities, and to experience those communities’ rise and fall, the Greeks pioneered the analysis of political collapse. Centuries later, with the US – and much of the West – in turmoil, the risks they identified seem to be leaping off the page.

Of course, politics in ancient Greece was not for the faint-hearted. “Had I been in politics,” said Socrates during his trial in 399BC, “I would have been dead long ago.” In an age in which political assassinations were not unusual, and the harassment, blackmailing and ostracism of politicians was a regular occurrence, he was merely stating what his audience would have considered obvious.

“Stasis”, however, went far beyond everyday political conflict. Generically related to the word for “standing”, the term referred to the worst fate that could befall a polis: the uncontrollable factional strife in which one or more parts of the city “stood up” against the others. Brilliantly described by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War, stasis was as devastating as the plague; but rather than an event, it was a self-reinforcing process, that once unleashed could tear a city apart.

At its heart, Thucydides argued, lay the collapse of the understandings that had, until then, defined citizens’ “shared world”. With common ground becoming fractured terrain, differences hardened to the point where citizens were “ranged against one another in opposing ideological camps”.

Freed of the restraints previously imposed by the bonds of civility, and “relentlessly competing to defeat their opponents”, the contending factions didn’t blanche at using “every available means, including trumped-up lawsuits and force, to pursue political vendettas”. “The result was that neither side paid any regard to personal integrity” – least of all in the words they used.

Language was, as a consequence, degraded: invective and hyperbole triumphed. “People altered the significance of words to suit their deeds: irrational daring came to be called manly courage, prudent delay a fair-seeming cowardice, a moderate attitude a mere shield for effeminacy, and a reasoned understanding with regard to all sides of an issue meant that one was indolent and of no use for anything.”

The worst of it, however, was that stasis fed on itself. As insults replaced insights, the dialogue that might have helped rebuild bridges became impossible. “Intelligence having emancipated itself from decency”, legitimacy was conferred on “deeds once considered shocking”, fuelling resentments that morphed into anger before becoming a rage “that overrode reason”.

And as politics descended into a frenzied struggle “to exceed ones rivals at excess itself”, “those citizens who chose moderation perished at the hands of both factions”, while the more intelligent of the belligerents, “overly confident that they could anticipate the plots of their less intelligent antagonists, tended to be caught off guard and so vanquished”.

In the end, stasis delivered the polis’s best to its worst, destroying even as splendid a jewel as Periclean Athens.

In drawing out those mechanisms, Thucydides showed himself to be anything but an optimist. A hard man – a former Athenian general – further hardened by experience and observation, he was convinced that in politics, “the chasms that yawn beneath us are deeper than the peaks that beckon us are high”.

And neck-deep in the grime of humanity as it really is, not as it might be, he viewed civilised morality as little more than a thin veneer, always at risk of being stripped away to reveal the horrors that lay beneath.

Yet that pessimism was itself a source of hope. If Thucydides had, as he tells us, composed the History as a “ktêma es aei”, a possession for all time, it was precisely to issue a warning. Armed with its lessons, citizens could mitigate the dangers of “rebarbarisation”, for example by imposing on the polis the checks and balances of a mixed constitution.

No less importantly, having understood that they risked destroying themselves in their attempts to destroy rivals, the competing factions might display greater prudence and even a measure of civility, “for if we share an equal fear, we are more inclined to approach each other with care and forethought”.

But those options brought no guarantees. Constitutions had great merits; it took, however, “much naivete to think that the laws alone can act as a bulwark against human nature when it sets out eagerly to do something”. As for the threat of mutual destruction, “regrettably, men are readier to hope than to fear, and promptly forget even the best-founded fears at the beckoning of groundless hopes”.

The forces that led to stasis would therefore persist “as long as there is the same physis for human beings”. And the best chance of taming those forces lay in what was most difficult to achieve.

That was preserving citizens’ reverence for the polis – the love of its culture and loyalty to its institutions, the attachment to its past and devotion to its future, the fellow feeling for its members, that sustains citizens’ willingness to fight and die for their homeland, thereby “earning, through the gift of their lives, the praise that grows not old”.

Whether much of that remains in today’s US is an open question. It is an open question too how much there still is of the respect for the laws that so impressed Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, as well as the myriad visitors who followed in his footsteps.

There is, on those questions, a great deal that should, and will, be said as the election approaches. In the immediate, what counts is not to exaggerate.

Most Americans are not single-minded ideologues: estimates vary, but few studies find that more than a third of voters are fiercely committed partisans, with many estimates being far lower than that. It is footloose voters who still, and increasingly, determine elections, meaning candidates must appeal to a broad, politically diverse base.

And regardless of the outcome, the separation of powers – jealously guarded by congress and the Supreme Court – remains firmly in place, averting evils whose reliable absence outweighs all other political goods.

But the stench of stasis is unmistakably in the air. What Richard Hofstadter, writing decades ago, brilliantly termed American politics’ “paranoid style” permeates today’s rhetoric, with that style’s trademark propensity to cast the adversary as “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel”. Demonstrating, as Hofstadter put it, “how much political leverage can be got out of the passions of a small minority,” it raises the stakes to the breaking point – and beyond.

The US is scarcely alone in that respect, as a glance at Australia shows. But it is now those forces’ fulcrum. Whether it can withstand the strain will determine whether the West succumbs to the fate of Athens or, in a world of rampant faction and fanaticism, remains freedom’s “last best hope”.