Plato was *never* a fan of Athenian democracy: his teacher and mentor, Socrates, was instrumental in several of the Peleponnesian city-states being taken over by tyrants - his *students* as it turned out. Socrates was maybe the first master of “fake news”: He was executed for using his personal free speech to undermine the value of free speech itself, and for thereby making himself - and his students - existential threats to Athens itself. I highly recommend “The Trial of Socrates” by IF Stone for a genuinely in-depth look at how Socrates came to be sentenced to death. He was the Fox News, the Sean Hannity, the Rush Limbaugh of the time, and presented a loving breathing crisis to Greek civilization.Plato was his apologist, his amanuensis, his water-carrier...too bad he was not seen through by the founding fathers when they were looking for a term way than monarchy.
There’s another aspect to all this - one that gets no shrift at all in “Christian” America, and that is sacred kingship: a head of state embodies a symbolic role that goes virtually unrecognized today; the idea that the king and the land are one, and that the head of state is a moral and ethical center that ties a nation together, allows it to weather crises and remain intact. The many volumes of Sir James Fraser’s “Golden Bough” goes into great depth and detail the topic; by that light, the presidency of DJT represents the fundamental moral corruption of us as a people, requiring a symbolic and actual purging of the threads that brought him to power, and to the destruction his time in power has wrought on us as a nation and a people.
getting deep...better quit....
