The Great Seal of the United States proclaims that the American founding is a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages.” On the one hand, the Constitution of 1787 was indeed a remarkable achievement, establishing a new commonwealth intended to protect the natural rights of all citizens. On the other, the American founding and the changes that have occurred over time can best be understood by looking further into the past, especially the taxonomy of regime types identified by such Greek philosophers as Plato and Aristotle.
Such history will help us understand the danger the American project is put in by its current corps of self-loathing elites.
Plato and Aristotle were the founders of the science of politics. The Ancient Greek science of politics differs from the political science of our time by focusing on the big questions: What is the best form of government? What form best ensures the excellence (arete) and happiness (eudaimonia) of the citizens? What causes the corruption and decline of a political community? In contrast, today’s political science concerns itself with minutiae. Adopting the value-free perspective of modernity, the political scientists of our time cannot adequately explain why one form of government is superior to another, other than personal preference. Today’s political scientists, therefore, write more and more about less and less.
The Greeks postulated a direct relationship between the human soul (psyche) and political constitutions. The Greeks divided the human soul into three parts: nous, the intellective, reasoning part; thumos, the spirited part, concerned with honor and justice; and epithumeia, the appetitive part, concerned with basic human desires and especially subject to the passions.
They believed that various polities each reflected a part of the human soul. In this taxonomy of regimes, the noetic part of the soul was seen in rule by the one; the thumetic part of the soul in rule by the few; and the appetitive part of the soul in rule by the many. Each form of rule had a good and bad version, the former based on rule for the benefit of the entire polity and the latter rule on behalf of the ruler or ruling class alone. Thus, the good form of rule by the one was kingship; the bad form, tyranny. The good form of rule by the few was aristocracy; the bad form, oligarchy or plutocracy. And the good form of rule by the many was politeia or a balanced constitution, which the Romans translated as res publica and which is most properly rendered as commonwealth in English; the bad form was democracy or ochlocracy: that is, mob rule.
This taxonomy led the Greek historian Polybius to suggest that all political regimes were subject to the “cycle of constitutions” (anakuklosis politeion). A kingship begins virtuously, but over time, the rule by the one on behalf of the whole deteriorates into tyranny. The virtuous few, the aristoi, depose the tyrant and reestablish well-ordered rule. But over time, that aristocracy deteriorates into oligarchy. The oligarchs are then overthrown by the virtuous many, but the balanced constitution that is put in place inevitably deteriorates into unruly democracy, after which the cycle will repeat. This cycle of constitutions was the central problem for the Greek founders of the science of politics: essentially, that good forms of rule become corrupted and tend to descend into bad forms.
These days, we tend not to think in terms of cycles. Indeed, the essence of modernity is the idea of linear progress. But the Greek taxonomy of regimes is useful in examining what has happened to the United States. The U.S. Constitution established the good form of rule by the many: a self-governing republic or commonwealth. As such, it established a “balanced” structure of government, in which the executive branch, in essence, represented the one, the Senate represented the few, and the House of Representatives represented the many (and the judicial Supreme Court represented the mediation between those elements and the law itself). But its foundation was ultimately democratic, in that both the executive and Senate, as well as the House, were elected by the many, albeit indirectly.
But for a variety of reasons — not least of which has been the rise of the “administrative state,” an unconstitutional pseudo fourth branch of government in violation of the principle of separation of power — the United States now exhibits the characteristics of oligarchy. Oligarchy, you’ll remember, is what the Greeks considered the bad form of rule by the few, in our case a ruling “elite” that includes not only unelected bureaucrats ruling in their own interests but also corporate leaders in tech, finance, and media. This oligarchic elite establishes rules from which they themselves are exempt.
Of course, all complex societies have a “ruling class,” which can be either aristocratic or oligarchic. The United States has prospered when its ruling class has been aristocratic. In such cases, the interests of this aristocratic ruling class have coincided with the interests of the nation as a whole. But problems arise when an aristocratic ruling class devolves into an oligarchic one, the interest of which diverges from that of the republic and its citizens.
We have seen this with the evolution, or rather devolution, of previous American elites from aristocracy to oligarchy: how America’s first aristocratic elite, the Federalists of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, devolved into an oligarchic rump of resentful and bitter New Englanders; how Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy of virtue and talents” became the cotton oligarchy of the antebellum American South; how the industrialists of the late 19th century became the plutocrats of the Gilded Age; how the great statesmen who won World War II and presided over the establishment of the post-war liberal world order devolved into an elite that undermines the American power that is necessary to maintain an order that benefits all American citizens, not just the ruling elites.
The new American oligarchy differs from its predecessors in one unprecedented way: its utter disdain for the American republic, as well as for its fellow citizens. In the past, the members of an aristocratic ruling class loved the United States as a nation and its principles, or at least identified their own interests with those of the country. But not only does today’s oligarchic ruling class not love the United States, but its members make it all too clear that they hate it. In this, they resemble the Athenian oligarchs who favored Sparta over their own city and its citizens.
For example, our oligarchic elites today insist that the United States is racist to the core and that Americans who espouse patriotic nationalism are anti-immigrant purveyors of ethnic and religious hatred. Our oligarchs are for “open borders” without the assimilation that has always characterized and facilitated immigration in the past. They reject the reasoning of the Founders, who saw the necessity of what Hamilton called a “common national sentiment.” As Hamilton argued, “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.” In contrast, our oligarchs view themselves not as citizens of America but as “citizens of the world” who reject national sovereignty and embrace “diversity” as a normative, positive good.
Our current oligarchic government-corporate-media-technology-finance complex poses an existential threat to republican self-government. For decades, its economic policies have hollowed out the American middle class and helped to impoverish American workers, while the economic gains have accrued to the oligarchs. In this, they resemble the Roman elites who replaced free labor with slaves from Rome’s wars of conquest, creating a seething urban proletariat to be bought off with bread and circuses.
Our present oligarchs follow the same path by buying off those who can be bought with government programs. Those who do not acquiesce in the oligarchy’s enterprise, who are not compliant with its actions, are dismissed as resentful racists or “anti-science” troglodytes, whose punishment is to be subject to surveillance and limits on speech and association. If they do not accept the tenets of “diversity and inclusion” in language or the workplace, they are subject to the loss of employment and social status. All the while, there is the clear, black irony that these oligarchs are, in fact, the largest beneficiaries of the society and institutions they wish to destroy. This renders our ruling elites not only oligarchic but self-hating and stupid. Do they really think they can benefit more from the wreckage of a broken polity?
The United States is at a tipping point. Will we as citizens reclaim the mantle of republican self-government or meekly submit to the rule of our oligarchic elites? If the latter, the American commonwealth is at a tragic end.
Mackubin Owens is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and author of U.S. Civil-Military Relations After 9/11: Renegotiating the Civil-Military Bargain. He is currently writing a history of U.S. civil-military relations.
