Make Comparisons Great Again
Last September, a trusted advisor suggested that Eidolon run an article on anti-immigration hysteria among Trump supporters and in Rome in the time of the Gracchi. It would take a brave writer to approach such a hot topic, he cautioned, and an even braver editor to publish it; the result could be “awesome,” but might also be “explosive and undesirable.”
What a difference nine months makes. Comparing Donald Trump to the ancient world has gone from potentially controversial to positively clichéd. Now Plato’s ideas about tyranny have been used to understand Trump’s rise in several major media outlets, including Time magazine, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, culminating in a doomsaying New York Magazine article titled “Democracies ends when they are too democratic.” These interpretations of Plato were then dismissed in an article in the Washington Post claiming that Athenian history is more useful to understanding Trump than Platonic philosophy is.
Less seriously, Donald Trump’s nicknames for his rivals (like “Crooked Hillary” and “Little Marco”) have been compared to Homeric epithets, and the homepage for the Vote Trump, Get Dumped movement, taking Aristophanes’ Lysistrata in an unadvisably literal way, alludes to that (fictional, comedic) text for proof that sex strikes work: “The Greeks did it…This is a tried and true method of getting men’s attention when they’re being dumb.”
Eidolon is implicated in this trend, although I’d like to believe we were using the ancient world to understand Trump’s appeal before it was cool. Two months after that first tentative conversation, we published Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s “Barbarians Inside the Gates”, a two-part exploration of the fear, exploitation, and politics of undocumented immigrants in Rome and today. In February we followed up with Jessica Evans’ “Alcibiades’ Trump Card,” analyzing the rhetoric of masculinity in the Republican Primary debates and Thucydides’ account of the debate between Alcibiades and Nicias. (Just a few weeks later, the Presidential candidates began openly suggesting that Trump had small hands and therefore a small penis, so I suppose the article was premature.)
I was proud to publish both of those articles, and I’ve enjoyed reading some of the comparisons between Trump and the ancient world in other publications. (Except for the sex strike suggestion. We owe Aristophanes better than that.) But we’re all guilty of exploiting the allure of these comparisons while sidestepping their politics.
What does it mean, really, that so many writers — classicists and non-classicists alike — have found the ancient world so useful for conceptualizing Trump’s appeal? Clearly, we believe the ancient world has something useful and interesting to tell us about The Donald, but why? And what does that belief say about us?
Going through my email correspondence with Dan-el from before his article is bittersweet now. I kept pushing him to turn it in, because I thought November 9 and 12 would be the absolute tail end of the article’s window of relevance. I was so sure the November 10 debate would finally conclude the viability of Trump’s unlikely candidacy.
It’s become fashionable now to Monday-morning quarterback the Republican primaries, pointing out the signs that Trump’s ascendancy to nominee was always inevitable. But the truth is that most of us (except for Scott Adams, apparently) were taken completely by surprise. I’m not going to claim prescience: if you’d told me, as I developed that article and edited it and commissioned cover art, that there was a greater-than-zero chance that in exactly a year Trump would be our president-elect, I would have been shocked. And I wouldn’t have been the only one.
Mixed in with that shock is fear, and, I think, a generous helping of disgust. The ugly truth we’d like to ignore is that Trump’s success isn’t really about him being some kind of unstoppable political force. On his own, Trump isn’t any kind of political force. He’s a businessman ruthlessly taking advantage of powerful currents running beneath the surface of the belief systems of many Americans: bigotry, entitlement, fear.
I was in the very early stages of pregnancy during the presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the fall of 2012. Around the time of Obama’s second inauguration in January 2013, I started to notice an unpleasant phenomenon whenever I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked much bigger than the image of myself that I held in my mind. The reality of my appearance was disturbingly different from what I expected to see.
I’m reminded of that sensation whenever I think of the fact that, as Andy Borowitz tweeted, so many millions of my fellow citizens voted for Trump. Whether or not he wins, those people are my countrymen (and, to a lesser extent, countrywomen, since Trump’s campaign has a female voter problem). I don’t live in the America I thought I did. I knew we had our problems — the prison-industrial complex, the militarization of our police forces, the deep systemic racism and rape culture and sexism and transphobia and ableism and income inequality. But the vastness of Trump’s support base has made me wonder for the first time if those problems can ever be fixed, or even ameliorated. I never thought America was perfect, but it’s never felt so unfamiliar and frightening.
In this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, people have turned to the ancient world for answers. Did the Greeks and Romans, with their uncanny foresight, see Trump coming thousands of years ago? Did they have suggestions for how to stop him? We trust that ancient wisdom. With time, the opinions and beliefs of the ancients have ossified until they have the status of truths. Their thoughts could be worth considering.
The engagement with ancient views on demagogues like Trump has grown over time. A few days before we published Barbarians Inside the Gates, the Daily Beast published an interview with Tom Holland using the inflammatory title “Is Donald Trump the Modern Nero?” It’s misleading: Trump is only discussed briefly at the end, when Holland says of Caligula and Nero, “in their bloodthirsty and brutal way they were populares, people who were playing to the popular gallery, who were all about entertaining as well as ruling. I think Donald Trump is clearly a politician in the popularis tradition.”
Contrast that approach from November 2015 with Classics professor Philip Freeman’s extensive comparison between Trump and Clodius, or Andrew Sullivan’s use of Plato to understand how American politics became so unstable, or even Holland’s own comparison with Caligula last week. The classics are now being positioned as somehow crucial to understanding Trump’s appeal.
Why we need the ancient Greeks and Romans to better understand Trump is rarely articulated by these writers. Sullivan begins his essay, “As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic.” That the two are connected in his brain is justification enough. A more explicit argument in favor of the comparison is made by Dartmouth professor Devin Singh in a Time article arguing that the ancient label ‘tyrant’ (τύραννος) fits Trump almost perfectly:
Centuries later, on another continent, these ideas still matter. It’s from such thinkers that we derive the political concepts that undergird our democracy. The ancient Greeks understood what qualities might destroy the democratic model they developed and that we’ve inherited.
I saw a less eloquent version of this paragraph in almost every entry into Eidolon’s high school essay contest about why the classics are important to study. That probably sounds like more of a burn than I intend it to be — it was a fair point then, and it’s a fair point now. But I think it’s more superficially compelling than meaningful. Our monuments look a lot like the ancients’, but we don’t need to know how the ancient bricks of the Pantheon were made to analyze the Lincoln Memorial’s structural stability.
Singh also overestimates how well the Athenians understood their democracy’s strengths and weaknesses. As Eidolon’s Trump comparison articles have shown, the ancients weren’t always unimpeachably wise when it came to demagogues. They were swayed by Alcibiades’ masculine rhetoric to go on the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. They thought it would make Athens great again. They were wrong.
Are this story and that of Gaius Gracchus’ failed citizenship proposal exempla in the truly classical, Plutarchan sense? Can we use them as instructive cautionary tales? Not really. The contexts and alternative options were too different from ours. The parallels are appealing, but how do they help us?
Even if the ancients have no practical wisdom to offer, we can still look at them for theory, as Sullivan does. This approach is more fruitful, but ultimately also more dangerous — because it feeds into the same forces that precipitated Trump’s rise.
In the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker stumbles upon this exact problem:
We at least owe Trump thanks for bringing these two ancient philosophers out of history’s woodwork and back into the conversation. Trump also has inspired reconsideration of rhetoric’s rightful place in the classroom, where it was once considered an essential component of “a gentleman’s” education.
Scare quotes aside, her use of the word ‘gentleman’ is telling. Looking to the ancient world as a source of wisdom and intellectual power is primarily an elite white male strategy — the strategy of gentlemen. Not exclusively, of course: the ancient world has been appropriated by the LGBTQ community and feminists and black hip-hop artists, too. But those appropriations are powerfully subversive precisely because they go against the expected grain. Dead white men are useful mostly to living white men.
Trump may be more orange than white these days, and the whiteness of the ancients may be debatable. Regardless, Trump feeds off the expectation that a rich white man is a source of authority. He is the combed-over manifestation of our deeply held belief that rich white men win, and they will continue winning, no matter how often they lose. History supports this belief, more or less. The rich white(ish) men of the ancient world suffered plenty of losses, up to and including the near-complete destruction of their civilizations, but they still won. In an election where, for the first time, a woman will be a major party’s nominee, the subtle reminder that for thousands of years rich white men have always won is powerful and dangerous.
Sullivan doesn’t seem to appreciate how completely he perpetuates these ideas. He doesn’t just use Plato to understand the downfall of America — he also blames Black Lives Matter for participating in the ‘demonization’ of the white working class who form Trump’s base and with whom he explicitly empathizes:
Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes.
The problem with this analysis, of course, is that Trump supporters are bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes. Many of them identify as part of the Alt-Right, an explicitly white nationalist movement. Trump also has support among the men who make up the loosely connected set of blogs and forums known as ‘the manosphere’. My research into the manosphere’s strange obsession with the ancient world — from Ovid as the OG PUA to their enthusiastic adoption of ancient Stoicism — has forced me to be an unwillingly frequent reader of deeply misogynistic sites like Return of Kings and Chateau Heartiste, where I’m subjected to a never-ending stream of Trump adoration. They see him as a true “alpha male.”
Sullivan’s performative exercise of empathy is misguided. Trump supporters don’t need his understanding and his backhanded swipes at the Ivy League after long reminiscences about how life-changing reading Plato was for him in college (at Oxford, by the way). They have their own misguided, incoherent analogies for how Trump “assassinated” his competition on the Ides of March. So we might ask ourselves: when we look to the ancients to try to understand Trump from a position of opposition, are we doing so in a markedly different way from the people who do the same from a position of support? Our comparisons may be more knowledgeable and educated, but the underlying impulse may be the same.
Should we issue an indictment against Trump comparisons? It probably wouldn’t make a difference: people aren’t going to stop making them, any more than they will stop comparing TV shows to Greek tragedy. Eidolon may even publish another before the election is over. Should Trump win, we may publish many more. I don’t think that will happen, but I never thought I’d hear the phrase ‘Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’ outside my nightmares, either.
I’m tempted here to take my inspiration from the master and leave with this concise message: Lots of academics are comparing Trump to the ancient world. He feeds on our trust of elite white cisgender men. Sad!
On the other hand, the widespread impulse to talk about the ancient world through and around and with reference to Trump could be useful. Just not in the way intended, which I suspect comes from our frustration at our inability to stop his momentum. And so we try to help by contributing in the best way we know how: through reasoned critique, informed by years of research and writing.
But reasoned critique won’t have any noticeable impact on Trump and his supporters, who seem as impervious to it as his hair is to the wind. Facile comparisons aren’t going to help, and may even hurt. We have a professional and ethical responsibility to carefully consider the audience of our comparisons and their intended effect.
The key to making comparisons great again is to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you writing for a major media news outlet, hoping to attract those sweet sweet classics enthusiast clicks by publishing an article with the title “Seven Ancient Greeks Who Were Exactly Like Donald Trump. #4 Will Shock You!”? Then good luck with that. Are you teaching Aristophanes’ Knights and hoping that a crack about how Cleon was totally the Donald Trump of 5th century Athens will get a laugh out of your students? Go ahead. Especially if you can use the joke to open up a useful conversation about Aristophanes’ political conservatism.
Are you trying to explain to the world how scary Donald Trump is by using ancient comparisons? Saying that Trump sounds like Sulla is never really going to accomplish much besides showing off how educated you are. Although Trump seems to embody American xenophobia and misogyny, he’s a symptom, not the disease itself. Your comparison may be disguising the true issues.
Or are you hoping to use Donald Trump and his ancient doppelgängers not to help understand Trump but to highlight the continuing importance of the ancient world? Is it your response to the angst you feel as a humanities scholar at being constantly forced to justify your relevance, or even your existence? Are you trying to make classics great again (for a very narrow definition of ‘great’ as ‘widely acknowledged to have value’)?
If that’s the case, tread carefully. The way to make classics truly great (again?), it seems to me, is to model, through thoughtful discussion of the ancient world that takes into consideration its social, cultural, and intellectual complexities, how it can serve as a useful space to explore the complexities of our own world. If that pushes some of us to write in new ways or for new audiences, so much the better. The best way to reach a broad audience isn’t by dumbing down your work, it’s by retaining nuance while eliminating jargon.
I’m aware of how great a challenge that is. Simple comparisons are easy to make. Avoiding the ‘great man’ model of history that encourages us to use the greatest thinkers of the West (like Plato) to understand the individual who may become, as we like to deem our President, “the most powerful man in the world” — that’s so much harder. Comparing the evolution and deployment of Romanitas and white nationalism would be a monumental project. But that’s why it’s worth doing.
Donna Zuckerberg is editor-in-chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014 and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her first book, Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.
