Praise for Trump and Political

“Bringing the wisdom contained within the history of to bear on the shocking events of the past few years, these essays give us what we need most of all: illumination in place of obfuscation.” —Damon Linker, Senior Correspondent, The Week

“Anyone who believes that philosophy has the ability and responsibility to reflect upon the concerns of the present will find these volumes utterly compelling.” —Jeffrey Bernstein, Professor, Philosophy, College of the Holy Cross, USA

“Certainly we have had a plethora of books speaking about the rise of Trump… but there is nothing from this timeless perspective.” —Bryan Paul-Frost, Associate Professor, Political Science, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, USA Angel Jaramillo Torres Marc Benjamin Sable Editors Trump and Political Philosophy

Leadership, Statesmanship, and Tyranny Editors Angel Jaramillo Torres Marc Benjamin Sable National Autonomous University Universidad Iberoamericana of Mexico Mexico City, Mexico Mexico City, Mexico

ISBN 978-3-319-74444-5 ISBN 978-3-319-74445-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74445-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940463

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations.

Cover design by Fatima Jamadar

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To Leslie Rubin, a fine scholar and a good friend Preface

To edit a volume that is a compilation of essays on the hypothetical opin- ions of classical and modern philosophers on the 45th Presidency of the United States is undoubtedly a challenge. The predicament is compounded by the inescapable fact that Donald Trump is unlikely to be interested in philosophy. According to his own public testimonies, Trump’s favorite books are the Bible and The Art of the Deal—not necessarily in that order. Perhaps this book will find a place on the bookshelves of citizens interested in the fate of American democracy, and more generally the world they are living in as the twentieth-first cen- tury approaches its third decade. This volume is divided into three parts: Ancient and Medieval Political Thought, Modern and Liberal Thought, and Continental Perspectives.1 The quarrel between ancient and moderns can help us to better under- stand statesmanship, tyranny, and leadership—themes critical for the America which has witnessed the rise of Trump. Political philosophy is, among other things, a meditation about real and desired regimes. It should be noted that this book has a companion volume, Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and Civic Virtue, and the project was originally intended as a single volume. If the reader finds some great thinker or political stance lacking here, we hope that they will look in there for insights. This collection is undoubtedly diverse, not only in terms of the thinkers with whom our contributors engage, but also in their politics. We have included authors who believe, explicitly or implicitly, that Donald Trump lacks the moral, political, and technical capacities to govern the United

vii viii PREFACE

States. We have decided to give voice as well to those who are optimistic about Trump and believe that he deserves a chance to demonstrate that he can deliver the goods. Our decision is likely not to garner much assent from either side of the political spectrum, but since this book is written from the point of view of philosophy, we think that dogmatism is the most perfidious of intellectual vices. All in all, we subscribe to the Socratic injunction that one is an edu- cated person to the extent one knows one’s ignorance. Moreover, it is our conviction that the strengthening of the public sphere needs an open and non-dogmatic discussion of ideas about what Trump’s surprising electoral victory means. If, as several of the contributors point out, the dangers of the present political landscape stem from our inability to rationally discuss the great issues of our time—that we are more comfortable arguing with the like-minded—we hope that this book will foster a dialogue across political divides that can improve the quality of American democracy. Of course, this book cannot provide all the insights that the philoso- phers might bring to bear on contemporary politics, or even just Trump, even taken together with its companion volume. But like the proverbial exiled poet, we have launched this book like a message in a bottle thrown into the sea. We hope some fishermen in search of human messages will find it and read it. Perhaps it can help them to get their bearings amidst a troubled moment in the American political landscape.

Note 1. The term “liberal” is not used here in the typical contemporary American political sense, i.e., in opposition to postwar conservatism. We use the term “liberal” to refer to all those political and ideologies which place an emphasis on formal, legal freedom, and the constitutional orders which support it. Our use of the term does not entail any particular stance as to the proper role of government in regulation of business, about which our contributors disagree, i.e., some of them are liberal, some conservative, and some radical in the conventional terminology of American politics. Depending on context, “neoliberal” might refer to a general acceptance of free markets, which has dominated thinking worldwide since the 1980s, or it might refer to the specific position represented by the Clintons’ reformist politics within the broad parameters of contemporary corporate capitalism. Acknowledgments

A project like this—which we count as including its sister volume, Trump and Political Philosophy: Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism and Civic Virtue— necessarily generates different sorts of debts than a work consisting of a single argument authored by a single scholar. These are the debts of friendship, in the broad sense of the Greek word philia. We are indebted in three ways: institutionally, professionally, and personally. First, we thank the organizations which facilitated this project: The Northeastern Political Science Association (NPSA), where we organized the first “Trump in the Face of Political Philosophy” panels that took place three days after the 2016 presidential election. We thank the NPSA also for the two roundtables based on essays in this book, one year later, and, more generally, as a forum where we met many of the contributors. The Association for Core Texts and Courses was also an excellent venue, where in the spring of 2017 we met a number of the contributors to this volume and quickly become friends. In addition, Angel Jaramillo was able to work on this project thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship provided by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT, Mexico’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation). He was able to work on this project as part of a postdoctoral position at the Coordinación de Estudios de Posgrado at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He wishes thus to thank the coordinator in the area of philosophy at that time, Leticia Flores Farfán. He acknowledges the support of the philosopher Josu Landa too. Second, there are also numerous individuals who facilitated this proj- ect, by helping to foster the conversation that we hope these two books constitute. We owe particular thanks to Nathan Tarcov of the University

ix x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS of Chicago, Richard Velkley of Tulane University, Joshua Parens of the University of Dallas, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and Jeffrey Bernstein of the College of the Holy Cross. Although none contributed essays, each made suggestions for inclusions in the volume and generously put us in contact with scholars who did participate. Three others who did contribute essays—Susan Shell, Gladden Pappin and Catherine Zuckert— also helped us to identify scholars whose essays likewise grace this volume. Above all, this project would have been impossible without the scholars who wrote essays for this book, and its sister volume. We believe their essays exhibit not only a very high quality of scholarship but also a serious- ness about politics. More prosaically, they were patient with two editors who learned “on the job” how to manage an intellectual project with 37 contributors. Moreover, they were fine colleagues, responding to com- ments on drafts and providing materials in a prompt fashion. We thank them all. We are of course grateful to the staff at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Michelle Chen and John Stegner who helped these novice co-editors through the process of turning a collection of essays into a finished manu- script. We are also highly appreciative of Palgrave’s design for the striking cover designs. A thank-you is also due to Chris Robinson, no longer at Palgrave, who first suggested that we turn two academic conference panels into a book-length project. Finally, we wish to thank our teachers. In the case of Marc Sable, these include, especially, Amy Kass, David Greenstone, Susanne Rudolph, David Smigelskis, and William Sewell, Jr. In the case of Angel Jaramillo, these include, particularly, Rafael Segovia, James Miller, Heinrich Meier, and Christopher Hitchens. Like the vast majority of human beings, our first teachers were our parents. We thank them, for helping us to become the people we are, and for their support, both emotional and material, which has enabled us both to become scholars and to bring this project to completion. Contents

1 Leadership, Statesmanship and Tyranny: The Character and Rhetoric of Trump 1 Angel Jaramillo Torres and Marc Benjamin Sable

Part I Ancient and Medieval Political Thought 15

2 Truth, Trump, Tyranny: Plato and the Sophists in an Era of ‘Alternative Facts’ 17 Patrick Lee Miller

3 Portraits of Ignobility: The Political Thought of Xenophon, and Donald Trump 33 Ashok Karra

4 Demagogy and the Decline of Middle-Class Republicanism: Aristotle on the Trump Phenomenon 51 Leslie G. Rubin

5 Democracy, Demagogues, and Political Wisdom: Understanding Trump in the Wake of Thucydides’ History 75 Bernard J. Dobski

xi xii CONTENTS

6 The Strongman, the Small Man, and the Gentleman: Confucius and Donald Trump 93 George A. Dunn

7 Trump, Alfarabi, and the Open Society 117 Christopher Colmo

Part II Modern and Liberal Thought 129

8 Machiavellian Politics, Modern Management and the Rise of Donald Trump 131 Gladden J. Pappin

9 Donald Trump: Shakespeare’s Lord of Misrule 149 Yu Jin Ko

10 Knave, Patriot, or Factionist: Three Rousseauian Hypotheses About the Election of President Trump 163 Joseph Reisert

11 Trump and The Federalist on National Greatness in a Commercial Republic 179 Arthur Milikh

12 American Constitutionalism from Hamilton to Lincoln to Trump 195 Murray Dry

13 The Lesson of Lincoln in the Age of Trump 211 John Burt

14 The Great Emancipators Oppose the “Slave Power”: The Lincolnian—and Aristotelian—Dimensions of Trump’s Rhetoric 235 Kenneth Masugi CONTENTS xiii

Part III Continental Perspectives 253

15 Charisma, Value and Political Vocation: Max Weber on the 2016 US Election 255 Marc Benjamin Sable

16 The Common Sense of Donald J. Trump: A Gramscian Reading of Twenty-First Century Populist Rhetoric 275 Kate Crehan

17 “I Alone Can Solve”: Carl Schmitt on Sovereignty and Nationhood Under Trump 293 Feisal G. Mohamed

Index 311 Notes on Contributors

John Burt is Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature at Brandeis University. He is the author of Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism (2013), which interprets the Lincoln-Douglas Debates through the phi- losophy of Kant and Rawls. His After the Southern Renascence was in 1999 as volume 7 of the Cambridge History of American literature. He was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1997 for exceptionally productive scholarship in American Literature, in particular Robert Penn Warren and American Idealism (1988). He is also the editor of several volumes of Robert Penn Warren’s poetry and the author of four volumes of his own. Christopher Colmo is Professor of Political Science and former chair of the Department of Political Science at Dominican University, where he teaches courses on philosophy of law, Gandhi and the Western classics, Latin American political thought, women in political philosophy, and contemporary political thought. In 2015–2016 he was the President’s Distinguished Service Professor at Dominican University. He is the author of Breaking with Athens: Alfarabi as Founder and has written in the Review of Politics and the American Political Science Review. Kate Crehan is Professor of Anthropology (Emerita) at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and College of Staten Island. She has conducted fieldwork in Zambia and Britain. She is the author of The Fractured Community: Landscapes of Power and Gender in Rural Zambia (1997); Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology (2002);

xv xvi Notes on Contributors

Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective (2011); and Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives (2016), and is the joint winner of the 2017 Sormani Prize. Bernard J. Dobski is Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches courses on political philosophy, international relations, and american for- eign policy. He is the co-editor of two volumes on Shakespeare (Souls with Longing and Shakespeare and the Body Politic), and has written essays, articles, and book reviews on Thucydides, Xenophon, Shakespeare, Mark Twain, liberal progressivism, and American foreign policy, in the Review of Politics, POLIS, Interpretation, Philosophy and Literature, Society, and Review of . Murray Dry is Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He is the author of Same-Sex Marriage and American Constitutionalism: A Study in Federalism, Separation of Powers, and Individual Rights (2017) and Civil Peace and the Quest for Truth: The First Amendment Freedoms in Political Philosophy and American Constitutionalism (2004). He assisted Herbert Storing in his seven-volume edition of The Complete Anti-Federalist (1981) and selected the material for a one-volume abridged version, The Anti- Federalist (1985). He has also written extensively on the debates over ratification of the Constitution and various issues concerning American constitutional law. George A. Dunn spent the past nine years as Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, in China. He is currently with the Philosophy Department at Marian University in Indianapolis. His research interests include moral and political philosophy, classical Chinese philosophy, , René Girard, and philosophy and popular culture. He has edited or co-edited six books on philosophy and popular culture, including Sons of Anarchy and Philosophy (2015) and The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan (2017), both co-edited with Jason Eberl. His current projects include books on Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss; René Girard and the Western Philosophical Tradition; and Leo Strauss in China. Notes on Contributors xvii

Angel Jaramillo Torres is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has been a journalist, essay- ist, editor, speechwriter, public servant, consultant, and academic. He holds a BA in international relations from El Colegio de México and an MA and PhD in political science from The New School for Social Research in New York, and was a DAAD fellow at the Ludwig-Maximilians-­ ­Universität München. He has taught at CUNY York College and City College and UNAM. He has worked for the Mexican government as a foreign policy analyst and speechwriter. His journalistic pieces have appeared in several outlets in Spanish and English. He is the author of Leo Strauss on Nietzsche’s Thrasymachean-Dionysian Socrates: Philosophy, Politics, Science, and Religion in the Modern Age (2017). Ashok Karra received his doctorate from the University of Dallas in December 2017. His dissertation, Xenophon’s Republic: Nobility, ­Self-­Knowledge, and the Identity of the Philosopher, wonders aloud about a strange miniature Xenophon presents of Socrates in the Memorabilia, where Socrates seems most competent to advise generals, politicians, and perhaps even to rule himself. Xenophon tempts his readers with the pos- sibility that rule can be perfectly rational and useful before acknowledging that human reason may not serve political ends properly in the least. The purpose of this temptation, Karra argues, is to highlight the uniqueness and moral character of the philosophical life itself. Karra also maintains a blog, Rethink, (http://www.ashokkarra.com), devoted to close-reading poetry and highlighting philosophical or political issues of note. Yu Jin Ko teaches English at Wellesley College and has written exten- sively on Shakespeare, with an emphasis on performance. His first book, Mutability and Division on Shakespeare’s Stage, appeared in 2004. He has also co-edited a book collection that brings together essays from scholars and theater professionals: Shakespeare’s Sense of Character: On the Page and From the Stage. His articles and reviews have continued to focus on Shakespeare in performance, both in the theater and on film. They include pieces like a review of Twelfth Night in Central Park fea- turing Anne Hathaway as well as an essay on a production of Macbeth by inmates of a correctional institution (“Macbeth Behind Bars”). More recently, he has moved into the area of Shakespeare in production across the globe, especially in the East. “The site of burial in two Korean hamlets” is his latest foray into this field. xviii Notes on Contributors

Kenneth Masugi has enjoyed careers in academia and government. He is the co-author, editor, or co-editor of nine books on American politics including a forthcoming monograph on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. While directing programs at the Claremont Institute, he also served as the editor of its quarterly Claremont Review of Books in its early years. He is on the editorial board of two political science journals. Masugi has taught at several institutions, including the US Air Force Academy, where he was Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor; the Ashbrook Center of Ashland University; and the center for the Study of American Government at Johns Hopkins University. Masugi has been a speechwriter for two Cabinet members and a special assistant for Clarence Thomas, when he was Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He is currently writing a book on the Declaration of Independence and the changing meaning of American citizenship. Arthur Milikh is associate director of The Heritage Foundation’s B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics. He conducts research on America’s founding principles, oversees the center’s research portfolio, and gives talks on the tenets of the American political tradition to policy- makers, political leaders, and the public. Patrick Lee Miller is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University. He is the author of Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (2012) and co-editor of Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy (2015). His recent philosophical writing uses Platonism to address current problems such as gender, sexuality, child psy- chology, pedagogy, natural evolution, virtual reality, spirituality, indeci- sion, honesty, and liberal government. Feisal G. Mohamed is Professor of English and Renaissance Studies at CUNY Graduate Center. A past president of the Milton Society of America, his most recent books are Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (2011); Milton’s Modernities: Poetry, Philosophy, and History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present, co-edited with Patrick Fadely (2017); and A New Deal for the Humanities: Liberal Arts and the Future of Public Higher Education (2016), co-edited with Gordon Hutner. In addition to scholarly journals, his work has appeared in Dissent, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, The American Scholar, and the website of The New Republic. At present, he is complet- Notes on Contributors xix ing a book manuscript provisionally entitled Sovereignty: Seventeenth-­ Century England and the Making of the Modern Political Imaginary. Gladden J. Pappin is Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of Dallas and is the deputy editor of American Affairs. He is also a perma- nent research fellow and senior adviser of the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. He received his AB (history) and PhD (government) from Harvard. He has written on the origins and criticism of modern politics, with particular attention to ecclesiastical poli- tics and the question of technology. His articles and reviews appear in American Affairs, History of Political Thought, Review of Metaphysics, Perspectives on Political Science, Comunicazioni sociali, Politics and Poetics, Modern Age, Intercollegiate Review, Claremont Review of Books, First Things, and elsewhere. Joseph Reisert is Harriet S. and George C. Wiswell, Jr., Associate Professor of American Constitutional Law in the Department of Government at Colby College. He is the author of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue and is currently writing a book on The General Will and Constitutional Democracy. Leslie G. Rubin taught political philosophy, American politics, constitu- tional law, and American political thought for 34 years at Kenyon College, at the University of Houston, and at Duquesne University. She was first exposed to Aristotle as a political science student at Dickinson College and wrote her dissertation at Boston College on the Politics. Since 2015, Rubin was an independent scholar working on the connections between Aristotle’s political thinking and the writings of the founding generation of the United States, to be published as America, Aristotle and the Politics of a Middle Class (Baylor University Press, 2018). During most of the last quarter century, she was Coordinator, then Director, of the Society for Greek Political Thought, an international organization through which she kept in touch with studies of the wide variety of Greek political philoso- phers and poets. Marc Benjamin Sable taught political science at Bethany College in West Virginia for ten years; since 2016, he has taught at Universidad de las Américas and Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. He received his PhD from the in 1997 with specializa- tions in comparative politics, American politics, and political theory. He was a 1993–1994 Fulbright grantee in Cairo, Egypt, and a 2014 NEH xx Notes on Contributors

Summer Institute Participant. His research has focused on Abraham Lincoln, American political thought, and Aristotle, and is currently in the final stages of a book manuscript entitled Lincoln’s Virtues and Aristotle’s Ethics. He has served at the Northeastern Political Science Association, as section coordinator for Continental Political Thought and Modern Political Thought, and on the General Council. In 2016–2017, he was a visiting researcher at the Institute for Philosophical Research of UNAM, where he has prepared a translation and analytic essay on Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Theater of Political Virtues.