Courier Journal's John David Dyche Attempts To Scare Voters Into Voting For John McCain, Succeeds Only In Leaving An Elephant Sized POOP Instead.

John David Dyche
Beware of despotism

Plato predicted that even the ideal political society would decline into it. Rome did. America's founders fought it and made preventing it the premise of their new government. The United States flirted with it during the Great Depression. Some advanced societies succumbed.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines despotism as, "A government or political system in which the ruler exercises absolute power." Impossible in modern America, right?

As this column's regular readers know, Plato's Republic explains how well-ordered states sink into despotism by stages. The first is timocracy, where ambition abounds, then greedy plutocracy, followed by pleasure-seeking democracy, and, finally, despotism, where one who won power as the people's champion becomes their oppressor.

Rome's route from republic to dictatorship provides an example. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote, "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight."

Gibbon published in 1776 as American revolutionaries were declaring independence from England. In justification they explained, "When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."

So they did, after analyzing the failures of various political systems throughout history. James Madison said no maxim was "more liable to be misapplied" than that "the interest of the majority is the political standard of right and wrong." John Adams concurred. "To give the people uncontrolled power is not the way to preserve liberty."

In a 1787 closed-door convention they produced a decidedly anti-democratic constitution. It incorporated a federal system; indirect election of senators allocated equally to each state and empowered to block executive appointments and treaties; and an electoral college comprised of wise men tasked with picking the president by non-popular vote.

Arguing for ratification in Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton observed that, "a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people." History teaches, he added, that the road to despotism is most often traveled by men who began their careers "by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants."

At about that time, France was throwing off monarchy for democracy, but after a bloody interval of mob rule got despotic Napoleon.

Global economic collapse helped produce dictators like Italy's Mussolini and Hitler, who emerged from Germany's Weimar democracy. Here, influential columnist Walter Lippman wrote that, "A mild species of dictatorship will help us over the rough spots in the road ahead." The Catholic magazine Commonweal contended that Franklin Roosevelt should have "the powers of a virtual dictatorship to reorganize the government."

Today, the U. S. is excessively democratic. We may soon see citizen "dial-groups" giving real-time instructions to demagogic representatives pandering to them via C-SPAN during round-the-clock congressional sessions.

America again confronts a dangerous economic crisis. Fear is palpable, and the public susceptible to seduction by an intelligent, charismatic leader who, assisted by sympathetic media, has mastered mass psychological manipulation.

Occasionally aspiring tyrants openly declare their intentions. More often citizens must discern them from ominously familiar features: huge and highly choreographed party rallies; evocative emblems and imagery; rhythmic chants; children singing the great one's praises; foundational relationships with unrepentant political and religious radicals; an autobiography of struggle authored before any real achievement; an "ism" invoked to preemptively deter or defensively demonize critics; an enfeebled opposition; and passionate pursuit of unchecked power over all branches of government.

It can happen here. The wisest minds and history warn us. Alarmism is not appropriate. Vigilance is.

John David Dyche is a Louisville attorney who writes a political column on alternate Tuesdays in Forum. He is completing a biography of U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell. His views are his own, not those of the law firm in which he practices. Read him on-line at www.courier-journal.com; e-mail: jddyche@yahoo.com.