As political philosophers of antiquity and of the Middle Ages remind us, the public life of the polis — politics — is necessarily a life in which conflict is ever-present. It may feel small comfort, but it may be enough to give way to despair or cynicism when we realize that it has ever been so, even in a democracy.

It’s clear that a civilization consumed by conflict cannot protect itself from enemies without or within. It must organize itself so that it has a sense of a common life and purpose, and so respond coherently and intelligently to the challenges life always brings. (READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin: Israel 50 Years On: Blessings and Challenges)

The practical question then becomes, how do we organize?

Aristotle answers that question as a phenomenologist, listing the different kinds of governments that states have formed, such as democracies, aristocracies, oligarchies, and the like, each with typical strengths and weaknesses. 

But before him, Socrates had not been so removed. He made passionate arguments about how best to organize life, passionate enough to give up his own life for the cause.

The powers that be in his age were most influenced by the Sophists. The Sophists recognized the power of language, so distinctive of our humanity, and taught that given the right rhetoric, a person could attain power and organize life as he thought best.

Socrates’ trenchant criticism came not from propagandizing against the Sophists, but by asking them questions that eventually exposed the contradictions latent in their thought. That is, they were in the end incoherent, unorganized in themselves. They were thus unable to effectively organize the life of the polis, no matter how much power they might get, because they themselves were unorganized and at odds with themselves. (READ MORE: We Ought to Know Better Than This!)

People do not like being exposed as incoherent, especially when they have gained power by advertising themselves as so coherent that they deserved to be listened to and obeyed.

Socrates’ death at the hands of democratic demagogues poisoned the name of democracy. Plato romanticized about mythical philosopher kings, and Aristotle, as we saw, retreated into phenomenology, seeing nothing essentially better about democracy than any other system. It had to wait till the seventeenth century, when people like Grotius, Selden, Harrington, and then Locke and Montesquieu made their arguments for democracy. All of these influenced the Framers of the American Constitution, as is evidenced at length in the Federalist.

Yet in the end, a set of laws is only an abstract thing. Just as democracy in Socrates’ day could be so perverse as to execute its reasoned critic, so too do we have copious evidence that without the devotion of the people to the core truths of democracy, the democratic state can founder and fail. It still comes down to what Socrates maintained: the truth must be sovereign for any organization to work, and it is to the truth that we owe our devotion.

Practical man that he was, Ben Franklin understood this. A delegate to the Constitutional Convention, James McHenry, recorded this in his diary entry of the day the convention’s work was completed:

A lady asked Dr. Franklin: Well, Doctor, what have we got a republic or a monarchy — A republic replied the Doctor, if you can keep it.

About a decade later, John Adams, then president, wrote to a group of Revolutionary War officers about the same issue but at greater length. The last sentence of this quotation is familiar, but here I bring it in its larger context, which I think reveals the full power of Adam’s warning.

Should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity, while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world; because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The usually unquoted first sentence in this text seems excruciatingly relevant to our times. Examples abound. First to mind might be a political figure carefully presented as the sincere man of the people, just a plain old Joe, everyone’s warm and fuzzy grandfather figure, all through the skill of media experts “displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity.” 

Some saw sooner, others are seeing it only now, how this is but a cover for a riot of “rapine and insolence,” recorded in part on the infamous laptop that esteemed government officials, trading on the good faith of the American people in their elected officers, tried to duplicitously label as Russian disinformation.

I offer only a salient example of what Adams was warning of. Sadly, as is evident in the angry dysfunction of America under the Biden, it is only one of too many examples. 

What is all too rare is political wisdom. We must treasure it and learn from it.

An example from today. Driving to the store for groceries, I was listening to Victor Davis Hansen tell of a grandmother who was foolish enough to walk into the Capitol on January 6 and linger there for twenty minutes. She destroyed nothing; she did no violence; she incited no one. Yet she was held without bail in jail for weeks and then was confined to her home for a year and half — all before trial. 

No reasonable person could describe this grandmother as a threat to anyone. Yet she was ground down by the full force of the federal government to a confession reminiscent of the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, and her public contrition was followed by the judge sentencing her to another year and half of imprisonment, portraying her as having irrevocably damaged American democracy and showing he wanted to make exemplary punishment of her. (READ MORE: Jan. 6: Seven Democrat Lies) 

A law was there, the judge had the power, yet the whole thing stinks. When one considers the 100 days of rioting in the summer of 2020, violence unequivocally and explicitly supported as part of a political campaign to unseat the president, violence that resulted in scores of deaths, billions of dollars of property damage, and attacks on symbols of the rule of law — when one considers that no one received the punishment of this grandma even though the many were armed, arson was committed time and again, violence was commonplace, and their intent was to change the government by force — we see what exactly what Adams warned us against.

I found some comfort later on today as a continued me re-reading of Martin Gilbert’s biography of Churchill.

Churchill was facing an existential threat to Britain and to civilization, as Britain stood all alone against Hitler just after France had fallen. He had the excuse to be draconian in his response to any misdeed, any break in discipline. 

Six firemen in England had been convicted of pocketing 11 pounds worth of whisky from a bombed out building where they had been doing their terribly dangerous and imperative work. For their misdeeds, each of the six was given five years imprisonment. At the same time, someone had stolen something of much higher value but had been given a six-month sentence. Churchill took up the matter with the cabinet officer in charge of such issues, who defended the sentence. Churchill was not satisfied and wrote: “The case of the firemen stands out as utterly disproportionate to all the others.”

Churchill had so many other things to deal with. He could have considered the sentence unimportant, perhaps even deserved, as his Home Secretary (the cabinet minister in charge of the justice system) thought.

But he realized, as the one person on whose shoulder the future of democratic government rested, that the true test of democracy is in its command on the devotion of the people. And nothing is more destructive of that devotion than the unfair use of the power of the law of the people.

America nearly destroyed its democracy over slavery. We still suffer from the hurt to our democracy by the decades-long obscenity of Jim Crow. Unfair and unequal justice was the rule, and the distrust still lingers.

The way out of that is not by applying injustice to a different group of people as revenge, the subjection of law to politics, or the destruction of the principle of justice being above political difference. The Sophists are today running rampant, in every branch of government.

We need the courage of Socrates to expose the incoherence, not by posing another ideology, but by engaging in dialogue and in humility, asking the real questions that allow us to get down to the truth — the only secure base for organizing our lives as individuals and as a nation.