February 2021.

     The second impeachment of King Joffrey the Superannuated following the 6 January 2021 assault on the Capitol led me to ponder the Athenians’ use of ostracism to take the starch out of potential tyrants and how closely impeachment was analogous to it.  The product of this reverie was this unpublished editorial.

     I wasn’t certain what to do with it.  My Beloved, with my consent, passed it to a friend whose opinion I value.  She was enthusiastic and asked to use it in her classes as an example of how pre-modernity holds relevance for the present.  I blushed.  I flogged it to The New York Times and The Washington Post.  No dice.  Events then pushed it past its sell-by date.

Here’s the unpublished editorial:

An American Ostracism.

     The nation finds itself at a disconcerting juncture in its democratic story, yet the crisis is one far from unique for democratic governments.  The forty-fifth president made an attempt, unprecedented in the American experience, to subvert the democratic process and to extend his rule through unconstitutional seizure of power.  The effort failed but left in its wake the thorny problem of how best to restrain a politician and a faction that remain a threat to democratic governance.

     The risk posed by the unscrupulous actor willing to employ any means to arrogate power for personal benefit has plagued democracy from its inception.  Millennia ago, the classical Athenians contended with it.  Peisistratus (600-527 BCE) seized power on three occasions and ruled Athens continuously from 546 to 527 BCE as a tyrant.  Tyranny, however, for the Greeks did not bear the dark connotations attached to it in the American idiom.  It was understood neutrally and simply as rule by unconstitutional means.  It was possible for an Athenian tyrant to be broadly popular and Peisistratus mostly was.  A tyrant often aspires to cement the position as a family business and therein is the problematic nature of tyranny exposed.  Hippias (d. 490 BCE) followed his father Peisistratus as tyrant.  His rule became so oppressive that the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes helped to engineer his ouster and exile in 510 BCE and then two years later introduced the reforms that earned him the sobriquet “father of democracy.”

     This democracy was narrow in its franchise (only free men; no women, no slaves) but ultimately more radically participatory than the American representative model.  It introduced a measure to forestall the ascent of a future wannabe tyrant, ostracism.  Athenian citizens convened annually and voted whether there should be an ostracism.  If yes, a second, secret balloting was held two months later.  Every citizen incised a name on a potsherd (ostracon) and, if a quorum voted, the top vote-getter had ten days to settle his affairs and leave Athens for ten years; however, his property and citizenship were protected and a return to politics was permitted once the exile ended.  The goal was to break a threatening, dangerous politician’s power and to hobble his faction.  Perhaps a dozen Athenians suffered ostracism during Athens’ classical era.

     Historical analogies are, of course, inherently limited.  Classical Athens is not twenty-first century America; nonetheless, the past should not be wholly discounted and can at least whisper in the present’s ear.  The universality of human experience should never be dismissed.  The question becomes, then, what democratic methods are available here and now to thwart a potential tyrant.  The situation in 2021 is complicated by a further disturbing reality:  A swathe of politicians in one of the nation’s two political parties has been marinating in varying measures of cynical ambition, authoritarian fantasy, delusion, and fecklessness, a toxic mixture with the potential to initiate a downward spiral into autocratic, illiberal governance.

     It is difficult to think that the Constitution’s framers, classically educated as they were, were ignorant of the Athenian example.  It, moreover, seems unlikely that they, having rebelled against what was in their perception tyrannical rule in its pejorative sense, would not have devised a provision to safeguard their fledging democratic republic from a tyrant.  They in fact did.  This mechanism was set into motion last month with the House’s bipartisan vote to impeach the forty-fifth president for fomenting the assault on the Capitol on 6 January.

     Unlike Athenian ostracism, this procedure requires three rather than two steps, and here the third step is crucial.  The former president must not just be convicted in his upcoming Senate trial but then he must also be disqualified from further federal officeholding.  This American ostracism is the only constitutional remedy for a dangerous demagogy driven by an amoral, conscienceless political opportunist suffering from more than a soupçon of sociopathy.

     Would that we now had a political counterpart of another classical Greek, Diogenes the Cynic (414/404-323 BCE), that prince of gadflies who made a career of exposing the hypocrisy and cant of the political elite.  What would Diogenes conclude should he stroll through the impeachment trial and, as was his wont, hold aloft a lamp lit in daytime in a search for an honest person?  Whatever he might make of the American brand of ostracism, the behavior on 6 January of the onetime president, now decamped to Florida, has proven true an aphorism credited to Diogenes:  “The mob is the mother of tyrants.”