partly by persuasion, partly by force, we shall contrive to overreach with impunity - Part 2

The subversive strategy of the aristocratic clubs in normal times is frankly set forth by Adeimantus in the second book of the Republic.  Adeimantus is usually identified as the brother of Plato.  "With a view to lying hid, " Adeimantus explains to Socrates, "we will organize societies [synomosiai] and political clubs [hetaireias] and there are teachers of cajolery who impart the arts of the popular assembly and the court-room.  So that, partly by persuasion, partly by force, we shall contrive to overreach with impunity."

Plato in the Laws provides the death penalty for anyone who would organize conspiracies or clubs to subvert his own ideal city.  But Athens was more tolerant.  The right of association was safeguarded by an Athenian law that went back to the days of Solon.  No legal action was ever taken against these aristocratic "clubs," although, as Gomme's monumental commentary on Thucydides points out, "only enemies of democracy need secret organizations."  

Here I will break in to point out that our equivalents of these aristocratic anti-democratic, terrorist organizing clubs, the terrorist organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan, white supremacist organizations, etc. similarly are protected by our equivalent to the Code of Solon, the Constitution* and, especially, the Bill of Rights and the conventions that have arisen and been promoted primarily by our elites.  That they have acted mostly against the enslaved and formerly enslaved is certainly a part of why they were not only tolerated under the Constitution and Bill of Right, the very Bill of Rights contains things put there to not only protect their assembly but to arm their like under the Second Amendment.   No such protection of rights was ever equally allowed to the enslaved under the U.S. Constitution.   Not even white abolitionists ever really had the equal protection of the law.

You will notice what I pointed out here the other day, that democracies are, by convention,  under some daffy notion of liberty, supposed to make themselves vulnerable to attacks and dangers that anti-democratic governments, criminal rackets of by and for a criminal syndicate who want to oppress, rob and terrorize and kill those outside of it won't feel they are morally obligated to risk.  Which is one of the stupider things about the theory and practice of much democracy.  The protection of actual equality and genuine democracy is a right to which all of the People who live under those have a right to.   Certainly more of a right to that than the right of those who would destroy equality and genuine democracy "partly by persuasion and party by force" to pursue their goals.  There is no right to impose illegitimate rule over anyone or to do things to impose that rule.  This is something our idiotic liberal democratic ideology can't navigate. Ironically, enough, even the anti-equality, anti-democrats among us benefit from the very thing they seek to destroy and we stupidly protect the means they use to destroy it for everyone else.  

The first mention of synomosiai in Thucydides is in the famous affair of the mutilation of the Hermae [statures of Hermes] just as an Athenian armada prepared to set out against Syracuse.  Statues of Hermes, the patron divinity of (among other things) travel, stood in front of Athenian homes.  In one night they were all mutilated.  An oligarchic conspiracy (synomosia) was suspected behind this ill-omened affront against the god, calculated to bring bad luck on the expedition.

After the disaster at Syracuse, an aristocratic conspiracy was indeed set afoot.  Thucydides tells us that a treasonable general Peisander began by reversing Athenian policy in the subject cities, abolishing the democracies Athens had fostered and replacing them with oligarchies.  These revolutions in the subject cities soon provided troops of oligarchic sympathy for the overthrow of democracy in Athens itself in 411.

Thucydides relates that when they reached Athens the conspirators found that much of their "business had already been accomplished" by the aristocratic secret clubs.  "Some of the younger men" in these clubs had organized squads of assassins to deprive the people of its leaders and to create an atmosphere of terror.  They "secretly put to death a certain Androcles," the historian tells us, because he was :the most prominent leader of the popular party.  Others opposed to their plans they secretly made away with in the same manner.  "Terror spread. People no longer "spoke against them, through fear and because it was seen that the conspiracy was widespread; and if anyone did oppose" them, Thucydides says, "at once in some convenient way he was a dead man."  These were the prototypes of the death squads the military used in Argentina, El Salvador, and Chile in our own time.

Domestic security broke down.  "No search was made," the historian continues, for those who did the deed, nor if they were suspected was any legal prosecution held."  On the contrary, Thucydides observes,  "The populace [the demos] kept quiet and were in such consternation that he who did not suffer any violence, even though he never said a word, counted that a gain."  The terror had a multiplyer effect. "Imagining the conspiracy to be much more widespread than it actually was," the democrats were "cowed in mind."

"All the members of the popular party," Thucydides explains, "approached each other with suspicion."  This was not mere paranoia.  There were unpredictable treacheries, as some switched sides from cowardice or opportunism.  "There were among them men whom one would never have expected to change over and favour an oligarchy."

It was these turncoats, the ancient historian relates, "who caused the greatest distrust among the masses and rendered the most valuable service toward the few in securing their safety by confirming in the populace this distrust of their own people toward each other." This was not ancient history to the Athenians when they put Socrates on trial.

Though it's certainly worth reading them, I am going to skip over the next three paragraphs about how history rapidly repeated itself under the terror regime of the Thirty in 404 and Socrates weak defense of himself at his trial, notably made after he had been convicted and sentenced.  Socrates then claiming he wasn't involved, having chosen to remain aloof from the oppressive actions of his students and their friends and cousins to preserve his integrity.  Such integrity as he maintained hardly seems to recommend the character of the one who polishes it up for show.  I am sure the lawyers up to including the Attorney General are proud of their maintenance  of every scrupulosity put on paper in the rules of conduct at the so-called department of justice in the past four years, too.  I am sure that most of the lawyers who obstructed justice on both sides don't have much to worry about in being held to account.  It's the rare occasion when the legal profession, up to and including judges and, especially, "justices" are required to take responsibility for the consequences of what they do and what they choose out of professional habit, don't do.  I'll amend this if the current U.S. Attorney for DC, Ed Martin is disbarred for his clear violations AND IF THAT DISBARMENT HAS ANY EFFECT IN REMOVING HIM.   I have a feeling that lots of our aristocrats are going to be covering their asses as the cowardly free-press have in Trump II.  Especially the DC press whores.  

I'll leave that point aside because I want to raise a different one in regard to these aristocratic clubs which were certainly widely known among the conspirators and certainly had to have been the extent to which they worked together in ancient Athens to thwart the non-egalitarian, old-family, slave supported, Athenian male rule on what was clearly a too broad for some oligarchic system which was the lauded and famous Athenian democracy.  Certainly the antics of Socrates and his "Socratified" boys club wouldn't have been tolerated if they hadn't been an eccentric and glib member of the middle-class and a coterie of aristocratic boys.  An egalitarian conspiracy of lower class men or slaves certainly wouldn't have been allowed the liberties granted to Socrates and his fellow anti-democrats for as long as they festered in Athens.  We certainly have examples of such lower-order subversive groups against white supremacy and concentrated wealth which were not tolerated under the First Amendment right to "peaceably assemble" even as those who assemble violently have flourished as long as they not only supported but imposed inequality and thwarted democracy.  Which is one of the greatest differences between egalitarian democracy and the liberal democracy which is not and never intended to be equal.

The anti-democratic, even anti-liberal democracy movements among the aristocracy and, especially, the legal whores in the Ivy League level law schools and their students who became judges and then "justices" has been an ongoing effort for more than half a century, with the financial support of millionaires and billionaires and with the blessing of our civic stand-in for a priest-class, the elite universities.  It is one of the many ironies of American history that as anything like a subversive movement in the law that supported socialism or anything that would endanger the wealth of the super-rich has been effectively marginalized, anything like efforts in the law to promote equality have been effectively swept aside by Supreme Court fiat, the most effective conspiracy against egalitarian democracy - like most of the efforts to wrest equality and real democracy from the Constitutional order - have succeeded beyond the wildest fever dreams of Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist and all of those corrupt law school profs who have promoted the unitary executive way to oligarchy.

It is a conspiracy which relied on the "liberal justices" being complete chumps going back sixty one years and, in among the clearest parallels of all to ancient Athens, with the support of the longest standing enemy of the United States, a neo-Stalinist Russian dictator - one conveniently shed of those pretenses of "socialism" as were clearly the only real problem the American establishment ever had with the original Stalin, not the every oppression of Russians or, now, even his attack on Ukraine.  That that irony is embodied in what was the most anti-Soviet Republican Party who has given control of the United States to Putin's puppet, the corrupt, criminal idiot, Donald Trump shows how corrupt not only our law but the media, the free-press that enabled and, in fact, propelled this whole thing is even as compared to the anti-egalitarian and so doomed to repeat its failures, Athens.  

I am certain that I. F. Stone of even 1988 would disagree with me on the democracy destructive character of the modern interpretation of the First Amendment, though this recapitulation of the destruction of a type of democracy was well under way the year the white collar crime rich Reagan administration would be succeeded by the equally criminal Bush I years.  The United States is bigger and more diverse than ancient Athens was, the parallels are in a larger time frame and on a larger scale. But I think the weaknesses inherent to an anti-egalitarian democracy are exactly the same.  And the weakness to fall for lies and propaganda and persuasion to choose what is worse for us are exactly the same and the same thing which has led us, twice, into the biggest phony and criminal idiot to have ever held power here, Trump.  Like the Athenians in the wake of the Four Hundred reign of terror, we have proven incapable of coming to an effective evaluation of what led us into Trump I and taking action to prevent it's even worse repeat in Trump II.  Though in our case the Supreme Court nullified the effective means that the post-Civil War Congress put into the Constitution to prevent exactly this, and it wasn't only the Republican-fascists on the Court who did that.  That's exactly what I mean when I say our system is, by choice and custom and habit incapable of learning from even the most terrible experience.  Or, rather, our aristocratic elites don't want to make such learning as had once taken hold to prevent disaster now.  And that stupidity is embedded as deep in the culture of the law as it is practiced by our highest court.  

No doubt Stone would have held that we should risk an oligarchic tyranny, as was already taking hold, so that the slogans of the "civil libertarians" wouldn't be contradicted.  I do have to wonder if he'd think that was worth it in 2026.   I have to wonder how many of us will still think it when things get far worse than they are right now.  

* Looking at the Code of Solon to compare it to our Constitution might be an interesting exercise but I don't have the time to do that right now.  As would comparing both to The Law of Moses.