To understand how he events of 411 and 403 must have changed popular attitudes toward Socrates, one need only recall how the democracy was twice restored. As in so many revolutions, like the fall of the czar and the kaiser in World War I, and the collapse of the Greek junta and the Argentine military dictatorship of the 1980s, the political overturn followed military disaster. For Athens in 411 it was the defeat at Syracuse; in 404, it was Athens' loss of its fleet - through treachery or unbelievable incompetence - at Aigospotomi and its surrender to Sparta.
I don't know if the fact that in the United States the fall of Republicans is solely due to their economic policies of maximum enrichment of the already filthy rich, that money coming from the lower economic classes and their consequent crashing of the economy marks us as better or worse than the ancient Greeks. I do know that, once Democrats have righted the economy once again, the media, mostly the mass media but also much of the boutique media and the millionaire-billionaire propaganda outfits, make sure that everyone forgets who tanked the economy and caused so much pain to everyone. That has been a pattern since the 1920s though the Great Depression that Republicans caused was severe enough that its lessons really took and kept Republicans from power for an unprecedentedly long period. It's clear from the media, from the most august, the great gray whore of the New York Times and its level down to FOX Lies and lower, sandbagged the most economically competent president of our lifetimes, and I mean those in their 80s and maybe their 90s as well as everyone younger, in favor of the stupidest, most recklessly stupid and irresponsible, convicted felon and sex criminal, and the consequences of that could well bring on another Great Depression. No doubt the mass media, freed by the Supreme Court to lie with impunity will try to repeat recent history as soon as a Democrat pulls their money out of the fire, again.
Though, as Bush II shows, the incompetent, economy crashing Republicans are fully capable of waging terrible, entirely unjustifiable wars that cost hundreds of thousands, perhaps ultimately millions of lives, even as they crash the economy. That our media and a majority of American voters either don't care about or support those wars - often on media fed ignorance and lies - is an indictment of our national character. As the major stain on the Biden presidency of allowing and supporting Israeli genocide against the Palestinians shows, that that character flaw and the media's role in promoting and maintaining it, has consequences that extend beyond the criminal party, the Republicans.
In the wake of these defeats, there ensued not a struggle between rich oligarchs and poor democrats but a three-cornered class struggle. Those led by Critias represented aristocrats who had been organized in clandestine conspiracies waiting for an opportunity to overturn the democracy. A second faction spoke for the middle class, the third, for the poor, who provided the labor force and owed their achievement of political equality to the role they played as sailors and light infantry - the marines - in the navy on which the imperial power and trade primacy of Athens rested.
In 411 and in 404 the democracy was overthrown by a coalition of he aristocrats and the middle class against the poor, whom they disfranchised. But that coalition twice broke down when the aristocrats tried to disarm and disfranchise the middle class as well as the poor, and to establish a dictatorship rather than an oligarchical or "republican" government based on a franchise limited to property owners. In 411 and 404, the conduct of the aristocratic dictators proved cruel, rapacious, and bloody. Never in the history of Athens were basic rights and property as insecure as in those two interludes. Both times the middle class in its own defense had to form an alliance with the poor and restore democracy.
In the context of the United States "the poor" has both an economic BUT ALSO AN OVERRIDING RACIAL COMPONENT. It has been the major tactic of the American aristocratic-oligarchic faction to leverage the racism of poor and middle-class whites to make sure that a united underclass doesn't overrule their rule. And enough poor whites and middle class People are perennial suckers for that and have been going back to before the Constitution was written and adopted. Those of us who theorize about "democracy" don't take into account the universality of character flaws, prejudice, hatred, greed, etc. having to be reckoned with when the government is by the choice of The People in whole, and the fact that it is the principle of EQUALITY not "liberty" is the remedy for that congenital disease that destroys democracy. The libertarian principle leads to such atrocities as the idea that there is a "right to lie," a "right to promote prejudice and hate" and as we have seen in the late 20th and 21st centuries, such "rights" find their biggest, fattest champions in exactly those who hate democracy the most. I have never heard a "free speech-press" champion who is really much bothered by the consequences of their position, no matter how many members of targeted groups are oppressed or even murdered.*
I think if it became clear to poor and middle class voters that they've been weakened by their prejudices, that it was in their interest to give it up, some, not all of that effect could be blunted. I think that if Lyndon Johnson had pulled off the Great Society instead of being sidetracked by the Vietnam War that could have been the result, though it's certain that the lying post-Sullivan media would have fought against that, tooth an nail.
That tactic of harnessing hate is not confined only to race but has worked for the oligarchs with a number of groups subject to destructive prejudice, LGBTQ+ People have been the focus of the same kind of beneficial hate campaigns, collectively or, as now, focusing on one of our coalition. While I. F. Stone doesn't bring that up in the context of Athens, perhaps texts focusing on that haven't survived in explicit enough form, it was almost certainly part of the politics of that non-egalitarian democracy in what was effectively an ethno-state. Though we do know that something similar with was in effect in that an accusation made that a citizen, a member of the enfranchised, native Athenian male population had taken the passive ("female") role in anal sex could lead to their disenfranchisement. One suspects that accusation was used as a tactic of control by the enemies of Athenian democracy, such as it was.
The restored democracy in 403 acquitted itself with magnanimity. Except for a few aristocratic leaders who lost their lives, the contending classes and factions were reconciled on the basis of a sweeping amnesty that won the admiration of antiquity. Aristotle, though he himself favored middle-class rule based on a limited franchise, paid his tribute to the restored democracy. "The Athenians," he wrote, about a half century after the overthrow of the Thirty, "appear both in private and public to have behaved toward the past disasters in the most completely honorable and statesmanlike manner of any people in history." In the cities the losers were often massacred and aristocratic landowners lost their estates to the landless. But the Athenian democrats, Aristotle notes with evident wonder, did not "even make a redistribution of the land."
But Socrates, during those fateful conflicts and their human resolution, did not take his stand with the aristocrats, or his own middle class, or the poor. The most talkative man in Athens fell silent when his voice was most needed. One possible reason is simply, that he did not care enough. He seemed wholly to lack compassion. Nietzsche, who began as a classical scholar, once described the logic of Socrates as "icy." Gregory Vlastos, one of the foremost Platonists of our time, once wrote that while Jesus wept for Jerusalem, Socrates never shed a tear for
Athens.
There are several pages after this that I'm tempted to go through, I.F. Stone going to the Euthyphro dialogue as a means of exploring Socrates' indifference to the suffering of others, especially those who the secular saint didn't figure were on the same social level he or his associates were on. I'm very tempted to go through it because back during the new atheism fad of the 00's I got into an argument over that particular piece with one of the second-tier celebrities of its online manifestation. But I'm not really interested in Socrates' personality, I'm far more interested in what those who participated in political life and the law in Athens did, how their customs and courtesies to the aristocratic, the wealthy, those of what they considered good families and what those practices enabled. I'd say those encouraged the two reigns of terror, the clearly inadequate "noble" response to both the first and second ones that led to the last of the three "earthquakes" that Stone says led the Athenians to finally have had enough of Socrates and decided they needed to be rid of him and his tail-chasing pursuit of "universals." The lauded philosophical tradition of Socrates was, in effect, a democracy eating moral nihilism. I think the major weakness in the Socratic tradition is that in the end we can't base our choices in absolute logical certainty but have to take responsibility by coming to a conclusion on the evidence available informed by morality. And morality often requiring self-sacrifice, isn't a guarantee of being as gratifying to the one taking responsibility. The elevation of pure logic, as if there is such a thing, over moral responsibility is intellectually as well as morally dishonest.
* The indifference to suffering that I. F. Stone justifiably charges that academic-secular idea of a saint, Socrates with, is certainly as present in the elite members of the legal profession, the "justices" and many of he judges and certainly is rampant among lawyers. It is why, for example, a Sandra Day O'Connor could OK the execution of someone who may have been innocent based on the schedule that paperwork was required to be filed. That kind of indifference to justice by "justices" is hardly unknown in many other cases, as well. I suspect their professional training promotes that indifference though, since lawyering is mostly motivated by self-enrichment of those who take it up, it may just be a profession that self-selectively attracts such amoral People. It is a huge mistake of the U.S. Constitution that it has allowed the Supreme Court to override the elected legislative and executive branches to the unique extent that ours does, not only through the inadequate Constitution but through its usurped Marbury powers. But, then, it was lawyers who wrote the thing and lawyers who were on the Court when it made that power grab.
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