CONTINUING ON WITH the events of the oligarchic reigns of terror that led to the Athenians feeling the need to be rid of the anti-democrat, Socrates.
It would have provided a powerful argument for the defense at Socrate's own trial if he had been able to demonstrate that his followers were not all antidemocratic aristocrats like Critias and Charmides, but that there were democrats among them, too. It is revealing that at the trial he was able to name only one.
Plato certainly realized the importance of this because in the Apology he had Socrates single him out and make a point of that disciple's pro-democratic record. He was a man named Chaerephon. He could not be called as a witness at the trial because he had already died.
"You know Chaerephon, I fancy," Socrates says to the judges. "He was my comrade from a youth and the comrade of your democratic party, and shared in the recent exile and came back with you."
Notice that Socrates does not say "our," or even "the," demicratic party but "your," as if clearly to dissociate himself from the dominant political view of the jurors. Note also that he does not say - as he might have, if if true - that despite the political prejudice against Socrates quite a few of his followers were of the people's party and then cite Chaerephon as one of them; evidently he was the exception. He is the only pro-democratic disciple mentioned anywhere in Plato or Xenophon. Most of the followers, as Socrates himself describes them, were "the young men who have the most leisure, the sons of the richest men."
That "the sons of the richest men" were also, with that one exception, among the biggest supporters of the violent, larcenous anti-democratic reigns of terror is certainly significant throughout the history of the opponents of democracy. Of course, that category doesn't only include "sons" but also in many cases the fathers of those sons as well. So it was in the fifth century B.C. and so it is today. I would say that even among supporters of some kind of democracy, notably in the world today, the highly inadequate form of liberal democracy which is proving to be most vulnerable to undermining through the very "liberties" that are the basis of such liberal democracy, some of the most enabling of that undermining are the holders of great wealth, parents and children. I think that's especially true among those who practice the legal profession and even more so those who are owners of and major figures in the media. I think even those of more modest backgrounds have thoroughly acclimated to the facts of that reality in how far they are willing to go to accommodate the enemies of equality and democracy, the Republican-fascist party, before that the Republican party when it was merely oligarchic and today when it is most accurately seen as being in the hands of neo-Nazis and neo-fascists. As I have mentioned here before, it was in the most elite of private universities that the basis of Trumpian fascism, as charted by the Heritage Foundation, the unitary executive theory of the American presidency was framed by the elite faculties of their law schools. The same can be said of that other major wall in the foundation of Trumpian fascism, the absolute interpretation of the First Amendment to permit the media to lie with impunity.
Let's finally admit that media carried lies are the absolute foundation of Trumpian fascism and, before then, the electoral success of the less intellectually pretentious 20th century manifestation of the Athenian anti-democratic clubs. MORE LIES IN THE MEDIA IS WHAT ELON MUSK'S AND THE OTHER RICH SONS' MONEY BOUGHT. Lies carried by the freest of free presses. The entire basis of the finance reform laws that the goddamned Supreme Court overturned after those passed and were made law in the wake of the crimes of Nixon AND HIS CAMPAIGN committed, THE VERY SUBSTANCE OF THE ELECTORAL CORRUPTION THAT WAS WHAT ALL OF THAT DIRTY MONEY WAS ABOUT was the ability to tell lies in the media so as to gull a susceptible margin of voters into voting for Republicans when the truth would have almost certainly have led to them choosing to vote against them.
The biggest reason that that corruption succeeds is that lying is so much a part of our politics, especially what is broadcast in the media, especially campaign ads bought with that millionaire and billionaire and duped-sucker middle-class and poor Peoples money. It is lying told to produce bad government, a way to sandbag government for the benefit of the many to buy government for the benefit of the rich.
When you hear someone tout "free press" or "free speech" in this context, what they mean is allowing lies instead of the truth to determine the government of the United States. No doubt the promotion of lies played a big part in the success of the anti-democratic putsches in ancient Athens, no doubt money played a big part in that.
Democracy, whether in its legitimate form in egalitarian democracy or its riskier and far less legitimate form as liberal democracy, is as OR EVEN MORE VULNERABLE to a media which is permitted to carry lies as it is any enemy foreign or domestic, in fact, they are the ones most enabled by that line of Supreme Court cases going from Sullivan to Buckley v Valeo to Citizens United. The "civil libertarians" have handed the most potent weapons against democracy directly to the ones who have the most to gain from the destruction of democracy and it's the same group mentioned above, "the sons of the richest men." Well, lots of them are daughters, too, these days.
To continue holding that that stand of "free speech-press" absolutism as some kind of virtue instead of what has brought us to where we are now is the major feature of the insanity of our culture, left, moderate, not-opposed-to-democracy right. THE ONLY PART OF OUR BODY POLITIC FOR WHICH IT IS NOT INSANE ARE THE OPPONENTS OF DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNMENT FOR THE PEOPLE BUT FOR THE RICHEST AMONG US. It's no wonder that the media, journalists as well as pseudo-journalists refuse to see that because it is in their direct financial and professional interest to not admit that or to even discuss it. Well, the Congress did after the revelations of the crimes of the Nixon regime and Spiro Agnew, it was the black-robed legal priests of the Court, liberal as well as crypto-fascists who just couldn't see the problem with empowering lying with permitting its financing by the crooks who paid for it in the Nixon campaign. The Court is and has been the most corrupt branch of the government. But they're innocents as compared to the journalists, the owners of the media and their civil-liberties lawyers.
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