The Greek experiment with democracy reached a memorable turning point in 427 BC. Athens was at war and tensions were high. The decisions the Athenian people faced were not mundane matters of bureaucracy, but life and death. Debates in the assembly were contentious, and powerful orators stirred up public anxiety. That year one of their long-standing allies—a city-state called Mytilene—defected and joined Athens’s enemy Sparta. The Athenians quashed the revolt, but they feared that if they didn’t punish the Mytilenians, other allies might abandon them, too. So the Athenian Assembly voted to kill all the city’s men and enslave its women and children to prove a point. The next day, citizens got cold feet and called for another meeting to reconsider the hasty decision.
One of the most vocal speakers in the debate was Cleon. He will sound familiar to readers. A prominent Athenian, Cleon inherited money from his father and leveraged it to launch a career in politics. Historians have characterized him as a populist, one of the era’s “new politicians.” Cleon was a crass and blunt public speaker, an immoral man who frequently sued his opponents, an armchair critic of those in power, and an orator who preyed upon the emotions of the people to whip up public support for his opinions. Although some accounts characterize him as charming, his speaking style was said to be angry and repugnant. Aristotle later described Cleon as: “[T]he man who, with his attacks, corrupted the Athenians more than anyone else. Although other speakers behaved decently, Cleon was the first to shout during a speech in the Assembly, [and] use abusive language while addressing the people….”
Cleon argued for slaughtering the Mytilenian rebels. He disparaged the “foolish” public intellectuals opposed to the decision and urged Athenians to ignore them. The educated politicians couldn’t be trusted; he suggested they might have been “bribed” to mislead the public. Government was best left to plain-speaking “ordinary men,” like himself. Cleon argued that no one had ever hurt their empire as much as Mytilenians, whose defection was an “attempt to ruin us.” He warned that if they didn’t make an example of the rebels, Athens would waste more money in more foreign wars, fighting people who defied them. Cleon closed by telling the assembly not to be “traitors to yourselves,” to show no “mercy” or “pity,” to listen to their original gut instincts, and to “punish them as they deserve.”
A man named Diodotus responded. He argued that ill-tempered decisions were reckless. Deliberation was necessary before taking action. Anyone who argued otherwise was either “senseless” or was trying to scare the people with false statements, such as Cleon’s insinuation that the other side in the debate had been bribed. “The good citizen ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents but by beating them fairly in argument,” Diodotus shot back. He said mass slaughter would be contrary to Athens’s long-term interests and that being lenient would instead allow Athens to win over many Mytilenians whom they still needed as supporters.
The assembly took it to a vote: Kill and enslave the Mytilenians, or show mercy by holding only the rebel leaders accountable? There was no consensus. With a show of hands, Athenians were almost evenly split. According to historical accounts, when the counting was completed, Diodotus secured just enough supporters to carry the day. With that, a horrific atrocity was prevented.
The story doesn’t have a happy ending. The split vote demonstrated how persuasive Cleon’s rhetoric had been, flashing the dark underbelly of majority rule. It was a preview of Athens’s descent. Within a decade, Athenians faced a similar decision. This time, they chose to throw mercy to the wind and annihilated the island people of Melos. Within three decades, a mob assembly voted to put to death Socrates, the so-called “wisest man” to have ever lived. The latter was an exclamation point on the death of Athenian democracy, which never recovered its former glory and eventually slipped into tyranny.
Like Athens, we face a turning point. The tone of our national conversation has taken a nosedive. We’ve grown impatient with our bureaucracies, with our Congress, and with one another. We’ve retreated into ideological corners. At the same time, the decisions we face are not routine; they are of the highest consequence, from an exploding federal debt to protracted foreign conflicts. Resolving them requires us to come together to set the nation’s priorities through conversation and compromise. Yet we are more divided than ever. The foundations of our democracy, which were meant to set boundaries on majority rule, are being tested.
Like Athens, we also have a Cleon in our midst, a foul-mouthed populist politician who uses rhetoric as a loaded gun. I’m not the first to see the similarities. Donald Trump’s words are powerful, and we are suffering three primary consequences from them. First, his words are hardening the national discourse, making it more difficult to sustain civility. Second, they are undermining our perceptions of the truth, making it challenging to find common ground. And third, they are fanning the flames of the mob mentality our Founders tried to prevent, making reasonable people once again consider—and lament—democracy’s greatest weakness.
Nasty Man
The words of America’s chief executives are captured after every administration, bound into volumes known as Public Papers of the Presidents. The compilations become the official record of each leader’s writings and speeches, published after they leave office. When I walk into the West Wing of the White House, the Papers are one of the first sights that catch my eye, displayed inside an ornate bookcase directly inside the official entrance. The volumes contain the words that shaped our nation and shook the world, reverberating through history.
Flipping through the pages, readers might encounter President Lincoln’s stirring remarks, which steered the United States toward reconciliation after a bitter Civil War. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” They might find Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory… We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”
What will the future volumes of President Trump’s Public Papers tell us about him and this moment in our political life? Will they inspire us and record a new birth of unity in our country? Or will we read them years from now as if they were the Mytilenian Debate, words that marked a turning point toward greater division?
We don’t know yet how his Public Papers will end, but we certainly know how they will begin. They will open with his inaugural address, which was characteristic of President Trump’s coarse style. That day he painted a bleak view of the country, of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash but that leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” He said our money had been “ripped” from our homes and “redistributed” around the world, while countries were ravaging us by “stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”