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Notes -
I think there are two things that can fill in the missing pieces of this puzzle:
Even one man marooned on an island has a conscience. He knows what he'd be ashamed for his father to see him do, if his father was there -- and that inner voice doesn't go away when his father dies. So in order to indulge his unclean appetites, he has to tell himself things like, "It's all good", and "Who's to say what's clean and unclean", and "Dad was a prick anyway" (which is why the woke smear their ancestors and tear down their statues). For that reason, I believe the behavior depends crucially on the ideology.
Remember that not all drones are poor. Also, Plato's view is not as simple as drones causing demokratia.
In an earlier part of the narrative, not recounted in my essay, Plato says that it is brazen oligarchy that first begins to make the drones more numerous: ruthless exploitation by the rich of the poor and of each other, turning the some of the losers in the economic free-for-all into poor, ruined wretches (my words, but his basic picture of things). From there, the causation between drones and demockratia is a mutually recursive chicken-and-egg cycle. More drones --> more democratic men --> more drones --> more democratic men... But *basically if Plato had to pick a single root cause, I think he would pick the ideology rather than a certain group of people. He tends to focus on the ideal as ultimate.
I'm not sure what "new" means here. I think Plato implicitly posits such an ideology.
I submit that living off of the work of others in your peer group violates universal, intuitively self-evident natural law. Every clan and tribe has disdain for people who don't pull their weight. Thus, saying it's OK to be a moocher requires turning down the volume on morality itself. It doesn't require that logically, but I believe it requires it psychologically. Moral nihilism is a very old philosophy, and I think its chief motivations make up a very short list: theft (by deception or by force, including government force), and sexual libertineness.
So as far as the ideology and the practice, I don't think you can have one without the other. Men find it easier to rationalize than to brazenly violate their conscience. A rationalization is better than sex. Have you ever gone more than one week without one good juicy rationalization? [Jeff Goldblum as Michael Gold in The Big Chill]
I don't know about that. They probably lean in that direction as a group far more than the working and middle classes when asked -- but they are not as zealous and vocal and organized in advocating it, because they are not zealous or vocal or organized on the whole. Crawling drones play different positions on the team than flying drones -- as different as quarterback and an offensive lineman.
Maybe I wasnt clear enough about this, but what I mean is: Yes, people need a justification for what theyre doing. But there is a lot of freedom in how that justification generalises. You can justify taking a rich guys money by arguing he got it illegitimately. This isnt that different politically, because you can make these allegations against whoever you want, but its not an explicit endorsement of redistribution. Its this explicit endorsement that I think is limited to elites (even actual leftist politicians often prefer to argue without it, e.g.), and would so far have considered a modern phenomenon.
Basically, I dont see why drones would lead to the development of democratic-man-ideology specifically, instead of some variation on "We wuz".
This is not something Plato touches on directly, but I have an idea about it. The guiding principle, if you can call it that, is a collective decision by the drones on the central question in founding any fundamentalist/extremist movement: As a function of the material and cultural circumstances I find myself in, what group can I demonize, scapegoat, and rally a coalition to attack and plunder? The details of the target group, the moral rationalization, and the attack strategy arise from culture and circumstance -- but when they find the answer it then plays out in (1) censoring the target group and their ideas, (2) scapegoating them for all the world's ills, (3) disarming them, (4) seizing their property in the name of justice, and often finally (5) murder. The target group is chosen opportunistically, not according to any eternal principle. Depending on circumstances, it could be heretics, Jews, the aristocracy, the Tutsis, the vaguely defined and ever-morphing "bourgeoisie", or straight white males. The tyranny Plato observed must have been of the left-wing variety, like that of Stalin and Mao -- but the dragon can wear the mask of the left, the right, religious fundamentalism, racial supremacy, or whatever.
Plato's "crawling drones" are thugs and paupers, that tend to stoke leftist tyranny, but leftist tyranny is just one of many possible answers to the question of who can I blame for my problems and attack and plunder with righteous indignation?
Also, that's pretty much a summary of the top-level post I am planning for next week.
Thats what I would have thought as well - but as per your post, Plato does describe something much more similar to modern ideology. You dont need moral relativism to fuck up the heretics. I guess Im waiting for next week.
Maybe this is the line that is causing the problem (from the OP):
Plato's view here is narrow -- focusing on the sorts of tyranny he (or his teacher, Socrates) witnessed -- which were evidently of a leftist variety. The most natural constituents of that kind of tyranny are the non-working poor. But in a broader view, which Plato does not discuss, the natural constituents of the tyrant might be a different group.
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