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Notes -
Note:
This post is an installment of a book I am writing, under the working title They See not, which I am serializing as a series of posts on The Motte. The book is planned to be about the nature and common characteristics of populist tyrannical movements, especially focusing on the woke ideology, and how to combat them. The first two chapters were:
The third chapter is titled Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness.
Preface to Chapter 3
The radical progressive movement in the West today, aka wokeness, bears a striking resemblance to the populist tyrannical regime described by Plato in The Republic. Given that, one would expect wokeness to have more recent historical counterparts as well, and I will argue that it does. This chapter will examine parallels between today's woke movement and the early emergence of three major tyrannical regimes of the 20th century: Soviet communism, Chinese communism, and Nazism.
It is not surprising that wokeness looks and feels a good deal like communism -- since it is a common view that wokeness inhabits the far left, and communism is often thought of as the really far left. However, even in light of that, I will attempt to show that the historical parallels between wokeness on the one hand, and the early rise of Chinese and Soviet Communism on the other, run deeper than one might expect. It is perhaps even more surprising, as I will also argue, that many of these parallels also extend to the rise of Nazism -- which is commonly viewed as the opposite of communism, and as an ideology of the "far right". This following chapters will examine historical parallels in the emergence of all four of these ideologies (Soviet communism, Chinese communism, Nazism, and wokeness) along three lines: victim identity politics, authoritarianism, and extremism, defined as follows:
Victim Identity Politics and Wokeness
(c) Feb 6, 2025, By J. Nelson Rushton
Diver's weights? Actually here, divers is an archaic spelling of diverse, meaning various and sundry. Of course different things have different weights and measures, but I think what is supposed to count as an abomination is different weights or measures for the same thing.
This phenomenon of diverse weights and diverse measures was brought home to me when -- somewhat to my chagrin, but also as the source of a few valuable life lessons -- I wound up rooming with a pot dealer for a few months when I was in graduate school. To be fair to him, my classified ad didn't specify "no drug dealers please" -- but, to be fair to me, he might have presumed on general principles that could be on my list of concerns, and given me a heads-up to see if it was a deal breaker. In any case, he didn't disclose his profession, and I didn't disclose a preference about that profession, and he moved in.
So one day my drug-dealing roomie has a client over and I am watching the deal happen in the living room. The dealer weighs out however many grams or ounces of pot was asked for, and then the customer pulls out his own scale, weighs the same lot again, and completes the transaction. Why the second weighing? The dealer isn't likely to have a broken scale; he buys and sells for a living. Aha!, I thought: Divers(e) weights and divers(e) measures! Evidently, it is a thing for particularly unscrupulous drug dealers to keep two scales in their pocket: one for buying and another one for selling -- and to pull out whichever one benefits him the most on each given occasion. That is the literal reading of the abomination in question -- though I suspect my pot-slinging roommate could plead ignorance on that score, not having not been much of a Bible reader at that stage of his life. Incidentally as it turns out, he is now, but that's another story.
Ѻ
I define victim identity politics as a caste system in which different moral standards are applied to people of different demographic groups, based on a narrative of historical class exploitation. The justification for woke victim politics was famously encapsulated by Ibram X. Kendi:
Here, Kendi is saying that (1) black people have been wrongfully oppressed by white people, in particular in America, throughout much of history, and that (2) the just and effective remedy for this offense is institutionalized discrimination in favor of blacks over whites, presumably until the books are balanced. One of those things is true. Kendi's argument seems to be based on a general principle that when one class of people has been systematically wronged by another class, each member of the offending group then owes each member of the offended group preferential treatment and reparations. But in the light of day, this view breaks down for two reasons: first, the woke don't really believe it, and, second, the principle itself is ridiculous.
The more you study it, the more you see that woke identity politics is not about keeping a ledger of historical injustices between groups and trying to balance the books; it is about keeping a ledger of historical injustices committed by groups that oppose the woke agenda, against groups that support the woke agenda, while conveniently ignoring all other patterns of predation and exploitation in the country and around the world. For example, the woke say that America owes blacks reparations for slavery. Maybe She does; around 450,000 blacks were brought to the United States and its original colonies in the Transatlantic slave trade, and their descendants held in bondage until the end of the Civil War in 1866 -- the total evil and suffering of which practice over time defy imagination or calculation. But on the other hand, over 1,000,000 whites were brought to the Mediterranean region in slavery by the Barbary pirates, and their descendants held in bondage until decades after the practice had been abolished in the United States, under circumstances no less brutal and probably worse. We hear indignant outcries by the woke for America to pay reparations to blacks -- but where are the cries for Morocco, Libya, or Turkey to pay reparations to whites and their families for their past enslavement and its deleterious and lasting effects? Of course there aren't any, because (1) the peoples of the Barbary Coast are not political opponents of the woke agenda, (2) group justice for ancient wrongs is a ridiculous idea in the first place, and (3) even if whites asked for reparations for their centuries of brutal oppression under North African slavery, as Thomas Sowell wrote, nobody is going to be fool enough to give it to them.
The woke would argue that, unlike the centuries-long slavery of whites in the Mediterranean, institutionalized discrimination against blacks in the United states is our problem, that it extends into living memory through the end of the Jim Crow era, and that its lasting effects are still felt by blacks today. And every word of that is true -- but if that is an outrage when it happens to some groups, shouldn't it be just as much of an outrage when it happens to others?
The raids of the Barbary pirates happened far away and long ago. But when it comes to alleged injustices by whites against non-whites, the woke certainly don't restrict attention to problems in our own back yard, or to problems that are currently going on. They fill the streets to protest the Israeli occupation of Palestine, wail angrily about the historical colonization of Africa by European powers like Belgium and Holland, and point their fingers over the long-ago British rule of India and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America -- all as if to say, look at all the terrible things white people have done. And they are right: white people have a lot of terrible things -- but so have other people, here in America and all around the world. Do the woke stigmatize the Japanese for their inhuman mistreatment of the people of Nanking and Korea during their subjugation under Hirohito? Do they lambast ethnic Hawaiians for the imperialism, slave driving, and brutality of King Kamehameha -- more recently than the American founding, and right in our own backyard? Are they calling for reparations to the Ute Indians for their epochs of enslavement and exploitation at the hands of the Navajo? And is anyone -- woke, Ute, or otherwise -- wagging their finger at modern day Navajos for those brutal crimes? Not at all. Not a peep. Why not?
Woke activists insist the United States should return the Black Hills region, in which Mount Rushmore is located, to the Sioux Indians -- from whom the United States seized it during the Black Hills War. And maybe we should: the Supreme Court ruled in 1960 that the United States owed the Sioux $106 million in return for the wrongful seizure of the Black Hills. But on the other hand, nobody -- neither the woke, nor the Supreme Court, nor anyone else -- is suggesting that the Sioux should pay reparations of any kind to the Cheyanne, who occupied the Black Hills for years before being driven out at the points of Sioux spears. Even the Cheyanne don't push that agenda; if they did, it would loose from Pandora's box the principle that people other than whites can be held individually and collectively responsible for the ancient wrongdoings of others of their race -- and nobody wants that.
To apply the principle of collective guilt to any group other than those targeted by the woke -- whites, and men, and especially white men -- sounds crazy. And it is crazy, but it is not less crazy for one group than it is for another. The fact that it has been normalized in our public conversation to do this selectively to certain groups shows how far down the woke rabbit hole our whole culture has fallen, and how far we have to go to drag ourselves out of it.
The "social justice" crowd claims that (1) blacks are negatively affected by the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow even today, and that (2) "systemic" racism continues to subtly permeate the fabric of our institutions, resulting in currents of racial prejudice that blacks must swim against -- and, therefore (3) policies and principles that discriminate against whites are necessary to "level the playing field". Claim #1 is certainly true, and I believe there is a good deal of truth to #2 -- but, again, does the social justice crowd go from #1 and #2 to #3 by the same logic for every group -- or are they pulling out diverse weights and diverse measures as it suits their political purposes?
If historical class maltreatment justifies present class favoritism, as Kendi claims to believe, then no group in modern history has earned it more than the Jews of Europe. If the Jews of Europe are not lagging economically, and are not overrepresented in Europe's prisons and poorhouses, should we conclude it is because, they have entirely escaped the effects of the brutal victimization that was historically aimed at them for thousands of years, to the point of attempted genocide almost within living memory? Or that all remnants of antisemitism have been completely extinguished from our institutional DNA and collective consciousness? Both claims are preposterous. If the Jews of Europe are doing better than the blacks of America, despite millennia of atrocious oppression and widespread lingering animus, it is only because the Jews of Europe do not act like fools as often as the Blacks of America. If blacks deserve officially sanctioned favoritism to level the playing field, on the argument that past discrimination requires it, then the Jews deserve such favoritism as much or mor. Of course that would only put the Jews farther ahead than they already are -- but, after all, a level playing field is a level playing field. Wouldn't the Jews be doing even better on a level playing field -- where they had never been persecuted and marginalized? So if the woke want to level the playing field, and if the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination, where are the strident demands for reparations and affirmative action for Jews?
It seems that a level playing field is not what the woke really want after all. They are often accused instead of chasing the dream of equity, or equal outcomes, defined as equal average levels of success and failure, in all major measures of quality-of-life (educationally, economically, in criminal justice, etc.), for every demographic group. That would explain why they don't support affirmative action for Jews -- and why the remedy for past discrimination against them isn't current discrimination at all. Some of the more extreme SJWs, such as Kamala Harris, even admit to wanting equal outcomes for all groups. But do they really want that? Do they apply the principle of equal outcomes evenhandedly to different demographic groups, for each basic measure of success and quality of life? Or is this another case of diverse weights and measures?
One key demographic group that is woefully lagging in quality of life in America, and falling behind farther with every year, is the largest minority group in the country comprising 49.5% of the population: men. For example, a man in America is around four times more likely than a woman to be sent to prison for a violent felony. (Should we automatically conclude there could be no other reason for this than sexism in the criminal justice system?) Roughly four fifths of all suicides in America are by men, and the rate of suicide among men increased 28% between the years of 2000 and 2021. American men die of drug overdoses at two to three times the rate of women, and almost 70% of homeless people in America are men. Even among those American men who escape catastrophic events like a felony conviction or a fatal overdose, educational and economic attainment among men is in worrisome decline. Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 12% less than the figure for women -- and men are falling rapidly further behind in this key measure of achievement and future success. Among adult men in the US, the percentage who are not working and not looking for work increased 3-fold (from 4% to 12%) between 1960 and 2010 and continues to grow. A tiny handful of the growing cohort of non-working men are independently wealthy -- but the vast majority are either sponging off of their wife or girlfriend, living on handouts from of the state, panhandling and hustling to get by as homeless addicts, or making their living through some form of organized crime. Twelve percent of all adult men in America now fit that description -- roughly the same proportion of men that earn graduate degrees, while two thirds of graduate degrees now go to women. To put that a different way, a man in America today is only half as likely as a woman to get a graduate degree, and is as likely to be an indigent or dependent as he is to get that graduate degree. In summary, men have disproportionately bad outcomes in several major areas of life, and they are falling farther behind in these areas by the year.
If you have been paying attention to the political discourse of the times, you may have heard statistics like these about the plight of men in America. But even if you have heard of these gloomy trends and disparities, you will have rarely if ever heard calls for pro-male affirmative action to remedy them, or seen women blamed for them wholesale as a class -- especially by woke SJW's. If the woke want what they say they want and think what they say they think, reverse discrimination and narratives of class exploitation should be right up their ally. But in the case of men, what happened to equal outcomes? and what happened to class exploitation as the explanation for group differences in outcomes? And if not equal outcomes and class oppression, what the Hell happened to leveling the playing field?
So let's summarize. The woke agenda is to balance the books of historical class oppression -- but only to examine the entries in the entries in those books where white men did something wrong. And they want to level the playing field -- except that they are fine to leave it tilted against groups that are succeeding on their own merit. And they want the same outcomes for every group -- and to impose quotas, regulations, and subsidies to bring about equal outcomes for all groups -- except for a striking lack of interest in any program or policy that would help men catch up to women in major areas of quality-of-life such as education, housing, and mental health. Make sense?
Cui bono?
The woke ideology's ideology does make sense if you watch what they do instead of listening to what they say. What is going on is that the aim of leveling the playing field, and the narrative of class exploitation as the automatic explanation for why some groups outperform others, and even the quest for equal outcomes by group, were all lies in the first place. The pattern of which groups are demonized by the radical left and targeted for group guilt, and which group disparities and trends the woke crusade to fix with affirmative action and reparations, are as clear as the pattern of which crooked scale a drug dealer chooses to weigh out his pot, depending on whether he is buying or selling: it is a matter of cui bono.
The table below shows the political leanings of several major demographic groups in the United States, according to Pew Research polls conducted in 2024 [source1, source2]. The number in the right-hand column is the percentage who described themselves as leaning Democrat, minus the percentage who described themselves as leaning Republican -- so the higher the number, the greater the number of self-described Democrats in the group. The groups appear in the table from top to bottom, ranked by their affinity toward the Democratic party.
Whaddayaknow? If you only looked at the left hand column, you might think this was a chart of the woke victim status hierarchy from top to bottom. There are two salient explanations of what could be going on here. The woke explanation would be that America is institutionally rigged to favor the groups at the bottom, and the Democrats are the ones who are trying to level the playing field -- so of course the groups at the bottom, who don't want the playing field leveled, tend more to vote Republican. If it were remotely true that Democrats wanted to level the playing field, that might be plausible -- but I believe there is a simpler explanation that fits more of the facts. Like Plato's drones buzzing around the bema, the radical left wants to silence and marginalize its political opponents, whose identities fit the pattern in the table above, and part of the plan is to demonize them as historical class oppressors.
As an experiment to test this, you could ask what would happen if Latino men began voting Republican in larger numbers. My theory suggests that, since selectively enforced class-guilt narratives are a propaganda tool of the woke, we would see a sudden wellspring of woke narratives about Latinos as class oppressors. But that experiment has already been run. Over the course of the last several years, Latinos began moving to the right politically source, to the point that almost half voted for Trump in 2024. Now Google "racism against Latinos" on the one hand, and "Latino white supremacist" on the other, and check the dates and sources on the top twenty articles for both searches. It seems that Latinos were once portrayed copiously in woke outlets as historical class victims -- until around 2023 when stories began to emerge of a nefarious white supremacy movement in the Latino community. So, either Latinos began flocking to the Republican party because they shifted toward white supremacy, around the same time left-leaning pundits came to their senses and realized Latinos had never been class victims in the first place, or the woke propaganda machine began to pump out articles about Latino white supremacy to marginalize that group as soon as they began voting more like white men. You make the call.
It is often said that the woke ideology is unforgiving. That is said with good reason: people have been cancelled by the woke left, for example, for years-old drunken social media posts, that were objectively inoffensive in the light of reason, and that were inside the window of acceptability at the time they were made. People have even been cancelled for liking such posts -- and in England some have been arrested. And that is pretty unforgiving. But, on the other hand, senator Roberd Byrd was literally an officer of the Ku Klux Klan in his youth (an Exalted Cyclops, no less!), and he was never cancelled for that. At the time of Byrd's death, he was a powerbroker in the national politics of the Democratic party and a dependable supporter of the Democratic agenda (the latter of which was no change; the Klan has always been dominated by Democrats). At his funeral, Byrd was lovingly eulogized by Democrats including President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Governor Joe Manchin, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Representative Nick Rahall, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, and former president Bill Clinton. So they aren't that unforgiving after all -- as long as you are squarely on their team. Diverse weights and diverse measures.
There is a second, less subtle reason whites would naturally appear at the bottom of the woke caste hierarchy. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to form a political movement -- not for the purpose of achieving any real aim of social justice, but just to plunder the wealth of an opportunistically selected class of people through the apparatus of the state. Who would be the most natural targets of such a scheme? the same as the natural targets for any other sort of robbery: the ones with the most money. This pattern dates back to the time of Plato, as he noted:
The pattern has repeated itself with the targeting of industrialists, aristocrats, and land-owning farmers (the "bourgeoisie") in the communist revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Yugoslavia, to name a few -- and with the targeting of Jews in Germany, Tutsis in Rwanda, Tamils in Sri Lanka, Igbos in Nigeria, and Christians in Lebanon to name a few more. In every case named here, and many others not named, a disproportionately successful demographic group was demonized as a historical exploiter class and targeted for persecution and plunder, ending in tyranny, and in several cases genocide. Some of these groups, without a doubt, had histories of predatory exploitation of their countrymen -- and some of them, without a doubt, did not. But in no case did the persecution and plunder solve the problems of the alleged victim classes that perpetrated them. In each case, on the contrary, it affected a catastrophe for everyone involved. It turns out that the alleged historical exploiter class, even when it actually is exploitative, is almost never the problem at the root of lagging outcomes for less fortunate groups.
The final reason why whites would find their place at the bottom of the woke caste system is the simplest of all. Whether the targets are whites, or Jews, or aristocrats, or industrialists, or Tutsis, or Tamils, or Igbos, or somebody else, when people are hurting and hungry, it is easy to get them to hate others who have more than them, to churn this hatred into an ideology, and then to mill that ideology into a political regime. That is the nature of the game of modern-day tyranny -- from Mugabe to Khomeini, from Lenin to Hitler, and in scores of other cases. Many of the class-exploitation narratives leveraged by tyrannical regimes of the 20th century had truth to them; some had smaller threads of truth, and some were utter fabrications. But no good came of the victim identity politics in any case; it is a murderous plague, plain and simple. There is a crucial difference between, on the one hand, remembering who did what to whom with an eye toward preventing it from happening again, and, on the other hand, saying, "...so let's do it back to them." Doing it back to them is the message Xendi expressed with such force and poetry, and his expression of that message -- the toxic, two-faced message of modern tyranny -- is the reason he has been elevated as a spokesman for the woke movement.
Conclusion
It is a natural question why, if wokeness functions largely a pretext for class warfare to demonize white people and redistribute their wealth, so many college-educated whites have nonetheless become infected with the woke mind virus. I will return to this question in detail in a later chapter, but the basic answer is that, in a tragedy of commons orchestrated by the woke censorship-indoctrination complex, it behooves them as individuals to be part of the problem in the large -- something like it behooved Uncle Tom. Doesn't it behoove you, at the very least to play along and keep your mouth shut? Playing along and keeping your mouth shut under tyranny is what Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz, in his book The Captive Mind, called ketman. Ketman is a dangerous game: you can only pretend to be something for so long, before you start to become what you pretend to be. Even if you continue to secretly and silently resist being changed by one-sided propaganda pouring out of our major institutions, the young people around you, who only hear one side of the argument voiced by authority figures in public, will presume that side is just and right, and that it is an offense to their community to question or deviate from it. Our cowering in silence, even in silent resistance, explains why our children are getting away from us.
The following chapters will discuss victim identity politics under Lenin, Hitler, and Mao Zedong.
I haven't read this book but I hope he would have addressed the obvious objection that this creates a loop. So if A discriminates against B then B discriminates against A as a remedy then surely A can discriminate against B in the future according to the same rule. I'm sure if challenged he would have a defence. But I feel like if social sciences are rigorous then you really should be pre-emptively defending obvious objections. My guess would be the concept of collective guilt or guilt following down racial or parental lines is very difficult to defend so the best strategy if you wanted to push these ideas is to just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.
He does: the point when B discriminating against A stops being acceptable as a means of addressing past discrimination by A against B is when "racial equity" is achieved — that is, when all disparate impact is eliminated. I've written at length about this before here on the Motte.
Kendi defines "racism" not as racial discrimination, but as the existence of statistical disparities between races. For him, a thing is "anti-racist" if it actively works to decrease those disparities. Anything which is not anti-racist — that is, not only things that increase disparate impact, but even those things which don't affect it at all — is thus "racist." Hence, present and future anti-white discrimination is not racist, but anti-racist, because it narrows white-black outcome gaps.
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An eye for an eye, leaves the whole world blind.
I disagree. It seems generally the case that you need at least one eye to be reasonably competent at catching people with eyes and then removing them. Continue this cycle:
The rest of the world would be blind, but there would be a nice fellow with at least one who reigned as king (or queen).
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Good for you.
To understand why he doesn't think this way, you have to realize that in his worldview, the only kind of discrimination that needs to be remedied is discrimination against groups he favors, such as blacks. Discrimination against whites doesn't need to be remedied. So in his mind he is saying, the only remedy to past discrimination against blacks is present discrimination against whites. The only remedy to present discrimination against blacks is future discrimination against whites. No loop there. The discrimination against whites goes on forever, but for him that's not a loop; that's justice.
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The mathematician in me can't get past "Only 44% of the students now enrolled in four-year colleges in the United States are men -- 14% less than the figure for women"
Either you mean 44% of the students are men and 58% are women, which is not possible, even with rounding error. Or you mean 44% are men and about 51% are women (since 44 is about 14% lower than 51), which draws my attention to the missing 5%, presumably in some other/no data/did not answer category.
Or it's a typo shrug
Lol. Not exactly a typo, but a calculation error. it should be 12% less, 44% vs 56%. Fixed now, thanks.
I'm going to be the pedant, because I can't help myself.
It's 12 pp less (percentage points). It's (44-56)/56 = -.214 = 21% (per-cent, for every hundred) lower. For every hundred women, there are 21 fewer men.
I'm so sorry, but I really can't help myself when it comes to pp vs %.
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Oh, dang, I missed the Plato discussion. This is a shame because I think you’re misreading a crucial part of it. Specifically here; the last time I made this argument (to @MaiqTheTrue) is here.
In short, I think aging philosophers have been complaining about libertine, shiftless youth for literal millennia, but the predictions rarely come true. Athens was perfectly able to go to war, elect new leaders, corral its livestock, etc. up until they got subjugated by an outside tyrant. Though if you’ve made a case for the decline of virtue in Classical Athens, I’d be interested in seeing it.
More importantly, the argument proves way too much. I could go down your tyrant checklist and fish for ways to make the prophecy fit Donald Trump, a textbook oligarch waving the flag of populism. Would that really be useful?
Accusing bureaucrats of being “accursed oligarchs” is a time-honored tradition in American politics. So is “commend[ing] and honor[ing] in public and private rulers who resemble subjects and subjects who are like rulers.” The humble, wise Everyman is one of our stock characters for an ideal statesman. That makes it kind of pointless to draw your enemies as the soyjak.
I wanted to discuss Plato because I think that post was a lot more interesting than this one. You are not the first person to write an essay about how your opponents are Literally Hitler. This isn’t even your first time playing the lazy DRRR game. (Though I see you made the same mistake as me with regards to Byrd. The man turned it around in the 80s and became a hugely influential civil rights supporter.) The Democrat agenda had thoroughly shifted by the Reagan years, and pretending otherwise is a cheap rhetorical trick.
I was going to disagree that it fits into this pattern, because when I read the Plato post it seemed to include antinomianism even in its unselfish forms, which is not usually found in the degeneration narratives, or much at all before modern times... but I cant see it anymore today. I notice that I am confused.
How did you find this? Is there an advanced search for this site?
In this case, I searched for “author:netstack Southern”. Be careful not to capitalize “author”. There are a few other search keywords like that; I think “flair” is one? Not sure if it’s documented anywhere.
Anyway, I was able to search for that because I knew I’d reminded someone that the Southern Strategy existed. I wasn’t sure if it was OP until I thumbed through.
What exactly were you looking for vis a vis “unselfish antinomianism”? I think that’s still a fair reading of Socrates’ lines, given the emphasis on liberty as an abstract good.
Compare on the one hand, the stereotypical wild youngin, who will tell you your lectures about virtue are boring, Im going to do dumb shit now, fuck you dad. And on the other hand, the kind of slightly-OCD knowitall, who is offended by the idea of virtue in full generality because it implies some people are better than others. The stably married educated liberals preaching free love. Etc. This other hand is what I mean by "unselfish antinomianism", and its something we dont see a lot of before the modern era, including in degeneration narratives. Indeed, even today, those narratives often emphasise how they dont really mean those more ideological aspects, and its all just cover for hedonism/the jews taking over/whatever, where it had sounded to me like Plato says they do that and do mean it, and thats the problem.
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Never too late.
Plato was clearly not saying that this (libertine-ness) was happening at the time he wrote The Republic. He was saying that it happens from time to time in various places, and that where it happens it is a symptom of coming tyranny. He had already lived through one such cycle in his 20's, and another one happened in Athens about 75 years after he wrote the Republic. It seemed to happen about every 100 years. Also, I do not accept the argument that the regime of the Thirty Tyrants had nothing to do with the moral fabric of Athens (see below). To elaborate on the words of Col. Jeff Cooper, armed men with moral courage cannot be easily tyrannized, and men with moral courage in the first place cannot easily be disarmed.
Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn't. I'm not sure why you think Classical Athens was such a first world open society. Plato's Apology suggests that most people cooperated with the regime of the thirty tyrants as informers, as if the people of Athens, like Soviet Russia, was open to that sort of government by virtue of its failing values. The trial of Socrates happened in 399; that almost certainly a historical event, retold fairly accurately by Plato (since it is not contradicted by other sources, many of whom mention Socrates and were familiar with Plato's work). The trial related in The Apology not exactly a signal of a functioning democracy; it is a story of literally fatal cancel culture.
You could of course fish for that, or for an extended analogy between pinto beans and cardboard (they do kind of taste like cardboard, don't they?), or anything else you want to fish for. The trick is to actually do it -- and compare the two side by side. If you have the time I would be happy to see the results of your analogy with Trump.
Sorry. No idea what this means.
Depends on how accurate the drawing is, and what other attempts to draw the same comparison you hold it next to. The details matter, and the control groups matter.
Be my guest. I will respond to your replies to it (though they may not have a big audience)
I didn't say anyone was literally Hitler. Please be smarter than this.
This is beside the point. My point was that Byrd was forgiven for egregious racism in his distant past.
Also, I think you missed the salient point of the article on Plato. Plato obviously has a low opinion of the "democratic men" of his time, and was probably on the other side from them of the political aisle. Maybe they were right and he was wrong; that's perfectly possible and (note carefully that) I never made a claim about it. The main point is the resemblance between their agenda and that of modern progressives, which I find evidently uncanny.
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