Sphinx

Over the last couple of months, one Thucydides quote has been quite widely circulated on the Twitter: “In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.” As I discussed a few years ago, it’s a genuine quote (from 8.89) albeit a pretty loose translation (by Rex Warner) – and since that discussion was in October 2016, I’m guessing that this appears on various websites listing Quotes on Democracy, which the sorts of people who like tweeting quotations refer to every four years. While many of the tweets are completely without context, however, enough of them appear in discussion threads that you can make a pretty good guess at their intended meaning, and what’s interesting is that there are two diametrically opposed uses: on the one hand, there those who (as was the case in 2016) offer this as evidence that sore losers are always going to claim they were cheated, but on the other hand this time around there are significant numbers – probably a majority – who put this line forward in support of the claim that there is going to be something unfair about a vote in a democracy, that ‘they’ are always going to cheat and manipulate the system.

Heads Thucydides is always right, tails current events once again confirm the eternal relevance of Thucydides. If you assume an insightful, illusionless authority figure, you can equally well imagine him having a clear-eyed view of politicians and of political systems. What most struck me this time around was the way that the quote actually encapsulates fundamental differences between ancient and modern democracy. Firstly, there’s the nature of the office for which an election is being held – never, in Athens, supreme executive power, but either a one-year role as one of the generals, or a largely honorific position as one of the magistrates; real power remained in the hands of the demos, and those who actually wanted to shape decisions and events, rather than simply enjoy a boost in status, had to persuade the assembly time after time to keep following their leadership. This could, as Thucydides’ account shows, result in abrupt changes of political direction, and the fact that the demos was prone to changing its mind was one of the main planks of the oligarchic critique of democracy. But it meant that no one was given several years’ worth of free hand in power – and, conversely, that every voting setback might be only temporary.

Secondly, there’s the nature of the relationship between the candidates and the electorate (anachronistic terms in relation to Athens, but you know what I mean). The Athenian demos got to choose between a selection of members of the elite who made no pretence about their different status, and who might indeed emphasise rather than try to disguise it (as Josh Ober pointed out), presumably because it’s a key part of their claim to be qualified for a generalship or magistracy. If we take the perspective of Aristophanes’ Knights, the suggestion is that such leading figures are indulged so long as they are useful, and flatter the people in an acceptable manner; there is no suggestion that they should in any way mirror or resemble the ordinary citizens.

Modern western democracies are much less, one might say, pragmatic: even though in practice the electorate are mostly faced with a choice between a selection of members of the elite, the idea is that the best candidate is representative of (a majority of) the voters, in beliefs and values if not in wealth and lifestyle (hence the phenomenon of Jacob Rees-Mogg). The demos has vastly less control over what these individuals then do, but has to believe that their actions in power will reflect those supposed common values. The politicians in turn regularly need to reaffirm or perform those values, asserting common ground with their ‘base’, regardless of their actions and of their actual view of their supporters (cf. Kieran Healy’s comment, in a discussion of Wednesday’s events in Washington DC, that “Trump loves his crowd, but he has no tolerance at all for the individuals who make it up.”).

Electoral failure is then generally blamed not (publicly, at least) on the ignorance and irrationality of the voters but on a failure (whether by the candidate, or the party programme, or as a result of opposition tactics) to communicate the right values successfully to mobilise key constituencies. But that’s then tricky if a representative political system starts to involve populism, with politicians claiming to represent ‘the people’ rather than specific constituencies of them (and decrying any concern for particular groups as a dangerous form of factionalism or identity politics). Then electoral defeat can only be the result of cheating, thwarting the will of the people (or the Real People), and the populist politician cannot concede without undermining their claim to represent the people – he must sustain the narrative of betrayal.

The closest we get to anything like this in classical Athens is Pericles, when what was in name a democracy became the rule of the leading man, as Thucydides put it, with hefty doses of coercive rhetoric to try to subsume citizens within the polis and to put this entirely in the service of his agenda. (Cleon is regularly denounced as a populist, for his alleged flattery of the demos, but I’m increasingly convinced that he’s radically distinct from any modern populism, unlike Pericles). But mostly this comparison emphasises the differences; Pericles’ power still depends on his ability to persuade everyone else of his wisdom and foresight, and it’s constantly subject to revision and limiting. He might feel betrayed, as in his petulant final speech, but there is no plausible recourse to claims of cheating in his defeat.

What is potentially ‘unfair’ in an ancient election is not the voting mechanism but the failure of ordinary citizens to discern true virtue when offered the opportunity to vote for it, because of their ignorance and/or the devious rhetoric of opponents. But no one cites Thucydides in relation to current events because they’re genuinely interested in the workings of Athenian democracy…