2,400 years ago, Aristotle perfectly described today’s leftist tyrants

The ideology is new, but using ancient examples, Aristotle proves that tyranny’s tactics are always the same.

This is an edited version of an essay that first appeared in American Thinker’s subscribers-only newsletter.

I admit without shame that I’m one of those people for whom classic philosophy is a closed book. That’s my excuse for being unfamiliar with Aristotle’s Politics, an eight-volume work from the middle of the 4th century BC that analyzes various political systems. Fortunately for America, many of the Founders had read Politics and applied it to the Constitution.

I mention Aristotle now because I learned yesterday that Aristotle, looking at examples in the ancient world, predicted the growing threat of leftist tyranny in the U.S. and Europe. He also answered a question I’ve been asking myself as I think about Europe’s imminent downfall because its leftist leaders decided to erase all borders and welcome in the entire Middle East and Africa to replace the native populations. Here, too, Democrats (and some Uniparty Republicans) tried desperately under Joe Biden to do the same, only to be foiled when voters insisted on reelecting Donald Trump.

With these thoughts in mind, I asked myself (literally, I spoke the words out loud), “Has there ever before been a country in which the leaders simply replaced the native population?” I couldn’t think of one—but Aristotle could. He revealed that one specific type of leader desperately wants to be surrounded by foreigners: the tyrant.

Having alienated his own people, writes Aristotle, the tyrant can no longer trust them, and he feels safe only when surrounded by those to whom he imputes the virtues he believes his own people lack—and whom he believes (probably naively) will not destroy him as his own people will eventually be driven to do.

Mercenaries did have a reputation for irregular conduct. Sometimes, if they weren’t paid, they became brigands, and that was widespread enough to become a nightmare in several places, perhaps especially (but certainly not limited to) Italy.

Some of the mercenary captains became notorious criminals.

The same thing, of course, happened at sea, when privateers became pirates.

I don’t recall ever reading any horror stories about the Swiss Guards, though I’ve never really tried to read up on them. Perhaps they were held to a higher standard. Or perhaps I simply haven’t read enough.

This discussion prompted a little quick checking, and I’ve stumbled across a quirk that I hadn’t known before. Most freepers will know of Miles Keough, made famous by Hollywood because he rode Comanche, the sole 7th Cavalry survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Keough has been identified for years in many Civil War histories as having been a member of the Swiss Guard. I had never really thought about it, but members of the Swiss Guard do have to be Swiss, unless that has now collapsed under the EU’s campaign to eradicate national identities.

Irish by birth, Keough had gone to Italy to serve in the Papal armies during the Italian wars of the mid-19th century. He distinguished himself, was highly decorated, and was invited to join the Company of Saint Patrick, part of the Vatican Guard (also known as the Palatine Guards). They wore bright green uniforms and I’m guessing they were an Irish unit alongside the Swiss Guards.

The Palatine Guards were latecomers, having been organized in 1850 and dissolved in 1970, one of the many casualities of Vatican II, when the hierarchy went to war on tradition. At the rate the rot is spreading, I wonder how long it will be before the Swiss Guard accepts Muslims.

Anyhow, Keough had one of those very colorful 19th century, Victorian era adventurers careers. He left the Palatine Guard and came to America when things settled down a bit in Italy and he found it too tame. As a European soldier of fortune with a creditable record of honorable service, he of course did well when he joined the Union Army in the Civil War. What he thought of Custer, I have no idea.

From X:

Now Plato – the most dangerous philosopher who ever lived.
Aristotle was his student, his corrector, and in the end his antidote. The argument between them is not ancient history. It is the argument the West is currently losing.
1. Plato distrusts the world. Everything visible, tangible, particular — the market, the body, the individual — is mere shadow to him. Reality is the Form, the Ideal, the perfect abstraction accessible only to the philosopher. This is not just a metaphysics. It is a politics. If the real is abstract and only the philosopher can access it, then only the philosopher should rule. The Republic follows necessarily from the theory of Forms. Plato built the first blueprint for technocratic tyranny and called it philosophy.
2. His perfect state is governed by philosopher-kings – selected, trained, and self-perpetuating. They know what is good for you better than you do, because they have access to the Forms and you do not. This is every credentialist institution, every expert class, every central planning committee that ever existed, dressed in a toga and speaking Greek. The technocrat ruling by divine right of competitive examination is a Platonic philosopher-king who has forgotten the philosophy but kept the power.
3. Idealism and absolutism are the intellectual disease of humanity. By avoiding collision with reality, they produce arrogant delusion – and arrogant delusion combined with power produces totalitarianism. This is the precise opposite of what built Western strength: individual freedom, competition, and meritocracy – a system that encourages everyone to create maximum value and gives the greatest room to those who do it best. Instead of a system of obedience to intellectual and physical bullies.
4. It started seriously with Plato, reached its apex with Hegel, and today’s Marxisms and deconstructionisms are merely the dishwater left behind. What they all share is the same social profile of origin: blasé, bored boys from wealthy homes, untouched by the pressure of real survival, inventing their idealisms in comfortable detachment from consequences. Unfortunately, detachment from reality impresses many simple minds with intellectual pretensions. They listened. The results were fatal. Millions of corpses.
5. Plato invented the "Noble Lie" – the idea that the ruling class should deceive the population for its own good. He considered it governance. Every ideology that has ever lied systematically to its population was, consciously or not, working from Plato’s manual. Every ministry of propaganda, every content moderation policy removing unauthorized narratives is Plato’s Republic with updated technology.
6. Aristotle walked into Plato’s Academy, studied there for twenty years, and then systematically dismantled everything. Where Plato saw Forms, Aristotle saw particulars. Where Plato trusted the philosopher, Aristotle trusted the middle class. One tradition produces science, common law, and the free market. The other produces utopias – and the violence required to build them. And in the process, two and a half thousand years of sophisticated abstraction buried the most obvious truth available to any living organism: that our purpose is to pass life forward, to create the most flourishing possible next generation. Simple. Obvious. Covered over by millennia of sophisticated raving of Platonists.
7. Every great man-made catastrophe of the modern era has Platonic DNA – the French Revolution’s Republic of Reason, Marxism’s scientific laws of history, Mao’s New Man. Each one began with a Form and required that the imperfect world be forced to conform to it. The pile of bodies is not an accident of implementation. It is what happens when you take Plato seriously enough to act on him. Aristotle’s answer sounds less glamorous: look at what actually exists, work with what human beings actually are, build institutions that survive contact with reality. Sounds less beautiful. It is why we are still here.

Again, from X:

Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.
1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?”
Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.
2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.
3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.
4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?
5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.
6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.
7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them.

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