Donald Trump: A Tyrant, but Whose Kind of Tyrant?

One reasonable criterion for the worth of nonfiction is longevity. How long is a book worth continuing to read? This has rarely been truer than at the end of a year in which so many political events have been declared "unprecedented." If recent events are truly unique in history, then surely books published prior to those events can have little to tell us about our current predicament, yes?

But, in fact, the opposite seems true, and both Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the American presidency have created cottage industries searching for theorists and philosophers who speak to contemporary problems. Of this year's attempts to prove the prescience of older texts, few are more brilliant than Andrew Sullivan's argument that Plato accounts nicely for the rise of Donald Trump. I would like to take on a less ambitious task and hearken back only to Hannah Arendt's 1963 book, On Revolution.

In particular, I want to point to one of the many careful distinctions she makes in characterising the modes of power that emerged from the American Revolution. Arendt argues that the American Revolution (and, to a lesser extent, the French Revolution) bequeathed to us a definition of tyranny that is less precise than the one that preceded it. Prior to the American Revolution, Arendt claims, "tyranny" referred not to all types of one-person rule, but to one-person rule in which the ruler chose, of his own accord, not to rule in the public interest: "Since the end of antiquity, it had been common in political theory to distinguish between government according to law and tyranny, whereby tyranny was understood to be the form of government in which the ruler ruled out of his own will and in pursuit of his own interests, thus offending the private welfare and the lawful, civil rights of the governed." (Arendt 121).

Thus, for pre-Revolutionary philosophers and politicians, it was not kings per se who were tyrants; it was only bad kings who were tyrants: "Under no circumstances could monarchy, one-man rule, as such be identified with tyranny; yet it was precisely this identification to which the revolutions quickly were to be driven. Tyranny, as the revolutions came to understand it, was a form of government in which the ruler, even though he ruled according to the laws of the realm, had monopolised for himself the rights of action" (Arendt 121).

As Arendt argues here, from the experience of republican government emerged the idea that any form of non-democratic government was ipso facto tyrannical. The individual in power might make good decisions or bad; either way, her failure to gain sanction from the people she governs constitutes a form of tyranny. It is in this sense that a certain kind of conservative can see President Obama's use of drones as tyrannical even while, when push comes to shove, supporting the specific decisions he has made. It is Obama's failure to consult Congress or the people directly, not the rectitude of his actions per se, that constitutes tyranny.

The pre-Revolutionary distinction between forms of one-person rule is, I want to suggest, being revived before our eyes in the phenomenon of Trumpism.

In the eyes of Trump's critics, his selection of certain companies for scorn, his decision to "save" a Carrier plant in one place while ignoring workers in another--that is to say, his decision to rule almost without policy and only by caprice--constitutes tyranny as such. We might concede that, yes, the nation or the world is better off with those few jobs saved and that Carrier plant open; but we still object to the way in which Trump "monopolise[s] for himself the rights of action." If jobs are to be kept in the United States, we insist, this ought to be done through a rational policy debated in the legislative and executive branches.

Trump's fans, however, adhere to an older, pre-Revolutionary definition of tyranny. Under this sense of tyranny, these acts are not tyrannical because, though they may stem from one-man rule, they uphold the public interest. Under this definition of tyranny, Trump may be capricious and may rule outside the bounds of republican norms. However, he only becomes a tyrant insofar as his actions advance his own interests to the exclusion of the nation's. If he saved 700 manufacturing jobs, who cares how he did it?

Trump's critics, then, have their work cut out for them. Marshalling evidence that Trump acts without the consent of Congress or without public consultation will convince few for whom such acts are not the problem. Unlike during the Nixon era, in which the question was only whether evidence of the crime could be found, in the Trump era it is a question of how to define the crime itself.