It is both a hope and enquiry. What is a statesman, anyway?
Plato gives us the answer. But Plato being very difficult to read, requiring the reader as he does to think long and carefully about the line of reasoning in every discussion -- well I thought I'd go ahead and jump past the tedious dialectical groundwork of Plato's dialog on the Statesman, right to the salient point of my diary, and of his dialog: the definition of a statesman, in which we learn to distinguish different forms of government, and the separate question of good versus bad government as it applies to each organizational form.
In the dialog, Plato compares the State to a fabric woven by a weaver. He compares all the necessary supports that go into allowing a weaver to weave to those that go into allowing the Statesman to govern well.
He analyzes the various forms of government with his brilliant method of classifications, and tells us about the basic distinction of good and bad government: the basic distinction of good government from bad, regardless of the form of the government, is whether the government is designed upon principles really and truly in the best interest of the people of the State. Those principles, the science of good government, are not partisan, but empirical and pragmatic. Good intentions do not redeem bad policies. Any outer form of government can work for the betterment of the people, or for narrow private interests, ie greed. And the basic distinction of good and bad is this single idea.
Plato suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the number of people tasked with government, which is one measure of the form of government, and the desirability for a citizen to live in that state. You may have the misfortune to live in a good government, or a bad one:
| Good Government | Bad Government |
Defining Character | According to Science and for the Good | According to Appetite and for the Rulers' own benefit |
One Person Rule | Monarchy (Best) | Tyranny (Worst) |
Elitist, Small group rule | Aristocracy | Oligarchy |
Democracy, Rule by and for the People | Democracy (Worst) | Tyranny of the Majority (Best) |
Stranger. The government of the few which is intermediate between that of the one and many; is also intermediate in good and evil; but the government of the many is in every respect weak and unable to do either any great good or any great evil, when compared with the others, because the offices are too minutely subdivided and too many hold them. And this therefore is the worst of all lawful governments, and the best of all lawless ones. If they are all without the restraints of law, democracy is the form in which to live is best; if they are well ordered then this is the last which you should choose, as royalty, the first form, is the best, with the exception of the seventh for that excels them all, and is among States what God is among men.
The Best and Worst categories are marked on the idea that if a knowledgeable and just king, a poltical scientist acting in the best interest of the people, if such a person is the king, then his kingly power gives him an efficient way to implement his just policies. By the same right, if a good government is supposed, then the dispersion of power that takes place in a democratic system is the least desirable situation, because it is inefficient in implementing policies.
On the other side, if a bad government is to hold sway, then the best form of government to live under is a tyranny of the majority, a democracy that is unfortunately ruled for the benefit of partisans instead of for the whole. Even though their policies are tyrannical, the democratic inefficiencies act as a delay on tyranny, which is the best one can hope for in a tyranny. And a tyrant king is the worst of the worst, because he can be efficiently unjust.
After laying all of this out as the playing field, Plato seeks to discover the Stateman's position among these players and scenarios. Going back to the analogy of the weaver, he comes to a remarkable conclusion: that the warp and woof of partisanship, which we easily identify in our own conservatives and progressives, the warmongers and the hopemongers -- that a just society cannot be made up of one or other of these exclusively. No more than a woven cloth can be made up of only warp, or only woof.
Plato describes the Stateman as the ruler who can weave together the hard and the soft partisans into a coherent and functional fabric. Plato actually says that in order to survive, a society must intermarry these partisans as a matter of preserving a balanced temperament -- when in fact their tendency to marry those who are like themselves, which leads to pusillanimous libertarians and pathalogically aggressive military types.
The rest of the citizens, out of whom, if they have
education, something noble may be made, and who are capable of being
united by the Statesman, the kingly art blends and weaves together;
taking on the one hand those whose natures tend rather to courage,
which is the stronger element and may be regarded as the warp, and
on the other hand those which incline to order and gentleness, and
which are represented in the figure as spun thick and soft after the
manner of the woof-these, which are naturally opposed, she seeks to
bind and weave together
Therefore I submit that Obama's stated aim of bringing partisans together to find solutions and put everyone to work on implementation is definitively the basic stance of Plato's Statesman. It is not a campaign strategy. It is the blueprint of good and just government, of, by and for the people. It is about damned time.