A couple weeks ago, a friend and I were having a familiar and singularly unenlightening debate as to which of the two presumptive GOP frontrunners for the 2024 election—Trump or DeSantis—would be marginally worse than the other. Obviously, it's an absurd and unnecessary question. They're both awful, and we should work equally hard to ensure neither of them ever becomes president. No great truth to reveal there.
Still, as an academic exercise, it's one that can't help but enthrall us. And in my own case, despite the steady accumulation of horrendous news out of Florida, I still held to the view that—dreadful as DeSantis may be—Trump is still slightly worse. Why? I argued: "we know that Trump tried to subvert democracy and undermine the results of a fair election. DeSantis hasn't done that yet. We shouldn't reward the guy we know is capable of a coup attempt. Better to give a chance to someone who hasn't tried it—even if it's only because he hasn't yet had the opportunity."
"Okay, so," my friend retorted, "your position is: 'better the devil you don't know.'" I chortled at that. "Okay, fine," I said. "Touché."
Then, reading in Aristotle this past weekend, I found a passage that would seem to endorse my friend's position. "Aristotle, you say?" Well, as an autodidactic complement to my formal legal education, it occurred to me that the truly consummate lawyer would be someone who had read the masterworks of classical rhetoric, starting with the treatise by Aristotle that launched the whole genre. And so I read the great peripatetic's incredibly dull and catalog-like disquisition on the subject, his famous treatise just called the Rhetoric.
Most of it, as I say, was rather unhelpful. I appreciated some of the philosopher's categorical divisions—the famous logos, ethos, and pathos distinction still makes sense, and some versions of his three overarching categories of deliberative, judicial, and epideictic rhetoric still describe the range of oratory that we practice in contemporary life. But overall, the treatise expends far too much ink on the obvious—almost as if Aristotle knew he was writing at the dawn of Western thought and needed to set down all the fundamentals, no matter how basic.
One of the few truly colorful passages in the short treatise, however, appears when Aristotle comes to discuss the use of fable to make a rhetorical point. Fables are great, he says, because they are so easy to make up; whereas historical examples need to be extracted from prior erudition. As an example of a fable used deftly in rhetoric, he writes that Aesop once used a parable of a fox and her ticks to urge the populace of Samos to be lenient toward a deposed demagogue:
A hedgehog found a fox—the fable runs—who was in great distress because she was covered in ticks. The hedgehog asks her if he should help by removing the ticks. The fox, to his surprise, says no. She prefers to leave them where they are. Why? Because, she says, the ticks that are already attached to her body have had a chance to drink their fill. They are already bloated with her blood. And if they are removed, it will only create space for new, hungrier ticks still famished for blood to fasten on in their place.
The point, Aesop elaborates the moral, is that the populace should spare the former demagogue because he has already had his fill. If they get rid of him, other, newer demagogues, still hungry for power and the public wealth, will come to drain the treasury still further.
The fable, one could say, is a clear notch on the Trump side of the scoreboard. It would seem to back up my friend's position much better than my own. Trump is the one who has already had his turn to stage a coup attempt. And it is precisely for this reason, Aesop seems to be telling us, that he is to be preferred to the next demagogue to come along (read DeSantis). Trump has already feasted upon the public's blood. He is bloated with success and with arrogance gratified. Meanwhile, DeSantis (who, reportedly, has recently lost weight in preparation for a 2024 run) is still hungry.
And I say—well, it's an interesting point, Aesop, but I'm still not 100% convinced. In particular, the problem with the theory is that the sort of person who is most drawn to being a demagogue may also be the sort of person incapable of ever being sated. Look at Trump for instance. Yes, he was president. Yes, he got to terrorize his staff and play at being a tinsel dictator for four years. But does that mean he is satisfied? If you think yes, you clearly have not heard his latest speeches. He is still out for blood.
Both Trump and DeSantis are still hungry ticks, therefore. They still want to feed. And so I guess the only rational position leads us back to where we started: we just have to admit that they are both terrible, that our country would be infinitely worse off if either man became president, and we just have to work to ensure their defeat in the next election, whichever of them wins the primaries.
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