Leadership in crisis – why the West needs Plato more than ever

Certainly stuff like Declaration of Independence or Common Sense is ideololgically-sounding. But these are propaganda pieces: they are also what they needed to be to get the citizenry behind the revolution.

The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.

(Interestingly, by this definition, America's two greatest ideologues are probably FDR and Abraham Lincoln. Which I think is accurate, but they're still widely esteemed. I still maintain that they are two of the most dangerous leaders in U.S. history though.)

> The way to tell an ideologue apart from a pragmatist is to look at their actions when faced like a choice like "Hundreds of thousands of people need to die, but it's for the greater good." The ideologue will choose the greater good; the pragmatist will choose the people.

In this case, the founding fathers were absolutely, unabashedly ideologues. They started a revolutionary war for their idea of the greater good. In an age of hereditary absolute monarchs and colonies and authoritarian rulers, their ideas were completely ideologically motivated (And batshit bonkers, in the world of the 18th century - but rather old-fashioned and uninteresting in the world of the 21st century.)

Given that you've cited both FDR and Lincoln as examples of ideologues, but the founding fathers as not, I postulate that your definition of an ideologue might be predicated on how orthodox and uninteresting their policies are to you.

The way you phrase this dilemma is telling - the implication is that people will die as a result of a deviation from the status quo, without quantifying what the greater good is. What if people will be saved as a result of a deviation from the status quo? Is someone who looks at an ongoing injustice, and acts in response to it an ideologue?

What about someone who adopts an ideology of tolerance towards slave states? Does that person become a pragmatist, because they've weighed hundreds of thousands of deaths, against millions of people enslaved for their entire lives, and decides that actually, the greater good requires those millions to continue to be slaves? [1] What if they decide that the greater good would be to actually go to war, but they choose the greater evil, instead? Is whether or not they are ideologues predicated on which of the two options they believe the greater good to be?

These sorts of questions, of course, lead to truly absurd responses. It's why the ideologue test isn't actually a good one.

Your other metric (Trust and obligation) for determining the quality of a leader is much better, because it does not try to give answers to difficult moral problems, without having any context of what those moral problems are. It's not a guiding principle that a leader must follow - it is a quality that they must express, so that they can make a correct decision.

[1] Is there a formula that determines how many slaves the death of a freeman can buy? And if you pay too dearly for the freedom of a slave, you become an ideologue? [2]

[2] As I said, any guiding principle that seeks to give a one-size-fits-all answer this question, without even knowing what the question is, on 'pragmatic' grounds (Where determining which side is pragmatic is completely subjective!) leads to truly absurd outcomes.

Plato knew that. The role of guardian wasn't exactly voluntary. The philosopher-kings were compelled to rule. The only rulers you can trust are those who don't seek power.

Plato of course got a lot going for him, but The Republic never really solved the problem of making sure you get a philosopher-king instead of a tyrant. This essay's author declines to mention the possibility of tyrants because he knows it will undermine his argument badly.