A Renewed American Timocracy

Pavlos Papadopoulos, "The Love of Honor and the Age of Trump"

Brutus and Cassius were conquered and slain, Hampden died in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail, etc. This is cold comfort. Politics are an ordeal path among red-hot ploughshares. Who, then, would be a politician for the pleasure of running about barefoot among them? Yet somebody must. And I think those whose characters, circumstances, education, etc., call them, ought to follow.

Yet I do not think that one or a few men are under any moral obligation to sacrifice for themselves and families all the pleasures, profits and prospects of life, while others for whose benefit this is to be done lie idle, enjoying all the sweets of society, accumulating wealth in abundance, and laying foundations for opulent and powerful families for many generations. No. I think the arduous duties of the times ought to be discharged in rotation, and I never will engage more in politics but upon this system…

-John Adams to James Warren, June 25, 1774

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Shortly after Donald Trump’s stunning election to a nonconsecutive second term, Vanity Fair released a digital cover for the event. Alongside a close-up of The Don staring with grim determination into the camera, there was a litany of damnations: “34 Felony Counts. 1 Conviction. 2 Cases Pending. 2 Impeachments. 6 Bankruptcies.” And then the kicker: “4 More Years. The 47th American President.”

In case there was any doubt of Vanity Fair’s tone — horrified incredulity that such a man could be restored to our highest office — associate editor Eric Lutz explained: “Four years after launching an unprecedented attack on democracy, and after leaving the White House in disgrace, Donald Trump will return to Washington, DC, as the 47th president of the United States. His 2024 election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris marks a startling political rebound for the Republican demagogue since his losing reelection bid of 2020 — and a deeply troubling turn for the country, as a twice-impeached convicted felon with authoritarian aspirations will assume the most powerful job in the world.”

Clearly, Vanity Fair meant to indict not just the anti-democratic, disgraced, demagogic, felonious, authoritarian Donald Trump, but the Americans who re-elected him despite — or was it because of? — his many crimes.

But for anyone who doubts the impartiality of our justice system toward the 45th and 47th president — or, indeed, for anyone who simply seeks to understand the once and future POTUS — Vanity Fair’s litany raises an obvious question.

What kind of man would put himself through all of this?

Since 2016, liberal commentators have worked themselves, and a disturbingly large part of the country, into hysterics over the manifold Badnesses of the Orange Man. They have not stopped at condemning his morals, his policies, or his actual record governing the United States: they have also psychoanalyzed him, seeking to expose his (evil) motives for all to see. Since Trump is obviously not a Christian conservative, they have been unable to swing their favored beating-stick — that this here Republican is a theocratic fanatic or a Christian nationalist or something to that effect — with their usual vigor, though these old habits explain why they swung so hard at the relatively tame proposals contained in Project 2025.

Instead, they have searched again and again for darker impulses that must be lurking in Donald Trump’s heart. The more sophisticated Trump critics have sometimes reached back to classical philosophy and sought to wrap their partisan revulsion in philosophic pretensions. Perhaps Trump has “a tyrannical soul,” in Plato’s sense of the term: he is enslaved to his own base desires, and thus seeks to dominate others so as to put them at the service of those desires. Or else, again following Plato, he is an oligarch: obsessed with wealth, seeking political power in order to enrich himself and his family.

These attempts to psychoanalyze Trump fail to explain why, having achieved wealth and fame as a businessman and entertainer, he would seek prestige in a new, more demanding, and more dangerous arena. A tyrannically souled hedonist or acquisitive oligarch could “live his bliss” far better by staying out of politics. They also fail to explain the appeal of Trump — an appeal that, four years ago, Carson Holloway rightly observed is due to his thumos, or spiritedness.

Trump has the soul, not of a tyrant, or even of an oligarch, but of an honor-lover. Plato called this type of soul timocratic: a man in whose soul the love of honor (timē) is the passion that rules (kratia) over his whole self. Such men may enjoy, and pursue, other goods, including wealth and power; but above all, they wish to accomplish something great and to be rightly celebrated for their accomplishments.

Trump said it himself in 2013: “If you fail once, twice, three times, it doesn’t matter. Learn from your mistakes and push forward to VICTORY – the sweetest feeling there is!” Only a timocrat — not a hedonist, and not a man consumed by love of money — would identify victory as “the sweetest feeling there is.”

Trump the timocrat desires victory and honor above all else. Notably, “honor” here means not mere popularity or reputation (the “fame” of a celebrity, which Trump already had in spades before 2015), but the esteem and gratitude that are bestowed on a champion by his community for fighting, and winning, on their behalf. This love of honor is classically expressed in military service (Plato pointed to Sparta as a timocratic regime), and we might think of American heroes such as Teddy Roosevelt as more-or-less classically timocratic men.

Aman’s type of soul will also reveal what he esteems in others. Here again Trump appears to be a timocrat.

Why is Trump not just a longstanding supporter of the UFC and friend with its CEO, Dana White — why did Trump’s affinity for the UFC take on a new prominence this election cycle, from his rockstar entrances to his election victory party at a UFC fight, entourage of cabinet appointees and political allies in tow? A UFC fight is one of the clearest examples, short of actual battle, of the kind of victory a timocratic man is interested in.

Why did Trump spend no less than 10% of his election night victory speech describing SpaceX’s October 13 “chopstick arms” catch of its Super Heavy booster? Trump the timocrat loves to celebrate “winners,” and condemns his opponents as “losers;” and victory comes in many forms. Americans have always been a pioneering people, and in the 20th century we acquired world domination by marrying this pioneering spirit to our technological ingenuity.

So far, the greatest accomplishment of America’s distinctive technological civilization — the achievement that will likely dominate later generations’ understanding of the 20th century — has been the 1969 moon landing. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the most prominent and impressive example of a technological “winner” in 21st century America. Musk’s determination to revitalize space travel harkens back to the era that Americans of all political persuasions recognize as our pioneering, technological civilization’s Space Age peak — and promises to renew it for our time.

In 2026, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump’s timocratic tastes were clear when he announced his semiquincentennial plans. Prominent among them were a Great American State Fair, to include contests for high school athletes that Trump dubbed “Patriot Games,” to “show off the best of American skill, sportsmanship, and competitive spirit.”

Trump is also determined to “bring back the National Garden of American Heroes,” first proposed amid the iconoclastic 1619 Riots during his first term, “and commission artists for the first 100 statues to populate the new park.” Champions in athletic competition, and heroes who embodied “the American spirit of daring and defiance, excellence and adventure, courage and confidence, loyalty and love” — these are the kinds of “winners” that a timocratic soul loves, and hopes that others will love as well.

Whatever else happens before, during, or after his second term, Donald Trump has already given his name to the current era. His promise to Make America Great Again resonates so powerfully in our dispirited and dispiriting times because it directly contradicts the End of History’s shriveled aspirations — to have one’s “little pleasures for the day” and “little pleasures for the night,” unable to “launch the arrow of [our] longing beyond man,” unable anymore “to give birth to a dancing star.” That promise directly contradicts the Left’s denunciation and renunciation of the American heritage — not just a catalogue of ideas or abstractions or progressive achievements in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, but a truly timocratic legacy of vitality and conquest: of the wilderness, of the open seas, of the continent, and of the stars.

The American poet Robinson Jeffers wrote that “the love of freedom has been the quality of Western man,” but that it has taken different forms for different civilizations: “For the Greeks the love of beauty, for Rome of ruling; for the present age the passionate love of discovery. … And you, America, that passion made you.” Let us hope we can recover that passion, so that it can make us ourselves once again.