Donald Trump’s democratic legacy

Monti is a professor of sociology at Saint Louis University.

How might Americans’ willingness to act out in public be put to better use than the destructive mess some of us want to make on behalf of Donald Trump and the rest of us hope to avoid?

My answer to this question builds on Trump’s obsession with crowds and how they could accomplish the very thing he has for so long managed to avoid: accountability for the crimes he has long committed against many individual Americans and more recently against the whole of the American people.

In thinking out loud about how to punish him, I can see how a prison sentence would inspire his supporters to come out even more strongly to support his claims about rigged elections and corrupt courts.

Be that as it may, for however long he occupies a prominent spot on the public stage, the rest of us must worry about the best way to avoid the violence he inspires others to do in his name and figure out how to hold him accountable for crimes he has committed.

Trump wasn’t the first person with aspirations to become autocrat-in-chief and there will be others in the future. None will be as consequential or memorable as Trump — not because of what he set out to do but because of the dramatic way he failed and then slunk out of Washington on the day Joe Biden was inaugurated.

The late historian Hugh Davis Graham pointed out more than a half-century ago that the central paradox in American history was the odd juxtaposition of popular unrest with the stability of important social and political institutions. Americans have been unrestful for a long time.

But how did Americans come to use crowds and civil unrest this way?

The answer to this question is even more surprising but would probably please Trump because he could blame it all on foreigners.

It was the Greeks’ fault.

Not the modern ones. The ones that Aristotle and Plato lived among and whose writings on politics still inform the way we govern ourselves today.

The origins of the unexpected union of popular unrest and institutional stability go back thousands of years. They can be traced to the ancient cities of Greece and the way Greeks made room for crowds in their social and political routines.

The ancient Greeks were aware of the destructive potential of crowds. Their cities, not unlike our own, could be difficult to manage and their people tough to keep in line. That is why Greek leaders found ways for crowds to come together in public and express their views on matters of common concern.

Of particular interest to us would be the trials of Greek elites accused of violating their city’s laws or committing other kinds of serious offenses. The accused in these cases had more social standing, power and wealth than the hundreds and sometimes thousands of people who were invited to render an opinion in public about the offending party’s guilt or innocence.

Everyday people, many of whom might not have had legal standing as “citizens” in their city, were asked to weigh in on these matters. Greek crowds were invited to make loud declarations about official misconduct and public insults to people’s sensibilities.

The other thing these trials accomplished was to provide a public rebuke for the highest and mightiest citizens of the city who learned they could be held accountable for serious violations of the law and breaches of the public’s trust.

Slaves might be killed for their misdeeds, because they had nothing to give up except their life. But wealthy and powerful people could lose their property, be expelled from the city or, most importantly perhaps, be publicly shamed.

I’ll be returning to this idea shortly.

The Greeks’ public deliberations would have looked rowdy, but they more closely resembled a big public arbitration. The idea was for people to argue out loud about what should be done and gradually reach some middle ground about what fair punishment looked like.

Everyone could walk away satisfied that justice had been served. Public order was restored. The community could move on.

People with money, power and social prestige — being more equal than everyone else — eventually figured out how to limit their accountability to the people they sought to rule. This change took a long time to happen. It is not the only reason why people with less standing in cities took to acting out in public without the permission of city leaders. But it was a big one.

Modern crowds, less easily constrained than the ones ancient Greek leaders organized, became more threatening to city leaders. Threatening or not, large numbers of less privileged people learned how to defend themselves when their rights were being ignored and their status as full-fledged members of the city was questioned. Like their better-off neighbors, the masses asserted the privilege to break important rules and customs and get away with it.

Which brings us back to Donald Trump.

Trump is already expected to give up a lot of money because of his sexual assault conviction. Should a judge eventually decide he needs to be locked up for another crime he committed, putting him in a jail cell or confining him to his shrinking New City condo or Mar-a-Lago estate would certainly be an option.

If we were back in ancient Greece, however, judges would turn the decision about what to do with Trump over to several hundred or thousands of his fellow Americans. They would let “the people” come up with a punishment, one that might not fit the crime but would certainly be appropriate for the criminal.

The problem, of course, is that our courts don’t ask the public what punishment should be handed down. But we could imagine what the result would look like if they did.

A great many of Trump’s detractors would want to lock him up. His supporters would want him to get nothing more than a slap on the wrist. Facing each other on the streets of New York or wherever his sentence was being handed down, these two crowds might be inclined to fight it out.

Trump would love that. Most of the rest of us probably wouldn’t.

If we take a page from the Greeks’ handbook on crowds, however, there’s a good chance we could avoid a nasty public fight. The courts could fashion a punishment that tortures Trump, just like the Greeks might have done, by shaming him in public.

Make Trump work off his sentence in soup kitchens and homeless shelters, helping disabled people and wounded veterans, and assisting immigrants to resettle and find jobs.

In serving some of the very people he’s spoken against most nastily and gone out of his way to continually insult, it wouldn’t matter if he was faking it and didn’t change his attitude towards such people. It only matters that he would be held publicly accountable for his crimes and the rest of us have a chance to watch his public act of contrition.

I think it’s a punishment the ancient Greeks would have understood and the rest of us could live with.

Most importantly, perhaps, it’s a punishment that would deny Trump the chance to declare himself the martyr he muses about being when he isn’t comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln or God.