Depending on your perspective, the Republicans’ recent belly flop in the midterm elections might seem like a tragedy, a farce, or a bit of both. Hysteria and ecstasy have been easy to come by. Wisdom, it must be said, has not.
At moments like this, when panic and fanaticism reign in the present, I find it helpful to take a break from the fracas of the news feed and look for enduring insights from the past. Right now, in particular, I’m getting a lot out of an ancient Greek comedy: Aristophanes’s Clouds.
When Clouds was first produced in the late 5th century BCE, Athens was just beginning to lose its grip on the sprawling naval empire it gained in the wake of a stunning victory against Persia a generation before. A little like America after the World Wars, Athens emerged from the Persian Wars as a freshly minted world leader, flush with cultural and political confidence. Just as America’s postwar energies largely dissipated into partisan infighting and foolhardy military expeditions, Athens found its golden-age glow quickly fading away as chronic overreach brought it into conflict with its rival Sparta in the disastrous Peloponnesian War.
All of this sets up Clouds to be remarkably informative about the question of how the MAGA movement, in just a few short years, ceded its extraordinary momentum to the young Turks of the Democratic Party.
Let’s back up to set the scene. Clouds’ playwright, Aristophanes, had a long-standing feud with various Athenian political leaders—especially Cleon, a general in the ongoing Peloponnesian War and a blustering populist hawk (not entirely unlike Donald Trump in his later years). But Aristophanes was no revolutionary itching to tear down the system and bring on anarchy. Rather, his plays bitterly savage Athens’s leaders not because they represent law and order, but because, in his view, they misrepresent it by thundering about virtue while indulging their own vices.
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