Much has been made of Donald Trump’s narcissism. Dana Milbank at The Washington Post speaks of a “festival of narcissism”; David Brooks of The New York Times refers to Trump’s “ego as ideology”; the clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis claims that Trump suffers from “textbook narcissistic personality disorder.” The list could go on. Indeed, Trump’s rise seems to be part of a broader cultural phenomenon that the scholars Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell have dubbed “the narcissism epidemic.”
If Trump really is a narcissist, we have to ask what a “narcissist in chief” would mean for our democracy. The Emory University psychologists Scott O. Lilienfeld and Ashley L. Watts paint an ambivalent picture. Although narcissists are “gifted stage performers who are persuasive and decisive,” they wrote in the Times, voters may also “get a good deal more than they bargained for” because narcissists often overestimate their abilities and accumulate “resources for themselves at others’ expense.”
How did Donald Trump’s candidacy happen? What ideas has he upended? How is academe responding? What does his candidacy mean for the future of democracy? We asked scholars from a variety of disciplines to weigh in.
The ancient Greeks, however, were less ambivalent about the threat narcissism poses to democracy — and one figure in particular deserves close comparison with Trump. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides narrates the decline of Athenian democracy at the hands of Alcibiades, the Athenian general and playboy. In Plato’s Republic, a regime ruled by benevolent philosopher kings undergoes a steady decline until democracy finally breeds a narcissistic tyrant — left unnamed in the text, though the allusions throughout suggest that it is Alcibiades.
Robert Garland, a classicist at Colgate University, has recently argued that Trump and Alcibiades are a lot alike. Both were born into positions of privilege and power — Trump the son of a wealthy businessman, Alcibiades the nephew and ward of Pericles, the ruler of Athens. As children, both loved to fight and win. As an adult, Alcibiades excelled as a military general, while Trump supposedly mastered the art of the deal. Both are known for boasting of their sexual exploits, and both show little loyalty to anything beyond themselves. Indeed, Alcibiades is said to have wanted his name and influence to extend to everything. The parallel to Trump — with his Trump Plaza, Trump Tower, Trump Entertainment Resorts — could not be more evident.
In his account of the Peloponnesian war, Thucydides contrasts the statesmanship of Pericles, which contributed to Athenian greatness, with the narcissism of Alcibiades, which led to Athenian demise. Thucydides, however, suggests that Pericles’ regime planted the seeds for the emergence of a figure like Alcibiades. Just as Ronald Reagan arguably furthered American empire by unleashing the greed of the Gordon Gekko ’80s, Pericles prudently excited and then channeled the private ambitions of the populace toward Athenian greatness. When it came time to rule, Alcibiades, animated by the same self-regard that characterized the people under Pericles, used politics not as a means to advance Athenian greatness but rather to further his own. According to Thucydides, Alcibiades’ insatiable lust for glory drove him to persuade the Athenians to undertake a risky invasion of Sicily that ultimately led to the downfall of Athens.
The narcissistic tyrant of Plato’s Republic is no less ambitious and no less in love with himself. Although Andrew Sullivan has recently appealed to Plato’s Republic to argue that democracy has precipitated the rise of a tyrant like Trump, a more careful reading of the text shows that a self-regarding eros — not democracy — effects the transition to tyranny. For Plato, democracy merely creates the conditions for tyranny. The cause of democracy’s downfall, however, is a narcissism that animates figures like Alcibiades or Trump.
Those concerned about the fate of our own democracy ought to be worried about the narcissism Trump embodies — and that our culture has increasingly embraced. This gospel of self-love has many of us falling for ourselves. It could, in turn, have many of us falling for another Alcibiades.
Matthew Meyer is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Scranton.
