[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]

The Dems are marshaling their forces in the face of Kamala Harris’s waning support from voters. Particularly troubling for them is the loss of a fifth of black men’s support, given that in a tight race it doesn’t take a lot of defections to determine the outcome. So, the Party’s éminence grise, Barack Obama, went to Pennsylvania, a critical swing state, to lecture a group of black men in Pittsburgh.

Obama expressed his displeasured with black males’ lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, which seemed “to be more pronounced with the brothers.” Nor did Obama like the “reasons and excuses” for their disaffection with Harris, which one imagines include issues such as inflation, crime, and the chaotic border. With condescending arrogance, Obama sniffed, “I have a problem with that.”

Worse yet, Obama exploited an insulting stereotype that black men are misogynists. Brushing away those “reasons and excuses” that trouble millions of voters of every ethnicity, Obama explained that “Because part of it [male support for Trump] makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”

The blow-back from all sides was swift. “Obama’s remark,” The Hill reports, “have drawn the ire of several prominent Black Americans. Former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner asked, ‘Why are Black men being lectured to? Why are Black men being belittled in ways that no other voting group [is]?’ Turner added ‘she has a lot of love’ for Obama, ‘but for him to single out Black men is wrong, and some of the Black men that I have talked to have their reasons why they want to vote a different way, and even if some of us may not like that, we have to respect it.’”

Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ) agreed on X: “Voting for someone solely based on the color of their skin is a shallow approach that undermines the true value of leadership and character. Judging a candidate on their principles, vision, and ability to lead, rather than rely on racial identity should be the deciding factor.”

Finally, Obama’s scolding, as The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker observed, implies some unsavory explanations for all men who support Trump: “Are you an immoral, bigoted person—one of those notoriously misogynistic black men who can’t stand uppity women, or a white racist who hates foreigners? Or are you a dupe, easily misled by misinformation? Maybe you’re both. Whatever. You may not be good or wise enough to understand, but you must listen to us, your moral and intellectual superiors, and do as you’re told. You’ll thank us later.”

Obama’s insults, however, are business as usual for Democrat politicians, from Obama’s two-bit psychologizing that Trump’s supporters “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations”; to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” filled with “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic [sic]—you name it.”

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, “The loudest yelps for decorum and manners come from the purveyors of vicious, question-begging ad hominem slurs.”

The point, however, is not the fact of such rhetoric in our political discourse, nor even the hypocrisy, which have characterized political rhetoric in our representative government that gives its very diverse citizens political equality and freedom of speech. The diversity of mores and standards of appropriate and inappropriate speech from the very beginning of our country made insults, slurs, smears, and shameless lies prevalent from both parties.

The peculiar arrogance of today’s Dems, on the other hand, reflects the pretensions of cognitive elites and credentialed technocrats who “follow the science” and think that “experts” should trump the voters’ interests, common sense, morals, and experience. Hence the current assault on the First Amendment, with partisan calls for intrusive government regulations to silence their political rival’s “misinformation” or “hate speech,” which of course frequently lie in the eye of the partisan beholder.

What’s more interesting is that these attitudes historically have characterized those who opposed giving non-elites equal rights and political freedom––no matter their birth, status, education, or wealth––ever since ancient Athens’s transformational development of these novel political ideals 2500 years ago.

This ancient anti-democracy tradition questioned the ability of the demos, the “masses” or the “poor,” to know what is best for the state, and so should be guided by those of noble birth, wealth, or later, philosophical training and knowledge. The “well-born” argued that––as Pindar, the celebrator of aristocratic athletic prowess, had put it about the time Athenians democracy began to develop––they have the “splendor running in the blood,” an innate capacity for excellence, virtue, courage, and wisdom that made them natural leaders. “The wise man knows many things in his blood,” Pindar wrote, but “the vulgar are taught”

The “poor” common people, on the other hand, are volatile and greedy, quick to violence, and prey to tyrannical demagogues who promise to redistribute the wealth of the rich aristocrats.

More brutal elitist prejudices characterize one of the earliest critics of democracy, conventionally called the Old Oligarch, who wrote that “Among the common people are the greatest ignorance, ill-discipline, and depravity.”

This divide between affluent elites and the middling non-elites also defined the nascent American Republic, and was a bone of contentious for the Framers of the Constitution. Indeed, the dangers of investing the masses with political power was a frequent topic during the debates at the Constitutional Convention. Edmund Randolph, the governor of Virginia, asserted, “It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the power of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches.” Fellow delegate Elbridge Gerry agreed: “The people do not want virtue; but are the dupes of pretended patriots. . . [who] are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men.” Sound familiar?

In 1792, a few years after the ratification of the Constitution, James Madison defined these two conflicting factions: “One of the divisions consists of those who . . . are more partial to the opulent than to the other classes of society; and hav[e] debauched themselves into a persuasion that mankind are incapable of governing themselves . . .” Such men “wish to point the measures of government less to the interest of the many than of the few, and less to the reason of the many than to their weaknesses” so that “the government itself may by degrees be narrowed into fewer hands.”

“The other division . . . consists of those who believing in the doctrine that mankind are capable of governing themselves, and hating hereditary power as an insult to the reason and outrage to the rights of man, are naturally offended at every public measure that does not appeal to the general interest of the community, or that is not strictly conformable to the principle, and conducive to the preservation of republican government.”

In our times, of course, credentials and advanced degrees have created a new aristocracy, an affluent “cognitive elite” who dismiss common sense, practical wisdom, tradition, and faith as mere anachronisms or superstitions that dupe the masses without college credential and wealth whom demagogues and wannabe tyrants manipulate with patriotism, prejudice, bigotry, class resentment, and disinformation that reinforce their false knowledge, selfish interests, and irrational beliefs.

One can easily see how these ancient stereotypes resemble the slanders against Trump and his supporters. As Gerard Baker suggested above, “Are you an immoral, bigoted person . . . . Or are you a dupe, easily misled by misinformation? Maybe you’re both. Whatever. You may not be good or wise enough to understand, but you must listen to us, your moral and intellectual superiors, and do as you’re told. You’ll thank us later.”

One hears in these parodic questions the same arrogant bigotry of the ancient critics of Athenian democracy.

Of course, we have a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy as an ancient Athenian would understand it. But the progressive Democrats have frequently accused Donald Trump of attacking “our democracy,” their misnomer for the partial but expanding technocracy of credentialed big-government managers and “experts” who must take hoi polloi in hand, and wean or force them from their discredited Constitution, for unalienable rights and freedoms interfere in today’s technocrats’ schemes to aggrandize power and “wish to point the measures of government less to the interest of the many than of the few.”

Finally, we should remember the central concern of citizens from ancient Athens to America’s Framers––how to avoid the tyranny of both the minority and the majority. Contrary to our technocrats, “solving problems” wasn’t the point of the Constitution, but creating mechanisms that protect all citizens from those extremes.

As we hear the Dems’ campaign rhetoric and promises of new regulation and more redistribution to achieve “social justice,” always keep in mind the wisdom of Montesquieu: “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.”