The opening passage of Plato's Republic finds Socrates walking with a young friend and student, Glaucon, in Piraeus, the port of Athens, where they had come to observe a religious festival. They are spotted by another young man, Polemarchus, who sends his slave ahead to ask Socrates to wait for him. What follows is a comic parody of an “arrest,” with Polemarchus pointing out that he has a number of friends with him (including Adeimantus, Glaucon's brother), and he would like Socrates to stay in Piraeus and accompany him and his group to his home. Socrates appears to be preparing to return to Athens, and Polemarchus says to him, “Well, you must either prove stronger than we are, or you will have to stay here.” Socrates responds, “Isn't there another alternative, namely that we persuade you to let us go?” Polemarchus' reply to this is certainly a conversation stopper: “But could you persuade us, if we won't listen?” Socrates has to admit that this is impossible, and he submits to the “arrest” and joins the group in visiting Polemarchus' home, where the conversation constituting the rest of the dialogue takes place.“But could you persuade us, if we won't listen?” A powerful point. Conversation is only possible among those who listen and consider the positions of those who speak. Without that kind of sympathetic listening, debate is just a surrogate for force—it isn't the words that matter; what is decisive, rather, is the relative strength, measured in terms of votes, guns, wealth, or some other standard unrelated to the reasonableness of the spoken words, of the person or people uttering them. Philosophy, really any form of reasonable discussion, is certainly not possible when we measure one another only by the physical force we wield. This force represents the world of necessity, rather than the world of ideas and free choice.In this brief opening passage of Plato's great book, we are presented with intimations of paramount importance for two prominent and interrelated contemporary concerns: the dramatic contrast between democratic and undemocratic institutions and practices, and the valuable role a broadly experienced liberal education plays in supporting and maintaining a healthy democratic politics and society.It is no secret that force largely rules the world. We are certainly subject to the forces of nature, which are mute and incapable of engaging in negotiation or discussion with us; we either learn to control, channel, or deflect them, or they will (and usually do) control us. In our relations with human beings, we know that our personal affairs far too often display the marks of force rather than consent or agreement, and our relationship with the impersonal groups, institutions, and individuals of the market and political world far too often measure influence and authority by sheer brute power. Our aspiration, however, is to tame these powers and bring them to the discipline of communication, reason, and agreement. If only, we hope, men would no longer use force to impose their will on women; if only, we hope, whites would no longer use their power to impose their will on Black and Brown neighbors; if only, we hope, our politics would grow out of genuine debate and conversation, where opponents listen to one another, consider their perspective and their arguments, and accept the outcome of democratic contestation as legitimate and binding on all participants. The world of conversation is one that allows for freedom and agreement; in the world governed only by force, even the powerful appear to be simply responding to their own advantageous material conditions. Choice doesn't appear to have anything to do with it. As President Trump made clear in a well-known interview with George Stephanopoulos, taking information about a political opponent from a foreign country during a political campaign seemed no different to him than any other opposition research one is forced by the circumstances to pursue. The implication is clear: he would be foolish to refuse to pay attention, regardless of the source of the information or the intention of the informants. Trump portrayed himself less as a moral agent, with real and meaningful choices to make about his behavior, than as the plaything of a situation which makes such decisions for him—he simply had to do what necessity dictates. What else can he do? The difference between “winners” and “losers” in Trump's world is simply between those he takes to be smart enough to understand what they need to do—that is, who understand the necessities of a particular situation—and those who are too stupid or deluded to be clear headed about this.We live at a moment in which the aspirations for conversation and choice are treated with contempt. In 2019, a gun shop in North Carolina displayed billboards picturing four first-term members of the US Congress, all women of color (and all recently reelected), describing them as the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (and, in the advertising copy's blunt language, “idiots” too). This, we were encouraged to believe, suggested that the presence of such women in our political order makes purchasing a weapon from Cherokee Guns a good idea.1 Our politics, especially at the national level, has increasingly taken this tone of outright battle, where the moral or principled concerns that the Republican Party has in the past vociferously professed are clearly no longer important to its members who have proven themselves willing to submit to any indignity or extreme violation of these moral and political principles in order to maintain and extend their own political power. President Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women yet maintained the enthusiastic support of his base (which continues to include, as is often noted, large numbers of evangelical Christians). Indeed, those who raised principled objections to the President's policies and his vile rhetoric of insult and division were contemptuously slandered as “stupid” or “low IQ,” clearly suggesting that the real world, the political world, will be treated as beyond principle, as the realm of bare-knuckled power and domination. The weak will be humiliated and vanquished. The idea of a shared set of underlying values between political opponents, that there are common commitments held by (virtually) all our elected officials and citizens, is dismissed as childish make-believe. Even pandering to our foreign adversaries has become acceptable to those for whom our politics has been reduced to nothing more than a blood sport. Any conception of principle above interest has been mocked at the highest level of government and winning at any and all costs is the only logic considered “realistic” or even acceptable (even, again, if it requires seeking aid from our enemies or, more recently, undermining the institutions of democratic governance themselves). There is a revolution at work in contemporary American politics, and this revolution is designed to exile morality entirely from political life. Public affairs are to be the domain of the strong, those who never apologize for any insult, indignity, corruption, or violation of plain decency. Those who worry about such things are insulted as weak, as “snowflakes,” as contemptable crybabies without the slightest sense of reality about the world in which we live.2Don't misunderstand me. I am fully aware that Donald Trump and his supporters simply said (and say) out loud what many in the past have believed but were too polite to say in public. I am fully aware that power has too frequently overshadowed and distorted principle in our politics, and that the powerful have all too often used the rhetoric of justice and propriety to control and oppress the powerless. One would be a political infant to ignore the shocking and depressing degree to which this has been so. Despite this obvious truth, however, there have also been moments of principle and commitment in our politics. At a time of civil war, Lincoln appealed to his adversaries' shared humanity, and refused to claim a knowledge of God's will in relation to human affairs. During the Civil Rights movement, Rev. King and many others located the principles of equality and justice in our traditions that could guide aspirations for reform. During less contentious moments, the public record is full of examples of everyday citizens and political elites accepting both defeat and victory with grace and dignity, of accepting the norms of debate, and at least feigning respect for law, process, and principle, of behaving, in short, as if their public life must be constrained by ethical principle. At the very least, a world based on freedom and principle has been a goal with which to shame and criticize the all too common brutality of our politics. How else can we understand the recent and welcome influence of the Black Lives Matter movement? Without the backdrop of the moral aspirations for equality, freedom, and justice, such a slogan would hold none of its current appeal.The problem with a world in which plain power has replaced argument and debate, or the meaningful appeal to norms and values, is that it threatens the very possibility of morality. Morality assumes choice and evaluation, while force follows only the logic of victory and defeat, of nothing beyond opposing forces, of necessity. Ours is increasingly a world in which arguments about what should be fall on deaf ears. What will be is nothing more than what the strong – through force or fraud – are able to impose upon others. Our public and private lives may not yet have reached the point in which conversation has no meaning (as, again, the Black Lives Matter movement suggests, as perhaps does the recent election), but the events of the last few years have demonstrated the ease with which we can slide, so quickly and seemingly without effective opposition, in this direction. The tragic end point of such developments in the twentieth century was fascist brutality. There is no moral conversation to be had with worshippers of power; the logic of their commitment is that they will cease to expand their domination over others only when forced to do so. The only possible check on the ideology of power is greater power, as the cataclysm of WWII demonstrated. Anyone who thinks they can form alliances with worshippers of power in order to pursue moral ends should consider this truth carefully.To the degree that my discussion captures a reality of our current political life, we find ourselves in a position approaching that which Socrates faces at the beginning of The Republic. The appeal to discussion, to a conversation where each side listens to and considers the position of the other, is too often drowned out by odious online screeds and tweets. Anger and hatred threaten to overwhelm and destroy the communal life and commitment required by democratic debate. In recent years, political “intelligence” has come to be unapologetically committed to insult, put-downs, dehumanization, inflammatory assertion, and the bold-faced lie. It is clear that a significant number of American citizens are today unable or unwilling to distinguish between real information and good faith arguments, on the one hand, and the shameless lying and distortions of demagogues, on the other. Indeed, we live at a moment in which the very idea of a shared reality, of a truth that transcends party and interest, has famously come under attack by elites at the highest level of government. This is a world in which Polemarchus' challenge to Socrates—“But could you persuade us, if we won't listen?”—is all too real, all too serious and persistent as a working political strategy.A world of brute power makes a mockery of both democracy (by caring nothing for deliberation or just process) and education (by insulting the commitment to reason itself), two of the most deep-seated values professed by American society throughout much of our history. The project for Socrates in The Republic was to somehow transform his relationship of submission into a conversation, a dialogue, in which the participants would listen to one another, discuss, argue, and hopefully find common knowledge. The first book (of ten) of the dialogue ends with something of a false start, in an exchange with an ambitious and arrogant young man, Thrasymachus, for whom debate is more a form of warfare than conversation. After Socrates leads Thrasymachus into contradiction, and in this way embarrasses and silences him, he (Socrates) settles in and succeeds in transforming the evening from a contest of clashing wills and opinions into a shared effort to understand the nature of justice. Regardless of our opinion about the substantive views Socrates develops with his interlocutors in the remainder of the dialogue, one of the deeply optimistic messages of Plato's work is simply that Socrates was able to transform a situation in which relative power determined the course of events into one in which reason and conversation ruled, if only for an evening.This optimism is a key source for hope about the possibility of actually engaging in what Socrates calls philosophy, but which we may think of (so as to avoid an overly technical or specialized understanding of what philosophy might mean) simply as the commitment to reasoned investigation of important matters. Plato would have us believe that such investigation requires a community of participants and a willingness to suspend conventional sources of authority (“forces,” that is) for the free and full play of imagination and reason. The optimism built into the structure of this dialogue is chastened by our knowledge of the broader story of Socrates: that he was executed by Athenian democracy for teachings that appeared to a majority of citizen jurors to subvert the substantive commitments of Athenian society and, to add insult to injury, corrupted the young who witnessed and shared in Socrates' philosophical investigations. Despite (and perhaps partly because of) this tragedy, Socrates' martyrdom inspires the entire Western philosophical project. Philosophical inquiry obviously gets off to a rough start, but it nonetheless raises the possibility of learning to become free in an essential sense: learning, that is, to think about what is right and true, and not merely reacting to the forces—natural, political, social, and so forth—that are acting (or attempting to act) upon us.This is another way of suggesting that here there is hope for the possibility of what we might think of as liberal education. To thrive, liberal education requires a political context in which “philosophical” investigation (that is, honest investigation of important matters, from scientific to normative and humanist concerns) is tolerated, even encouraged, even though it will inevitably generate dissent and disagreement. By far the friendliest political environments in our world for such investigations are liberal democracies, in which there is a wide tolerance for alternative and conflicting views, relatively democratic access to the conversations themselves, and a significant commitment to educating the young to develop the skills and commitments to participating in this “philosophical” project. In fact, we might think that such an education is not only tolerated and encouraged in modern liberal democracies, but required by them for the reason that democracy, self-rule, promises a high level of choice for all citizens.3 Political freedom assumes such choice. Choice requires deliberation, debate, the consideration of alternative views, the ability to form a view about what might be good, and not merely what looks necessary or inevitable. Democracy promises, or at least aspires, to a certain level of self-rule for all citizens. This means, in turn, wide-spread participation in public choices about leadership, policy, and so forth. In light of this, we can see why liberal democracy is historically so intimately tied to liberal education: this education seeks to promote precisely the skills and commitments to deliberation, reasoned debate, and free choice that are the cornerstones of democracy, and it seeks to promote them for all citizens even though they have historically been reserved, in undemocratic regimes, for the privileged and powerful few. Democratic citizens are asked their views and their choices. Such a request assumes that these choices are not simply inevitable reflections of power and interest; it assumes at least a modicum of rationality and autonomy on the part of all political participants. It assumes, that is, that citizens are free. And this freedom assumes that the skills of freedom—most essentially, the rational capacity for deliberation, evaluation, discussion, and debate—have been either allowed to flourish spontaneously or have been cultivated among the citizens. Assuming that we cannot rely entirely on the spontaneous appearance of such skills (and I would submit that we cannot), freedom requires a “philosophical” or liberal education.The commitment to liberal education for the sake of encouraging the cultivation of free, democratic citizens has, I suggested earlier, a deep (if not yet fully realized or equitable) history in American society, and still represents one of our highest aspirations. It is also, as we know, under significant stress and attack in our current political environment. The degree to which our politics will be hopelessly deformed by force and fraud is yet uncertain: the 2020 election provides a rebuke, if not exactly a resounding one, of these trends. There is still a slender thread of hope for a majority commitment to the promise of democracy, as well as the intellectual virtues and practices upon which it must rest.