I’ve been thinking about Thucydides a lot lately, especially the passage in which he describes the train wreck that politics in the Greek world became.
He says that city-states became rabidly factional, such that people began to value behavior they used to condemn, and condemn behavior that used to be valued, such as deliberation, careful attention to decisions, looking into issues, reasonable caution—those were all dismissed as cowardly and unmanly. A culture that once equated good education with skill in deliberation and war (as in Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” toward the beginning of the war with Sparta), now condemned thinking. Thucydides says,
“Irrational recklessness was now considered courageous commitment, hesitation while looking to the future was high-styled cowardice, moderation was a cover for lack of manhood, while senseless anger now helped to define a true man, and deliberation for security was a specious excuse for dereliction. The man of violent temper was always credible, anyone opposing him was suspect. [.…] Quite simply, one was praised for outracing everyone else to commit a crime. […]Kinship became alien compared with party affiliation, because the latter led to drastic action with less hesitation. For party meetings did not take place to use the benefit of existing laws, but to find advantage in breaking them. [….] Men responded to reasonable words from their opponents with defensive actions if they had the advantage, and not with magnanimity. Revenge mattered more than not being harmed in the first place. And if there were actually reconciliations under oath, they occurred because of both sides’ lack of alternatives, and lasted only as long as neither found some other source of power. [….] All this was caused by leadership based on greed and ambition and led in turn to fanaticism once men were committed to the power struggle. For the leading men in the cities, through their emphasis on an attractive slogan for each side—political equality for the masses, the moderation of aristocracy—treated as their prize the public interest to which they paid lip service and, competing by every means to get the better of one another, boldly committed atrocities and processed to still worse acts of revenge, stopping at limits set by neither justice nor the city’s interest but by the gratification of their parties at every stage, and whether by condemnations through unjust voting or by acquiring superiority in brute force, both sides were ready to justify to the utmost their immediate hopes of victory. And so neither side acted with piety, but those who managed to accomplish something hateful by using honorable arguments were more highly regarded. The citizens in the middle, either because they had not taken sides or because begrudged their survival, were destroyed by both factions.” (3.82, Lattimore translation)