Scott Free Never Was...,

WaPo |  President Trump apparently had an affair with a porn star while his model wife was home with their newborn son. No surprise there. Keeping the affair out of the newspapers before the 2016 election reportedly cost him $130,000, around a measly 0.004 percent of his claimed net worth of $3.1 billion — nothing to him. The fact that you might be unsettled by this news also means nothing to him. Trump is impervious to scandal and immune to social censure. He is insulated from consequence by power, money and fame in a way not imaginable to the ordinary person. He is the freest man alive.

Americans like to think we invented freedom, but we really only extended it to an absurd conclusion in the person of Trump. The ancients had their version of freedom, and they were as fiercely protective of it as we are of ours. For Plato, people are free when they are fully in control of themselves, with their self-mastery uninhibited by passions or appetites. Much the same for Aristotle, who saw freedom in rational, intelligent self-direction. On that foundational principle, they and the other worthies of the ancient world formed the idea of democracy as a system balancing equality and responsibility, for, as Aristotle wrote, “where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.” How right he was.

Plenty of history came between the ancient experiments with democracy and ours. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas, though separated by centuries, took more or less the same view: People are naturally inclined to desire goodness and truth, and whatever gets in the way of that pursuit makes us less free. In the late Middle Ages, that thread began to unravel. By the modern era, it was thoroughly frayed.