I unironically support this.

I think this is a fitting monument that deserves a place of public prominence in Richmond, VA. In the event that we seized power, I wouldn’t take it down either.

I would leave this up to illustrate to future generations the absurdity of liberal democracy and the extremes to which our culture degenerated under that system of government. It turned our culture upside down and in the end completely perverted the natural order.

New York Times:

“He looks like a man lost in time, uprooted, with the horse he rode in on, from a previous century, perhaps, or was it a future one? In a riot of flashing neon signs and costumed avengers, populating a patch of Times Square on Broadway between 46th and 47th Streets, he can be seen looking regal and triumphant astride a rearing steed worthy of Napoleon, flanked between the modern colonial outposts of American Eagle Outfitters and Express … After the sculpture leaves Times Square in December, it will be permanently installed in Richmond on Arthur Ashe Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, recently renamed after the Richmond-born African-American tennis icon, that crosses Monument Avenue. The street’s renaming came amid a statewide reckoning over the Confederacy’s racist heritage. And the rider in “Rumors of War,” a young African-American man with a knot of dreadlocks in a hoodie and ripped jeans, reflects a similar effort to reclaim history. …”

When I look at this spectacle, I find my mind circling back to Plato’s critique of democracy and his prescient account of its downfall in The Republic:

Plato explained how pushing liberty and equality to ever greater extremes eventually discredits democracy and brings on a desire for authority that produces tyranny:

“True.

And democracy has her own good, of which the insatiable desire brings her to dissolution?

What good?

Freedom, I replied; which, as they tell you in a democracy, is the glory of the State –and that therefore in a democracy alone will the freeman of nature deign to dwell.

Yes; the saying is in everybody’s mouth.

I was going to observe, that the insatiable desire of this and the neglect of other things introduces the change in democracy, which occasions a demand for tyranny. …

Quite true, he said.

The last extreme of popular liberty is when the slave bought with money, whether male or female, is just as free as his or her purchaser; nor must I forget to tell of the liberty and equality of the two sexes in relation to each other.

Why not, as Aeschylus says, utter the word which rises to our lips?

That is what I am doing, I replied; and I must add that no one who does not know would believe, how much greater is the liberty which the animals who are under the dominion of man have in a democracy than in any other State: for truly, the she-dogs, as the proverb says, are as good as their she-mistresses, and the horses and asses have a way of marching along with all the rights and dignities of freemen; and they will run at anybody who comes in their way if he does not leave the road clear for them: and all things are just ready to burst with liberty.

When I take a country walk, he said, I often experience what you describe. You and I have dreamed the same thing.

And above all, I said, and as the result of all, see how sensitive the citizens become; they chafe impatiently at the least touch of authority and at length, as you know, they cease to care even for the laws, written or unwritten; they will have no one over them.

Yes, he said, I know it too well.

Such, my friend, I said, is the fair and glorious beginning out of which springs tyranny.

Glorious indeed, he said. But what is the next step?

The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy –the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction; and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government.

True.

The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Yes, the natural order.

And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?

As we might expect.”

If Plato is right, then eventually we will be relieved of liberal democracy when the cycle of regimes renews itself. The funny thing is, the Jewish political scientist Shawn Rosenberg recently shocked his peers by saying pretty much the same thing.