From Plato to Trump: The Blind Spots of Philosopher-Kings in American Politics

By Jose Franco
I’ve spent much of my adult life wrestling with contradictions. In politics, in philosophy, even in baseball dugouts I’ve coached from—what we call “truth” often looks a lot like an illusion that comforts one side while alienating the other. And nowhere do I see this tension more clearly than in the way liberal economics is championed in today’s America, the way our media sustains itself, and the way ancient philosophers like Plato imagined governance should work.

Let me start with the present. The dominant economic arguments on the American left—raising minimum wages, expanding safety nets, forgiving student debt—are usually framed as moral imperatives. I agree with the spirit: no society should tolerate the extreme inequalities we see today. But the blind spot comes when these policies are presented as if they exist in a vacuum, unaffected by incentives, trade-offs, or unintended consequences.

For example, raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour may sound compassionate, but if small businesses fold under the strain while larger corporations automate even faster, who really benefits? When liberal policies fail to grapple with second- and third-order effects, they give conservatives an easy opening: “Look, these ideas don’t work in reality.” The truth is more complicated. Some interventions do help. But when framed without nuance, liberal economics looks naive—and the public, already skeptical, grows more divided.

This is where our media environment makes things worse. News outlets no longer operate as neutral arbiters of fact (if they ever truly did). Their business models rely on clicks, subscriptions, and emotional engagement. Objective truth is too bland to sell. Instead, we get “confirming-based” stories—pieces that flatter our biases and reinforce our priors.

Turn on MSNBC and you’ll hear that America teeters on the brink of fascism. Switch to Fox News and you’ll learn we’re being suffocated by woke authoritarianism. Both extremes are profitable because they offer certainty, outrage, and identity. What we rarely hear is the complexity in between—that some liberal policies fail not because compassion is misplaced, but because design is shallow; that some conservative critiques hit valid notes, even if their solutions fall short.
Binary politics is a goldmine for the media because it transforms every debate into a zero-sum game. Each headline becomes a team jersey. Each story, a cheer or a jeer. But what it almost never becomes is a mirror—a reflection of the messy paradoxes that define the human condition.

This isn’t a new problem. Plato, writing in The Republic 2,400 years ago, proposed that society should be governed not by the masses but by philosopher-kings—wise elites trained to pursue justice and truth rather than wealth or power. In theory, it’s a noble idea. Who wouldn’t want a government guided by wisdom instead of polls and soundbites?

But here, too, lies a blind spot. Philosophers, like media outlets and politicians, are not immune to bias. Their pursuit of “truth” is often colored by their own assumptions, cultural context, and egos. Plato himself could not conceive of women, slaves, or non-Greeks as equals. His philosopher-king was already compromised by the blind spots of his era.

Even if we granted philosophers political authority, what would prevent their “truth” from becoming dogma? The danger of philosopher-kings is the same as the danger of partisan media: mistaking subjective philosophies for universal truths. Wisdom without humility calcifies into arrogance.

I see a similar lack of humility in the way liberal economics is often sold. Take climate policy. Progressives argue for a rapid transition to renewable energy. That’s admirable and necessary. But when advocates gloss over the economic dislocations—the coal miner in West Virginia, the single mother who can’t afford a new electric car—the blind spot grows. To pretend these costs don’t exist is to risk backlash, as we saw with France’s “yellow vest” protests when fuel taxes fell hardest on working people.

Or look at student debt forgiveness. The moral case is compelling—young people shouldn’t start life shackled by loans. But framing it as a blanket fix ignores the resentment of those who sacrificed to pay their debts or those who never had the chance to attend college in the first place. If the goal is equity, why not pair forgiveness with deep investments in vocational training and public universities to ensure future affordability? The blind spot isn’t compassion—it’s the lack of foresight in how others will experience the policy.

My Own Wrestling Match

I don’t write this as an enemy of liberal economics. I write it as someone who wants these ideas to succeed but knows they won’t unless they address their blind spots. I think back to my days in business school, where we learned about self-fulfilling prophecies. People don’t just respond to incentives—they respond to how those incentives are framed. If liberals can’t articulate the second- and third-order effects of their policies, they risk creating the very failures their critics predict.
It’s a lesson I learned coaching baseball, too. A player may love the idea of swinging for the fences every at-bat. But if he ignores situational hitting—advancing the runner, sacrificing when needed—he’ll hurt the team in the long run. Compassion in economics is like power in baseball: it must be guided by strategy, not impulse.

But here’s the rub: nuance doesn’t sell. Outlets that tried to build a brand around sober, balanced reporting—think of NPR or The Christian Science Monitor—struggle for influence compared to the outrage machines of cable news. Even legacy newspapers like The New York Times often drift toward framing stories through partisan lenses because ambiguity doesn’t go viral.
This means the incentive structure of our information ecosystem mirrors the incentive structure of politics: binary simplicity wins. Complexity loses. And when complexity loses, democracy itself suffers. Because citizens aren’t given the tools to think in shades of gray, they’re trapped in a cycle of all-or-nothing choices.

Which brings me back to Plato. The philosopher-king model failed to account for the subjectivity of truth. Every philosopher projects their own worldview onto reality. Marx saw history as class struggle. Nietzsche saw it as will to power. Freud saw it as the unconscious. Each offered insights—but each also mistook their lens for the lens.

The blind spot of philosophers is the same blind spot of modern politics: mistaking a part for the whole, a story for the truth. Plato imagined wisdom could be separated from power, but in reality, power bends wisdom to its own ends. Just as media bends truth to fit its profit model. Just as liberal economics bends compassion into slogans that sometimes collapse under the weight of reality.

And this brings me to my own uneasy comparison. When I publish my free eBooks at www.stoopjuice.com, I know they won’t get the same attention as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, or Donald Trump. They are today’s philosopher-kings in their own ways, commanding headlines and airtime with every word. Trump thrives on spectacle. AOC thrives on charisma. Mamdani, with his detailed arguments for socialism, echoes Plato’s ideal—an expert who claims governance should be guided by those steeped in philosophy and economics, not the general public.

I, on the other hand, write with a different aim: to confront myself, to test my own blind spots in public view, to chase objectivity even when I know it can never be fully reached. Unsurprisingly, this doesn’t sell. Self-confrontation doesn’t trend on Twitter. But outrage does. Certainty does. The philosopher-kings of our time gain platforms not for their humility but for their amplification. And the media, chasing its own incentives, happily obliges.

This isn’t bitterness; it’s clarity. I don’t expect my writings to go viral. But I do expect myself to keep writing them, because truth-seeking—even in its messy, subjective, self-critical form—is the only antidote I know to the binary poison of our politics.

So what’s the way forward? I don’t believe we can abandon liberal economics—it is too essential in a society marked by deep inequality. But we can demand more humility in how it is argued. We can ask policymakers to speak honestly about trade-offs, to frame compassion not as cost-free but as a choice worth making even with costs attached. We can ask media to stop playing the binary game and instead highlight paradox, contradiction, and the messy middle where most of us live.

And maybe we can ask something of ourselves, too. Instead of waiting for philosopher-kings or partisan pundits to tell us what’s true, we can cultivate the habit of self-questioning. To ask: where are my own blind spots? What assumptions am I carrying without inspection? What am I refusing to see because it doesn’t flatter my worldview?
That’s the kind of governance Plato didn’t imagine but that democracy requires: not rule by experts who claim to know the truth, but shared responsibility among citizens willing to wrestle with complexity.

The irony is that America’s most urgent problems—climate change, inequality, healthcare—don’t require philosopher-kings. They require citizens and leaders willing to admit what they don’t know, willing to see the paradoxes and blind spots for what they are. The media won’t make this easy, because profit favors clarity over contradiction. But clarity without contradiction is just propaganda.
Liberal economics has heart. Plato had vision. The media has reach. AOC, Mamdani, and Trump have volume. What we lack, and what we desperately need, is humility. The humility to recognize that truth is always filtered, always partial, always shaped by incentives. And that admitting this doesn’t weaken our pursuit of justice—it strengthens it.