It’s John Milton’s time now.
In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election and afterward, Shakespeare was frequently invoked to help make sense of the Trump phenomenon.
At least two popular books used the past to illuminate the present. Stephen Greenblatt’s best-seller, Tyrant: Shakespeare and Politics, used the Bard’s plays to tease out the range of motivations for supporting Trump by looking at why people supported the murderous Richard, Duke of Gloucester. Jeffrey R. Wilson’s Shakespeare and Trump, used literary criticism to understand the “hidden causes, structure, and meanings” of the Trump phenomenon.
After Trump lost the 2020 election, using Shakespeare as a mirror for contemporary politics faded. Biden is many things, but not a Shakespearean character. After probably the worst presidential debate on record, there were whispers that Biden would act like King Lear and hang on. Instead, after some resistance, Biden listened to his advisors, read the polls, and bowed to the inevitable. A tragic figure he is not.
But now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, the race is alarmingly close. Polymarket (a website for betting on the outcome of events) as of this writing gives Trump a 60% chance of winning. Fivethirtyeight.com has Trump 51%, Harris 49%. All the polls are in the margin of error.
Which means there’s a very good chance America’s next president will be a convicted felon, a man found liable in civil court of sexual abuse, and whose lying, according to the Washington Post’s fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, is “off the charts.” Even worse, Trump regularly praises dictators, and according to General Mark Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Trump is “fascist to the core.”
The contest is not between rival approaches to economics and foreign policy, but between democracy and autocracy. America’s future is truly in the balance.
So the writer we need to turn to is not William Shakespeare, but John Milton.
Milton wanted to write a great epic poem (about what he wasn’t sure). But as England slid into civil war, Milton gave up verse and started writing political pamphlets against Charles I’s tyranny. Over the course of his career, he wrote against press censorship (Areopagitica), for the people’s right to unseat a tyrant (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates), and for the separation of church and state (A Treatise of Civil Power). Milton’s passionate defense of liberty and republican ideals laid the foundation for the American Revolution.
But the book that speaks to our moment is The Ready and Easy Way. After Parliament tried and executed Charles I, they replaced monarchy with republican government. But the experiment did not work. Disillusionment quickly set in and in 1660, Parliament was about to restore the previous system. In The Ready and Easy Way, Milton begs Parliament to stop.
Why, Milton asks, would you do this? After listing Charles I’s many crimes, including “leaguing” with England’s enemies, Milton asks why would anyone want to go back and surrender their hard-won liberty? He is totally bewildered.
Similarly, why would we want to return Trump to the White House after all the “chaos and ineptitude” characterizing Trump’s presidency? His siding with Vladimir Putin over our intelligence agencies; his telling white supremacists to “stand back and stand by”; his denigrating science during the worst of the COVID epidemic, causing who knows how many needless deaths? The list goes on and on.
Just as restoring the monarchy, Milton writes, would only confirm “the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies,” so would putting Trump back in the White House confirm Putin’s and Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban’s belief that liberalism is “obsolete,” and democracy “shipwrecked.” Even America, they would say, has joined the rightward march and the rejection of liberal democracy.
When Milton warns about how a monarch will bask in “the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people,” he might have been describing the 2024 Republican National Convention. Everyone Trump “passed stepped back in reflexive obedience, or awe.” All of the speakers slathered Trump with flattery, including if not especially those who scorned him before. Ted Cruz, for example, once called Trump “utterly amoral” and “a sniveling coward”; he began his RNC speech by giving thanks to the Almighty: “God Bless Donald J. Trump.”
Milton also warned there would be payback, “revenges and offenses remembered . . ., suits, indictments . . . who knows against whom or how many.” Again, Milton might as well be talking about Trump, who has repeatedly vowed retribution for his political enemies. Trump called Rep. Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi “an enemy from within,” and he promised to open up a criminal probe of the Biden family, never mind that there is zero evidence of illegality. Trump also wants to rescind ABC’s and CBS’s broadcasting license because he doesn’t like how he was treated.
Milton predicted that the monarchy’s return would mean the return of tyranny, and that’s exactly what happened. Despite promises of religious toleration, the government quickly passed a series of laws known as the Clarendon Code intended to crush any disagreement with official doctrine. The Licensing Act (1662) restored censorship, and the Five Mile Act prohibited any nonconforming preacher from coming within five miles of their original parish. Andrew Marvell, poet and Milton’s friend, called these laws “the quintessence of arbitrary malice.”
As for Trump, the signs are not good. He has called for the Constitution to be terminated so he can overturn the result the result of the 2020 election, and he has vowed to conduct mass deportations of undocumented migrants, which he cannot do unless he suspends both the Constitution and federal law. Project 2025 (which Trump has tried to disavow) calls for replacing the merit-based civil service with loyalists who will not question his orders. The guardrails that prevented Trump from acting on his worst impulses are no longer present, and thanks to the Supreme Court, the president now enjoys immunity for all official acts. “The President,” writes Justice Sotomayor, “is now a king above the law.”
Milton responded to the collapse of his political hopes by retreating from the public arena and concentrating on finishing his masterpiece, Paradise Lost. But Milton had completely lost faith in his countrymen, who made the wrong choice, preferring “easy servitude” over “hard liberty.” Toward the poem’s end, the angel Michael gives Adam a vision of the future, and it is not a happy one. Thanks to the Fall, Michael tells Adam, “tyranny must be.”
Let’s hope that will not be the case for America after November 5.
Peter C. Herman is a professor of English literature at San Diego State University. He has published books on Shakespeare, Milton and the literature of terrorism, and essays in Salon, Newsweek, Inside Higher Ed, and Times of San Diego. His latest book is “Early Modern Others: Resisting Bias in Renaissance Literature” (Routledge).
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
