The Society for Philosophy in the Contemporary World maintains a commitment to pluralism in philosophical discourse by encouraging original, unconventional research with regard to contemporary concerns. Often this original and unconventional approach enables urgent and timely discussions to come to the fore. In the special section of this issue, Andrew Fiala’s Tyranny from Plato to Trump (2022) is engaged, not merely as an abstract author-meets-critics discussion, but as a provocative meditation on the present and a call to philosophers to respond to our political moment.

In Tyranny from Plato to Trump, Fiala mines the Western philosophical tradition to develop an understanding of the problem of tyranny and applies those insights to the age of Trump. Though I’m convinced by Fiala’s general account, in this paper I offer some critical comments, which I hope will invite him to further expand upon some of his views. In specific, I raise some questions about the nature of those who support tyrants and how to identify them. I also explore the problem of polarization and how it and foolishness might stand in the way of improving the educational system. Finally, I offer some reasons to think that people are naturally disposed to support tyrants and so that democracy is always at risk.

These remarks consider Andrew Fiala’s Tyranny from Trump to Plato in the context of political apathy and climate pessimism. First, I raise the issue of whether or not some form of tyranny might be necessary in dealing with the crisis of climate change. Second, I express some skepticism about Fiala’s dual remedies of moral education (Ch 8) and constitutional wisdom (Ch 9) to face our present political challenges.

This essay follows Fiala’s hopefulness and his analysis of the coordination of a trio of actors needed for tyranny to succeed with a suggestion that preventing tyranny requires also a collective understanding, and education, of the coordination of citizens needed to create and sustain a democracy. Just as no one person can succeed at becoming a tyrant on their own, no one can achieve democracy on their own. Democracy is group work, conducted through epistemic interdependence, trust, and political friendships.

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet between Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies.