In Attempt To Smear Trump The Left Is Butchering Ancient History

“Ancient Sparta explains 2026,” Ishaan Tharoor asserted in a Dec. 30 column for The Washington Post. Readers at first glance might be deceived into thinking Tharoor’s analysis would offer insightful commentary about the continued relevance of ancient Greece. But no.

“Myths of Sparta,” claimed Tharoor, “shadow” the rhetoric of the right, which, he said, implicitly carries themes aligned with fascism and even eugenics. Beyond straining the credulity of his readers, Tharoor’s tired analysis suggests that perhaps a good New Year’s resolution for the left would be to abandon ridiculous historical analogies that ironically say more about their liberal promoters than they do about contemporary conservatives.

Trying (and Failing) to Connect MAGA to Hitler via Sparta

Prominent on Tharoor’s list of supposed champions of the ancient militarized slave-based oligarchy of Sparta is Pete Hegseth. The War Department secretary, Tharoor argued, “openly channels supposed Spartan values when he extols the newfound ‘warrior ethos’ of the Trump administration, tightens the Pentagon’s standards for grooming and physical fitness and links the mission of the U.S. military more closely to the White House’s political agenda.” A Google search failed to find a single example of Hegseth talking about Sparta since he assumed office. And if promoting physical fitness standards is “Spartan,” then so is Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign.

Yet Tharoor soldiered on with his faulty analogy: “The waning of the postwar ‘rules-based’ order and the apparent retreat of globalization — sped, in part, by President Donald Trump’s trade wars — has returned us to a kind of ‘Spartan’ moment, some analysts say.” He cites Swedish economic historian Johan Norberg: “There’s very much the Spartan mentality — that the world is a zero-sum game, and if somebody else benefits, you’re worse off. And that seems to be the Trumpian worldview as well, and why Sparta is an ideal for people on the MAGA right.”

Now I could be wrong, but I doubt Trump spends much time thinking about Thermopylae.

Failing to identify any obvious examples of conservatives embracing a “Spartan worldview,” Tharoor (surprise!) returned to Jan. 6. He noted that “some rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, wore Sparta-themed helmets. They also flew flags emblazoned with the Spartan idiom ‘Molon Labe.’” He also indicted gun owners: “U.S. gun rights activists invoke ‘Molon Labe’ as a slogan, a rejection of anyone who would contravene their Second Amendment freedoms.”

Thus did Tharoor make his tenuous connection: A single appropriated Spartan slogan and a few Sparta-themed helmets at a rally from five years ago are enough for him to associate conservatives with the Nazis, given that Hitler admired the Greek city-state for destroying “sick, weak, deformed children.” This comparison is beyond risible — it is sick, given that it is the contemporary left’s pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia policies that are a threat to vulnerable children, whose “quality of life” is deemed insufficiently worthy of being saved. Approximately two-thirds of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb, for example, are aborted in the United States.

Why Ancient Sparta and Greece Actually Matter

In truth, ancient Sparta and ancient Greece, more broadly, are incredibly relevant to contemporary America, but not for the reasons given by liberal pundits and their tiresomely endless ad Hitlerum arguments. As Robin Waterfield’s excellent new translation of Thucydides’ The History of the Peloponnesian War demonstrates, the challenges and struggles faced by the ancient Greeks possess a universal, eternal quality, which is why so many generations have consistently returned to them for wisdom and guidance. As the historian Thucydides himself remarked: “I will be content if [the History] is judged useful by people who want a clear view of what happened in the past — and, human nature being what it is, of what is going to happen again in the future in an approximate or closely similar way.”

During that nearly thirty-year war between Athens and Sparta (and their respective allies) in the fifth century B.C., Greece was subjected to what Thucydides describes as unprecedented violence and destruction. The Athenians, the dominant power at the beginning of hostilities because of their huge navy and extensive system of client city-states, at first followed the defensive strategy of the brilliant statesman Pericles, who exhorted them to avoid open battle with the superior Spartan hoplites. Yet in 415 B.C. the Athenians attacked Sparta-aligned Syracuse in Sicily; the expedition turned into a quagmire that ultimately chewed up thousands of Athenian soldiers and much of their navy. (The Athenians also foolishly recalled their expert general Alcibiades almost immediately after the expedition began; he in turn joined Sparta.)

Many of the stories within Thucydides’ epic history are applicable to contemporary politics, such as Pericles’ exemplary rhetoric glorifying Athens in his funeral oration. In his speech, considered by many the ancient equivalent of the Gettysburg Address, Pericles declared that “what counts is merit rather than social status” and that the Athenian impulse is to “fearlessly do good to others.”

There is the riveting narrative of the Mytilenean revolt, which Athens originally decided to repress by massacring the entire male population, only to reverse their decision the next day. And there are quotations that continue to reverberate, such as the Athenians’ charge to the neutral Melos, that “the strong do what they can and the weak concede them that right.” Over and over again, Thucydides’ history offers timeless instruction regarding political prudence and imprudence, brilliant military strategy and inept, self-destructive overreach.

Avoiding the ‘Spartan Trap‘

During the Cold War, the bipolar conflict between the West and the Soviet Union was often compared to that between the democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta. More recently, Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has promoted the so-called “Thucydides Trap” to predict future seemingly inevitable great-power conflicts between a dominant (if vulnerable) power and a rising power eager to supplant it. Regardless of the exactness of such analogies, their existence demonstrates the continued value and resonance of Thucydides’ history to help us better understand rhetoric, politics, foreign policy, and even human nature itself.

Yet attempts to draw perfect analogies when it comes to the ancient Greeks have obvious limits, as evidenced by attempts to paint conservatives as somehow representative of Sparta. “When people cherry-pick one or two features of an analogy,” Allison told Tharoor for the latter’s column trying to draw a line from Sparta to Hitler to Trump, “that will frequently tell you more about the person and their views than it will about the illumination of the world.” Tharoor and those on the left beholden to their own “Spartan trap” should contemplate Allison’s warning.

Casey Chalk is a senior contributor at The Federalist and an editor and columnist at The New Oxford Review. He is a regular contributor at many publications and the author of three books, including the upcoming “Wisdom From the Cross: How Jesus’ Seven Last Words Teach Us How to Live (and Die)” (Sophia Institute Press, 2026).