Will the U.S. Pass a Point of No Return? - The Atlantic - 0 views
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the most sustained line of response has been from my friend Eric Schnurer, a writer and long-time advisor to state and local governments.
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In his first installment, in the fall of 2019, Schnurer emphasized the parts of the America-and-Rome comparison he thought were most significant—and worrisome. Then last summer, during the election campaign and the pandemic lockdown, he extended the comparison in an even-less-cheering way. In a third and more cautionary extension of his argument this summer, he concentrated on the U.S. Senate.
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Now, chapter four:
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crossing the Rubicon. Schnurer argues that this is more than just a familiar phrase. And he says that a U.S. Rubicon moment is in view—which would be triggered by a possible indictment of Donald Trump.
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Crossing the Rubicon: If the United States, in recent years, has been tracking the decline and fall of Republican Rome, when do we pass the point of no return? By Eric B. Schnurer
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How did a wealthy, powerful, and successfully self-governing people—proud of their frontier origins, piety and traditional values, and above all their origin story in throwing off monarchical rule—essentially commit democratic suicide and settle, more-or-less willingly, for a half-millennium of dictatorship?
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From rising economic inequality, political violence, and governmental dysfunction on through the generally lackadaisical reaction of the Senate to a losing chief-executive candidate’s conspiracy to murder many of them, overthrow the government, and thereby block certifying his defeat, events in ancient Rome have remarkably paralleled some you might recognize more recently
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What might signal the end of democracy as we know it? There is, it turns out, an easy answer at hand.
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While there is no precise end date to the Republic, there was a bright-line occurrence generally recognized as the irreversible beginning of the end for participatory government.
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there is indeed an event looming—probably before the end of this year— that poses almost precisely the same situation as what provoked Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon: the possible indictment of former president Donald J. Trump.
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January 6th. It is no coincidence that insurrectionists that day carried banners urging Trump to “Cross the Rubicon” and declaring “The Die Is Cast”— Caesar’s words upon alighting on the Italian side of the river—or that they will be with him to storm the forces of the Republic and ignite a civil war over Trump’s potential indictment:
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Avoiding criminal prosecution is precisely why Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army and ignited a civil war 21 centuries ago.
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Caesar’s ultimate rise had begun with the Cataline conspiracy a decade or so earlier, which, as noted, bears a familial resemblance to Trump’s attempts to overturn the recent election and, both literally and figuratively, decapitate the government.
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Senate conservatives, known as the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”), chose largely to shrug off both the immediate assault on the state and the long-term threat Caesar in particular posed to republicanism. They soon lived to regret it.
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The patricians who ruled Rome, however, had long resisted fundamental economic reforms to benefit the great mass of the population, making only such concessions as necessary when times grew tense. This simply increased the internal tensions within society as the economy globalized, making those with the means richer and richer, hollowing out the middle class, and leaving more and more Romans at the edge of desperation.
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Will the Trumpist party similarly ultimately prevail once they cross the Rubicon? I have been predicting for years that something resembling a civil war will arise and something like Trumpists likely will carry the day in the short-term
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three of these—Caesar, of course, plus Marcus Licinius Crassus, known as “the richest man in Rome,” and Gnaeus Pompeius (Pompey the Great), the undisputedly dominant figure of the era—formed a Triumvirate and became, between them, the sole possessors of real power. The only real question was which one would prevail as the sole autocrat,
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Caesar thus hoped to temporize, reach some sort of cohabitation arrangement with Pompey, and eventually prevail in the long term. But his enemies forced his hand with the threat of imminent criminal prosecution.
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Caesar paused with his army on the Gaul side of the Rubicon.
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His only path was forward. As he crossed, he uttered the famous phrase, “Alea iacta est”: “The die is cast.” The phrase has taken on the meaning of an inevitability, but Caesar meant quite the opposite: that, while he was committed and could not turn back, the outcome was far from inevitable but, rather, a tremendous gamble. At least for him.
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The outcome for the Republic itself, however, was indeed at that point already cast as if in iron rather than in tumbling dice. Whatever the outcome of the ensuing war, whether Caesar or Pompey prevailed as dictator, the Republic—a system of self-government in which disputes were settled by politics rather than force, where power was dispersed rather than concentrated—was dead.
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The defenders of the Republic folded more quickly than the French Army in World War II and left Rome open to Caesar.
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Rome was now—and ever would remain—a dictatorship.
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When Trump’s supporters urge him to cross the Rubicon and cast the die—events that become highly likely if he, like Caesar, faces indictment—that is what they contemplate.
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What did all this mean for Rome? And what might it mean for us?
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Augustus essentially achieved the settlement of unreconcilable political, social, and economic strains within Republican Rome that even his uncle Julius could not attain. The Augustinian settlement was essentially to substitute peace and prosperity for politics, and to impose the veneer of traditional piety and moral values over the reality of an increasingly heterodox and heterogenous society.
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The Augustinian Settlement had something for everyone. Augustus, ultimately the canniest politician, was himself outwardly pious, dutiful, traditional, and respectful of republican forms—thus appealing to conservatives—while he presided over a cultural efflorescence fueled by a liberality in everything except political expression
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The concentration of power in the Emperor allowed Rome to mobilize its economic and military resources in a way that the Republic had not, leading to five centuries of expanding geopolitical power and economic opulence the likes of which the world had never seen before.
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Politics essentially ended for half a millennium—all government was the will of one man—and so did freedom of political speech and thought. But Romans, at least if they were lucky, were free, safe and wealthy beyond imagination in every other way. It was a trade-off they were more than happy to accept.
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By Caesar’s time, however, the populares were no longer so much true “Tribunes of the People” like the Gracchi, as ambitious patricians with an authoritarian bent who recognized anti-elite appeals to the disaffected mob as their pathway to power
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But a reactionary philosophy that rejects fact in favor of fantasy, is economically retrograde and socially repugnant to the majority of Americans, can impose its rule for only so long.
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Governments as we know them today will be left to fill the role solely of the traditionalist “night watchman state”—maintaining physical order and extracting a “protection” fee in return—much like the ancient Roman state. The demise of liberal democracy, the end of virtually all politics, and perhaps a little performative traditionalism and a destructive civil war, may all be coming, anyway. But, in return, Blue America, like Rome, will be able to carry on pretty much as it wishes, rising to new heights of wealth and global power.
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Will highly-educated Americans really be willing to settle for physical security and financial success beyond anything now imaginable, in return for abandoning the American Republic for an enlightened dictatorship?
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The Roman experience isn’t very encouraging on that score—but neither are contemporary Democrats.
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When the crisis came, it was the optimates (i.e., “the Best People”) who were the last defenders of the Republic.
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Why? Because the status quo worked for them, whereas the plebeians had long-since lost faith in “the system.” The supporters of the Republic were the cream of Roman society, those who, as the saying went, “had Greek” (world-class educations), married amongst themselves, and passed these advantages on to their children.
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The republican structures they defended—elections, limited and dispersed powers, rule of law—in turn supported the rest of their existing order: an increasingly globalized economy exacerbating distributional divides but benefiting their own class.
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The optimates were tone deaf to the needs of those struggling to make a living, while the insurrectionists played to the working class in order to destroy what passed for democracy and impose their personal rule.
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Rich, out-of-touch, socially liberal democrats versus rich, demagogic authoritarians masquerading as the party of the working class—not far off from today. The difference is that progressives don’t recognize that they’re the new optimates.
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Increasingly-illiberal “progressives” are slowly losing not just the white working class but also Black and Latino workers, those for whom they think they speak.
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Meanwhile, time grows short. As aggrieved souls are forced from their dying communities and traditional social structures, into a metropolitan economy that has no place for them, the army on the Rubicon draws closer every day to the city’s walls.
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