History never repeats itself but it rhymes. — John Robert Colombo
In 133 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, leader of the Roman Assembly, tried to enact land reform to help the poor cope with an unfair economic system. His fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed the plan. Push turned to shove, and Gracchus’s henchmen dragged Octavius from his speaker’s platform and blockaded him from carrying out his duties. Gracchus then tried to run for an unheard-of second term in a row, but was assassinated. Street riots erupted. Thus began the unraveling of the 500-year Roman experiment in democracy.
Decades of street fighting, insurrections, military battles, and coups tore up the fabric of Roman politics. By the time the smoke cleared in 27 BC, Augustus was emperor and the great Republic was no more. From then until its breakup in 476 AD, the Roman Empire was ruled by dictators.
Inspired by the original Roman democracy, and mindful of its mismanagement and ruin, the American Founders devised a Constitution that would, they hoped, safeguard the new nation from ancient mistakes. Despite bumps, scrapes, and an all-out civil war, the American experiment survived and became a light to the world.
Today, though, signs and portents hint at a darker future for American politics. In many ways, unrest among Americans resembles the turmoil of the late Roman Republic. Citizens are taking sides in divisive arguments about social norms, economic disparity, the purpose of government, and the general direction the country should take:
- In September 2018, 84 percent of Republicans approved of President Trump, while only 4 percent of Democrats agreed.
- That same September, support for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh skewed sharply from a Republican 84% to a Democratic 9%.
- “ . . . a record 90 percent of those who say they disapprove of the president now say they are supporting Democratic House candidates, up from 83 percent in August.” (Washington Post)
- More and more Americans lately see the nation as split between rich and poor.
- Much of the Left regards the U.S. flag as a symbol of injustice.
- Since 2016, each side in the Senate has abandoned its “advise and consent” duty and instead simply tries to squelch its opponent’s nominations to the Supreme Court.
- Ex-presidents Obama and Clinton campaign openly for Democratic candidates, breaking a time-honored tradition among former chief executives to stay above the fray.
- The ACLU, once a champion of the civil liberties of groups it disagreed with, will no longer defend such people.
- Republicans want to prosecute presidential candidate Hillary Clinton; Democrats want to impeach President Donald Trump.
- Left-wing Antifa activists clash violently in the streets with conservative opponents. Other activists, searching for dirt, raid senatorial email caches. Still others pound on the doors of the Supreme Court in protest.
- Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, dining with his wife, is confronted by angry protesters, one of whom grabs the Senator’s take-out bag and throws it into the street, shouting, “Why don’t you get out of here? Why don’t you leave the entire country?”
- Hillary Clinton, 2016 Democratic candidate for president: “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for.”
- Scott Wagner, Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, to his Democratic rival, Governor Tom Wolf: “I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes.”
- Senator Tim Kaine (D-Va): “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets . . . “
- President Trump, on GOP Rep. Greg Gianforte’s physical assault on a reporter: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of guy.”
- Joe Biden, former US vice president: “If we were in high school, I’d take [Trump] behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”
They sound like angry toughs warming up for a bar fight.
The main point of democracy is to prevent this sort of thing. It’s not working. The nation seems divided into two camps that disagree so fundamentally on the American purpose that they’ve gotten to the point of condoning violence. Instead of discussion, people shout. Instead of respect, people condemn. Tolerance is replaced by calls for prosecution. The Rule of Law is threatened as each side thinks about taking matters into its own hands.
After decades of political strife, Ancient Rome’s republic degraded into tyranny. Will Americans repeat that tragic history?
The Founders must be spinning in their graves.
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Robert I Schwartz
2018 October 22
Jim:
America was never originally conceived as an Athenian democracy. It was otherwise conceived as a limited democratic republic (enfranchising only white, protestant, male landowners) somewhat on the Roman model and tempered by the more recent hard lessons provided by the European Wars of Religion and the English Civil War, with a touch of the Enlightenment thrown into the stew.
The Founding Fathers recognized that their original imperfect governmental conception could not resolve all of their immediate differences (slavery being the most nettlesome) and would need further refinement, the first major effort resulting in the multiple-amendment Bill of Rights. The same Amendment process was expected to help further continuously refine the Constitution to address future circumstances that the Founding Fathers wisely knew that they could not resolve immediately or anticipate in the future.
In their hope to mitigate the potential for the adoption of ill-considered Amendments based upon untampered political emotions, they created a complex, difficult and slow amendment adoption process Unfortunately, along with the size of the country, eventually that self-renewal amendment process grew to be too unwieldy to actually function as intended. It is thus the American Experiment in self-government that is increasingly failing based upon its inability to recast itself to meet the challenges of the recent past, present and future. In a word, it has become effectively “ossified”. We no longer even trust ourselves to change it.
Lacking the necessary working mechanism for political adaptation; the populace becomes increasingly divided into tribal camps (now inflamed by an irresponsible social media) that increasingly cannot converse in a civil manner, let alone find compromise solutions. The former “loyal opposition” has now become the “evil enemy” with whom discussion becomes practically impossible. The flawed election of the profoundly stupid, mendacious, egomaniacal & obnoxious Donald Trump as President is just the latest manifestation of that underlying structural division; he exacerbates and exploits it, but he certainly did not start it.
The influence of purchased mass media of all types has placed the management of a manipulated public opinion in the hands of those wealthy few who can best afford to purchase it, so (to paraphrase Lincoln) we now have an unrepresentative “government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy that may perish from this Earth.”
Since soon after the Civil War ended America has actually become an increasingly-hereditary illiberal economic oligarchy that just masquerades as a democratic republic; one with a supersized military that since 1945 is forward-deployed primarily to enforce America’s overseas economic self-interests.
In the wealthiest country on the planet an increasing disenfranchised proportion of the population is short of food, increasingly homeless, deprived of affordable medical care, lacking sufficient education for themselves and their children, shorn of any hope of upwards economic mobility and in their despair often turning to fatal drugs for temporary nepenthe. All of the surplus wealth of the country is being funneled into the hands of very few hyper-rich families who don’t need it and could not possibly spend all that they already have acquired, mostly by inheritance, even if they wanted to. In the long term that paradigm is just not sustainable (for confirmation, just ask the ghosts of Louis XVI and Tsar Nicolas II).
Our old UCSC college classmate Ben Stein’s father, the Nixon chief economist Herbert Stein, once wryly wrote that: “Every physical or economic system that is unsustainable must eventually come to an end”. I do not think that either of us will be around long enough to see that end in the current America (that looks nothing like the idealized representation provided in our high school textbooks) but the present does look to be increasingly unsustainable on a broad number of fronts, and Herb Stein was obviously right.
Cheers,
Rob Schwartz AIA