Like Rome, America Could be Ripe for Tyranny, by Robert Merry.
Of all the journalistic essays published as Donald Trump emerged last year as a serious presidential contender, perhaps the most haunting was Andrew Sullivan’s New York article, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny.” It explored the Trump phenomenon through the prism of Plato’s Republic and the Greek philosopher’s observation that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.”
Sullivan explores Plato’s critique of late-stage democracy, when the rich are attacked, barriers to equality are crushed, deference to authority withers, multiculturalism and sexual freedom create a polity “decorated in all hues,” the foreigner is equal to the citizen, and shame and privilege become anathema. Writes Sullivan: “And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.”
For Sullivan, who read the Republic in graduate school, Plato had planted in his mind “a gnawing worry” about the mortality of democratic regimes caught in this vortex of late-stage civic and personal excess.
The elite view:
“It was increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic times,” writes Sullivan, “and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical character plucked directly out of one of the first books about politics ever written.” …
[Sullivan] decries the emergence of “media democracy” — talk radio, the Internet, cable television, and social media, all of which have been “swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse.” …
The elites must “thwart this monster” so those multitudes can’t flock to him. “In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order,” writes Sullivan, “Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.” …
The elite’s inability to see the point of view of others:
It’s interesting, though, that Sullivan invokes Plato as an avenue into his fervent warning against a tyrannical Trumpian mass movement, but then he essentially ignores the Republic’s underlying lessons. If late-stage democracy, with all of its manifestations so well described by Sullivan, renders a society ripe for dictatorship, it won’t do much good to destroy the dictator without addressing the spawning ground, particularly if the dictator hasn’t yet even become a dictator. …
This ignores the deterministic question unleashed by Plato’s ponderings about democracy — whether it inevitably breeds tyranny because of inevitable internal decay. …
Citing Aristotle, [neoconservative thinker Irving Kristol] argued that “all forms of government — democracy, oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, tyranny — are inherently unstable…all political regimes are inherently transitional…the stability of all regimes is corrupted by the corrosive power of time.” …
The Roman example:
The [Roman] republic lasted for 465 years, and for some 376 of those years the system bestowed upon Roman citizens relative internal peace and stability (within the context, of course, of human nature). Then it entered into a crisis of the regime — “a long, drawn-out, protracted spiral of disorder,” according to historian Garrett G. Fagan — that lasted nearly a century before Julius Caesar finally killed the republic and re-instituted the kings of old in the form of emperors whose title bore his name. Plato had essentially predicted it.
It may be instructive, even a bit stunning, to ponder the parallels between Rome’s early history and America’s. Both began as outposts of their respective core civilizations. Each, as noted, was led initially by kings, but each threw over its kings out of fear and disgust at what it considered tyranny. Each then crafted a delicately balanced governmental system designed to protect citizens from arbitrary governmental actions. In each instance this included divided powers, temporary and checked executive prerogative, legislative authority, and a voting franchise making government at least somewhat answerable to citizens.
Each began its democratic phase with serious limitations but opened up the system to greater democratic access over time. Each set out — brutally, when necessary — to dominate its immediate geopolitical environment. For Rome it was the Italian boot; for America, the North American midsection. In mastering its environment, each generated great wealth that soon translated into military power, enhanced by its mastery also of new technologies applied to new devices of warfare. …
Thus can Rome’s hundred-year Punic Wars against Carthage be seen as corresponding to America’s seventy-year struggles in Europe, from 1918 to 1989. Both republics emerged victorious and exploited their victories to dominate a unipolar world. As Gene Callahan, economics professor at SUNY Purchase … , has written, Rome and America are “arguably the two most influential republics in world history.” …
The founders of the USA were well aware of Roman history and tried to prevent the rise of a Caesar:
Ultimately, the Founders sought to protect their fledgling polity from what they saw as its greatest threat — the rise of a demagogic dictator — by placing limits on pure democratic expression and rendering a system that incorporated elements of indirect democracy, with “hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power,” as Sullivan puts it.
These included limitations on the exercise of the franchise, the indirect voting mechanism of the Electoral College, the Senate as a check on popular passions of the moment, and the independent Supreme Court. And of course the Constitution itself, with its carefully prescribed and proscribed powers, was seen as the ultimate bulwark against the Roman fate. But, as Sullivan correctly notes, many of these “firewalls against democratic wildfires” have eroded. …
But it is social conditions that ultimately cause the fall of a Republic, not a demagogue:
But the Founders, like Sullivan, perhaps placed too much emphasis on the threat of a Caesar and not enough on the underlying conditions that could generate such a threat. …
In other words, the health of any democratic polity may require not just a matrix of complex and finely balanced governmental structures — conferring “freedom,” as it is habitually expressed in today’s America — but also a general consensus on what the society stands for, whence it came, its underlying cultural essence, its heritage. Those sensibilities, once a powerful foundation of the American identity, also have eroded significantly in recent decades. …
The demagogue can seize power only when the health of the polity wanes to such an extent that the people allow it, even sometimes welcome it. That’s what happened in Rome. …
Does this sounds vaguely familiar?
While Rome generated great wealth through the plunder that came with its conquests, this wealth wasn’t shared equally within the polity. Only the rich could afford to buy the public lands acquired through military victory or to support the multitude of slaves brought into Rome from conquered territories. The result was a growing gap between society’s chosen and its dispossessed. …
[There arose] a new and larger aristocracy of wealth, of what became known as New Men — cunning, opportunistic, with little fealty to Rome’s once-hallowed rituals of democracy and civic compassion. They gobbled up all they could of the largess flowing into Rome from the far-flung lands of conquest, including expanses of public lands beyond what they were entitled to by law. …
The question today:
The question facing America, in the wake of the Trump election and so much else of disrupting and disturbing impact, is whether the country has entered a crisis of the regime …
We’re talking about an acidic kind of crisis that eats away slowly at that foundation and leaves citizens wondering if their fellow citizens share the same values, see the world the same way, desire anything resembling the same national future. …
And it can’t be denied that there are unsettling parallels between Rome’s regime crisis and some elements of the current American troubles — the erosion in ancient safeguards designed to protect the polity from the passions of the majority; the specter of growing inequality; the increasingly grasping temperament of the elites; expanding political polarization and a decline in the commonality of outlook among citizens; the rise of rancorous ideological politics; an expansionist foreign policy generating domestic tensions; the aggrandizement of executive power; even the willingness to shut down the government in the pursuit of political advantage.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
