Is There Hope For The American Republic After Trump?
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Our Caesar
Can the country come back from Trump? The Republic already looks like Rome in ruins.
By Andrew Sullivan
Four years after Donald Trump emerged as the most nakedly authoritarian candidate in American history, it’s tempting to view the threat he once seemed to pose as overblown. Upon his election, some panicked that he would be a proto-dictator, trampling every democratic institution in the fascist manner imported from Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Others saw merely a malign, illiberal incompetent who would probably amount to nothing too threatening — or believed that America’s democratic institutions and strong Constitution would surely survive Trump’s strongman posturing, however menacing it appeared in the abstract. Many contended that his manifest criminality meant he would be dispatched in short order, with impeachment simply a matter of time.
It was all, unavoidably, unknown and unknowable — and so we cast around for historical analogies to guide us. Was this the 1930s, along the lines of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here? Or the 19th century in Latin America, with Trump an old-school caudillo? Was he another demagogue like George Wallace or Huey Long — but in the White House?
Well, we now have a solid record of what Trump has said and done. And it fits few modern templates exactly. He is no Pinochet nor Hitler, no Nixon nor Clinton. His emergence as a cultish strongman in a constitutional democracy who believes he has Article 2 sanction to do “whatever I want” — as he boasted, just casually, last month — seems to have few precedents.
But zoom out a little more and one obvious and arguably apposite parallel exists: the Roman Republic, whose fate the Founding Fathers were extremely conscious of when they designed the U.S. Constitution. That tremendously successful republic began, like ours, by throwing off monarchy, and went on to last for the better part of 500 years. It practiced slavery as an integral and fast-growing part of its economy. It became embroiled in bitter and bloody civil wars, even as its territory kept expanding and its population took off. It won its own hot-and-cold war with its original nemesis, Carthage, bringing it into unexpected dominance over the entire Mediterranean as well as the whole Italian peninsula and Spain.
And the unprecedented wealth it acquired by essentially looting or taxing every city and territory it won and occupied soon created not just the first superpower but a superwealthy micro-elite — a one percent of its day — that used its money to control the political process and, over time, more to advance its own interests than the public good. As the republic grew and grew in size and population and wealth, these elites generated intense and increasing resentment and hatred from the lower orders, and two deeply hostile factions eventually emerged, largely on class lines, to be exploited by canny and charismatic opportunists. Well, you get the point.
Of course, in so many ways, ancient Rome is profoundly different from the modern U.S. It had no written constitution; it barely had a functioning state or a unified professional military insulated from politics. Many leaders were absent from Rome for long stretches of time as they waged military campaigns abroad. There was no established international order, no advanced technology, and only the barest of welfare safety nets.
But there is a reason the Founding Fathers thought it was worth deep study. They saw the destabilizing consequences of a slaveholding republic expanding its territory and becoming a vast, regional hegemon. And they were acutely aware of how, in its final century and a half, an astonishing republican success story unraveled into a profoundly polarized polity, increasingly beset by violence, shedding one established republican norm after another, its elites fighting among themselves in a zero-sum struggle for power. And they saw how the weakening of those norms and the inability to compromise and mounting inequalities slowly corroded republican institutions. And saw, too, with the benefit of hindsight, where that ultimately led: to strongman rule, a dictatorship.
So when, one wonders, will our Caesars finally arrive? Or has one already?
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This piece is a bit long to reproduce in full, so read the rest of it here (or hit the 'seeded content' bar above, of course).
Please read it before commenting. A familiarity with the history of the Roman Republic would probably come in handy, but the author explains things well enough that it isn't really necessary.
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From the article:
Can our republic heal and survive, or are we on the cusp of our own 'Augustine' transition to autocracy?
From the article:
The electorate allowed Trump. It may do so again even with all it has learned.
I'm still flabbergasted by that. It's often stated that he's a symptom, not the cause.
This part of the article speaks to that, and has been stuck in the forefront of my mind since I read it:
It's like a bad dream I keep wanting to wake up from. Unfortunately, like you said, the electorate actually allowed this. Not the entire electorate, though. Specifically, it was the Republican Party and its base.
The "Republican" (!) Party, irony is thy name. More like a "Death to the Republic" party these days.
We have seen the qualifications for who would be elected to PotUS diminish over the years. This establishes a precedent which enables further lowering of the bar by incrementalism. The American people are now desensitized to the point where we do not demand the likes of Dwight Eisenhower but will settle for highly flawed characters like Trump.
So please tell us what Trump has ACTUALLY done to make your life so miserable. Is it one of those "lies" the triggered keep speaking of? Which of those lies affected you personally?
Are you mad because your tax cut did not mean "I get more stuff for free"?
Please, tell us what is so bad in your life that Trump and ONLY Trump has brought upon you.
Also, feelings don't count. I'm asking for hard evidence.
Now, this article is an OpEd and should probably be in that category, not the "news" category.
I think you can scream at the sky there.
You know, instead of posting it all again, I'm just going to refer you to the excerpt I posted above in 1.1.4
*cough* Um... It is in the Op/Ed category.
OK..I made a mistake and am big enough to admit it. No biggie...
Now, about your Op/Ed. It is just that. An opinion from someone else, and JUST an opinion. I believe I asked you how Trump has affected YOU personally, not some obscure never Trumper who may claim to be a conservative, but only when it benefits him.
Again....How has Trump negatively affected YOU. I seriously doubt he has made your life worse. If his policies have not made it better, then you have not been affected personally.
I am a 20 year veteran, and it I were still active duty, I would be proud to serve under this President. Do you wish to still be in the conflicts Obama got us into? I'm glad he is pulling us out of bs skirmishes we should never had been in the first place.
The United States lost it's Americanism with Supply Side Economics, Citizens United and the culmination of wealth concentration which led to expanding Middle Eastern conflicts, all of which were based on lies, waged for fraud and plundered the American people's treasury.
As far as Trump? Religious jingoism, self indulgence, fear of the other, suspicion of established norms with a well planned and better executed assault on democratic values led by autocratic regimes ( mainly Russia and The Saudi Caliphate ) have led to an anti-American cult status which allowed the rise of Trump as it has also done in Russia, Hungary, Poland and Brazil among other lesser states in the World.
Is there hope? There is always hope. But when the lie and alternative facts are projected without consequence, the prospect of that hope is diminished.