This morning I listened to an interview on the New York Times Book Review podcast.
The interviewee, Yascha Mounk, was talking about the decline of the Roman Republic, and comparing it to the present situation in the United States.
This is part of what he said. I cut and paste it from his article on the same subject:
"...the principal purpose of his book is to allow “readers to
better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who
breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish
them for doing so.” Does he accomplish that ambitious goal?
In Watts’s telling of the Roman Republic’s agonizing death,
slow-moving structural transformations gradually sowed the seeds of demise. As
the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the
growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the
institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose
from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of
ordinary Romans. With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional
institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their
competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize
promises. It was these populares — populists like Tiberius Gracchus and his
younger brother Gaius — who, in their bid for power, first broke some of the
republic’s most longstanding norms.
The transformation of Rome’s army compounded the challenge
of growing inequality. In the early days of the republic, soldiers thought of
their participation in military service as a civic duty. Commanders hoped to
win great honors and perhaps to attain higher office. But by the late second
century B.C., the army had essentially been privatized. Commanders knew that
the plunder of new lands could garner them vast riches. Their soldiers signed
up for the ride in the hope of gaining a generous allotment of land on which to
start a farm. With soldiers increasingly loyal to their commanders, and
commanders doing whatever it took to maximize the prospect of private profit,
the Senate was no longer in charge.
It took a long time for these tensions to build. But once
they reached a critical point, Rome’s descent into chaos and dysfunction was
astonishingly swift.
During the century and a half between the days of Pyrrhus
and the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, there had not been a single outbreak of
large-scale political violence. Then Tiberius pushed through land reforms in
defiance of the Senate’s veto. In the ensuing fracas, he and hundreds of his
followers were murdered. The taboo on naked power politics had been broken,
never to recover.
Over the next years, it quickly became normal for populist
politicians to set aside longstanding norms to accomplish their goals; for
military commanders to bend the Senate to their will by threatening to occupy
Rome; and for rival generals to wage war on one another. “Within a generation
of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm
their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of
assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell
into civil war.”
If we are to avoid the fate that ultimately befell Rome,
Watts cautions, it is “vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic
worked, what it achieved and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens
ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.” In a
sense, the book fails in this ambition. Especially as it progresses, Watts, a
professor of history at the University of California at San Diego, abandons a
careful analysis of the larger trends for a blow-by-blow account of the many
conflicts that divided the republic in the last century of its existence. At
times, this endless onslaught of calamities — a new violation of some
traditional norm, the latest commander to threaten an invasion of Rome, one
more shift in the ever-fragile constellation of power — starts to numb the
mind.
But in another sense, the sheer repetitiveness of the
calamities that befell Rome only serves to underline the book’s most urgent
message. If we were to make explicit the implicit analogy that runs all the way
through “Mortal Republic,” we would most likely cast Donald Trump as a farcical
reincarnation of Tiberius Gracchus. Like the original populist, Trump was
propelled to power by the all-too-real failures of a political system that is
unable to curb growing inequality or to mobilize its most eminent citizens
around a shared conception of the common good. And like Gracchus, Trump
believes that, because he is acting in the name of the dispossessed, he is
perfectly justified in shredding the Republic’s traditions.
If that analogy is right, the good news is that Trump will,
once the history of our own mortal Republic is written, turn out to be a relatively
minor character. Far from single-handedly destroying our political system, he
is the transitional figure whose election demonstrates the extent to which the
failings of our democracy are finally starting to take their toll.
The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to
afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity. For though four generations
stand between Tiberius Gracchus’ violent death and Augustus’ rapid ascent to
plenipotentiary power, the intervening century was one of virtually incessant
fear and chaos. If the central analogy that animates “Mortal Republic” is
correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to
persist long after its present occupant has left the White House. "
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