The Roman Republic's long decay echoes in our own tumultuous moment. But just how far along are we, and what can we do about it?
The classicist Mary Beard begins her 2016 book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome,
with a bizarre and troubling episode that occurred in 63 B.C., shortly
after the great orator, philosopher, wit, and politician, Cicero, had
been elected to Rome’s highest office, the consulship. His opponent had
been Catiline, born in privilege as scion of an ancient family but
burdened with a reputation for unsavory and perhaps criminal behavior.
Shortly
after the election, Cicero announced that he had uncovered a terrorist
plot, led by Catiline, to assassinate Rome’s elected officials, destroy
the city, and bring down its civic structures. The newly elected
consul’s sensational revelation was bolstered by a packet of letters he
had obtained that incriminated Catiline and others in the plot. Cicero
quickly obtained from the Senate a grant of enhanced authority to thwart
the conspiracy and save Rome. The enhanced authority, Beard informs us,
was “roughly the ancient equivalent of a modern ‘emergency powers’ or
‘prevention of terrorism’ act, and no less controversial.”
Cataline
promptly fled Rome, organized a ragtag army, and was defeated and
killed. Cicero then used his emergency powers to round up the suspected
plotters and have them “summarily executed” without even a show trial,
some of them almost certainly innocent. Thereafter, writes Beard, the
great orator “never ceased to use his rhetorical talents to boast how he
had uncovered Catiline’s terrible plot and saved the state.”
But
skeptics have emerged since that ancient era who note that Cicero’s
narrative plays very much to his own favor, and Beard suggests that a
fundamental question for today “should be not whether Cicero exaggerated the dangers of the conspiracy, but how far.”
After all, she writes, the exaggeration of an opponent’s malignancy is
not uncommon in politics and can reveal how “political paranoia and
self-interest often work.”
In
contemplating the Cicero-Catiline episode in our own time of American
political turmoil, one can’t help noting similarities between then and
now. There is, first of all, the political loser refusing to accept the
electoral outcome and seeking to tear down the structures of
governmental succession. That seems like Donald Trump. But then there
are also the opponents of the disgruntled loser who seem bent on
exaggerating the episode for political benefit. That sounds like some of
Trump’s detractors, warning about what they describe as widespread
right-wing terrorism. Or, looking more broadly, one is reminded of those
who, back in 2016 and 2017, concocted and circulated accusations of a
nefarious Trump conspiracy with a foreign power. That “Russiagate”
fervor seemed designed, ultimately, to undermine the new president and
even destroy his presidency based on “political paranoia and
self-interest,” to use Beard’s term.
However
intrigued we may feel about the Cicero tale as analogous to America’s
civic struggles of today, it’s difficult to see just what conclusions we
should draw. But, if we step back and place the Cicero-Catiline episode
in the full context of the Roman Republic’s 465-year history, it
becomes more revealing—and far more ominous.
After some 376 years
of remarkably stable governance, the brilliantly constructed Roman
Republic began to sputter. The polity slipped into a crisis of the
regime—“a long, drawn-out, protracted spiral of disorder,” as historian
Garrett G. Fagan once put it—that lasted nearly a century before the
system became so dysfunctional that Julius Caesar finally killed it off
and reinstituted the kings of old in the form of emperors titled with
his name. By the time of Cicero’s emergence as Rome’s great protector
from Catiline’s mortal threat, Rome had been struggling with this regime
crisis for 70 years. Afterward it would have just 19 more years of
existence.
This crisis
was complex and tangled up in multiple aspects of Rome’s social,
cultural, political, and economic life. But in essence it was a
progressive erosion of what Abraham Lincoln called, in a different
context, the “mystic chords of memory”—a widespread constitutional
sensibility and consciousness of heritage that maintained a powerful
hold on the people and sustained a mutual fealty to their republican
compact. Called mos maiorum and often distilled simply as “the
way of the ancestors,” the Roman constitution, though unwritten and
vague in conception, was nevertheless universally hallowed and so ruled
supreme.
Thus,
for centuries this cultural ethos transcended whatever issues might
arise in the polity, and a civic comity prevailed. Then around 133 B.C.,
the political issues roiling Rome took on a definitional cast,
penetrating to the very heart of Rome’s identity. The issues became more
important than the state’s mystic chords, and politics increasingly
took on a portentous cast. The opposition had to be not just bested but
destroyed. It must be noted also that, once the Romans abandoned mos maiorum
just a little, a further unraveling ensued. Eventually the Roman
constitution no longer maintained its traditional hold on the public
imagination or its check on the machinations of politicians.
Viewed
in this context, the Cicero-Cataline episode takes on clarity as part
of a much broader regime crisis that pulled the republic into a downward
spiral that led eventually to its demise. This poses some questions for
today’s America: Are we in a similar regime crisis and, if so, can we
extricate ourselves from it and put the country back on the trajectory
of its past? We may indeed be in such a crisis, and we won’t get out of
it without recognizing its essence and its dangers.
One
thing to be said about the crisis of the Roman regime is that those
high officials struggling within it never understood what it was, never
managed to define it so they could address it. They were too fixated on
winning the next political battle. Another thing to be said is that the
two major Roman factions struggling to define the polity—the Optimates,
or traditional elites; and Populares, the people at large—simply
couldn’t come together with any kind of accommodative spirit. They saw
each other as mortal enemies. One faction or the other had to prevail,
or a higher authority had to emerge to settle their differences through
unchecked power. That higher authority did emerge eventually in the
figure of Caesar and his successors. Finally, as noted, the Roman crisis
emerged out of definitional issues centered on the true nature of the
regime, its essence, what it stood for. The chasm between the two
visions was immense.
All of these elements of the Roman syndrome
are evident in America today. Certainly, the nature of the crisis
besetting America is little understood by our political leaders. They go
about their jobs as if they are engaged in the kind of politics
personified by Franklin Roosevelt vs. Alf Landon or Lyndon Johnson vs.
Barry Goldwater. The politics of those days could be raucous and
intense, but there was no regime crisis. Today there is, but nobody
seems aware of it.
Further, there is little interest among
politicians today, as in crisis-ridden Rome, in dealing with the
opposition in any good-faith way denoting a fealty to the structures of
our republic. Consider the empty governance of Donald Trump, bolstered
up by the solid support of roughly 40 percent of the electorate
throughout his four-year term. He couldn’t build on that foundational
support to fashion a governing coalition because he couldn’t bring
himself to work with those who weren’t already wearing MAGA hats.
We
are seeing much the same thing from Joe Biden in these early weeks of
his presidency, notably his decision to ram through the Senate an
expansive stimulus package without any Republican support. It is evident
also in the president’s bold, unilateral actions regarding the most
divisive issue roiling the nation in these times: immigration. With
several executive actions Biden has signaled that he doesn’t intend to
look for any middle ground on the issue, any more than Trump did during
his tenure.
And the
erosion of constitutional precepts and strictures has been going on for
years, notably in the administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama,
Trump, and now, as it seems, Biden. These men have demonstrated that, if
the president wants to do it, he’ll find a way to do it. Watch for what
the governing Democrats do about the huge student-debt overhang. Will
they concoct what they purport to be a constitutional underpinning for
the president to cancel much of the debt through executive authority, as
many top Democrats are now advocating? That would certainly fit a
pattern: Bush’s “signing statements,” which sought to alter the meaning
of statutes; Bush’s warrantless wiretaps; Obama’s tinkering with the
clear meaning of the Affordable Care Act after its passage in
contravention of congressional intent; Obama’s unconstitutional DACA
executive action that unilaterally altered, contrary to prevailing law,
the immigration status of illegals brought into the country as children;
Obama’s effort to stack the National Labor Relations Board by
circumventing the Constitution’s “advise and consent” clause (actions
struck down by the Supreme Court in a 9-0 decision); Trump’s diversion
of federal funds for purposes (his border wall, for example) not
authorized by Congress; Trump’s declaration that he had authority to
take military action against Iran, when no such authority seemed
credible; and the general growth over the years in size and reach of the
administrative state.
The trend is unmistakable and ominous.
Out
in the country, meanwhile, Americans are squaring off with an intensity
of anger rarely seen in American political history. Many of the issues
separating the U.S. factions are clearly definitional and hence highly
divisive—in ideological terms, between globalists and nationalists; in
socioeconomic terms, between elites and ordinary citizens; in geographic
terms, between the coasts and flyover states; in foreign policy,
between interventionists and advocates of realism and restraint.
During last year’s campaign, New York Times
commentator Thomas B. Edsall produced a trenchant piece examining the
chasm between today’s U.S. factions and the increasingly intense
passions that drive them. Edsall quoted Seth Jones of the Center for
Strategic and International Studies as noting that more and more people
were viewing the election in apocalyptic terms, as if it would “decide
the success or failure of the United States.” Such intensity of
political sentiment, he suggested, “significantly increases (actually
inflates) the importance of the election in ways that make violence
almost inevitable.” And, sure enough, violence soon ensued at the
nation’s capital, with five fatalities.
If America is mired in a
regime crisis in the mode of Rome, we’re in the early phase, certainly
far from the 70-year mark that spawned the injurious spectacle of the
Cicero-Catiline standoff. There remain grounds for hope that America can
regain its footing in coming years. But we’re on a dangerous path, and
part of the danger lies in the reality that hardly anyone seems to
understand the true nature of the crisis we’re in.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/our-catalinian-crisis/
