A great state can fall apart when the rule-breaking of one man inspires his enemies to break the rules, too.
Earlier this month, a man armed with
a semiautomatic rifle was apprehended on a South Florida golf course. He was
allegedly planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second
attempted assassination against Trump in two-and-a-half months.
It’s likely that the gunman, Ryan W.
Routh, was acting alone. But he is not alone in his hatred for Trump. In the
eyes of many Americans, the 45th president is an existential threat to our
republic. And ever since he won the Republican nomination for president in
2016, his opponents have treated him as such. They have also been repeatedly
stunned by the fact that Trump breaks the norms of modern politics. From the
minor—commenting on the size of his manhood—to the unprecedentedly
major—denying that he lost the 2020 presidential election.
The dynamic between Trump and his
haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked
the country by leading rallies where his adoring fans chanted, “Lock her up,”
referring to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Eight years later, crowds at Kamala
Harris rallies belt out a similar chant, calling for Trump’s
imprisonment.
In this respect Ryan
Routh is part of a larger problem tearing our country apart. When the other
side is considered completely beyond the pale—a threat to our very system of
government—it’s worth breaking the norms of political decorum to stop them
getting into power. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an “extinction-level event.” If Kamala wins, our country will
become, in Trump’s words, “Venezuela on steroids.”
One escalation begets the next, until
politics goes past the point of no return. We take it for granted today that we
settle our elections with voting, not shooting. But republics don’t last
forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows. Because the stakes
are so high, it’s essential to ask: What leads a republic to choose the gun
over the ballot?
To try answering that question, I
looked back to ancient Rome, a republic that not only fell but fell because of
the rule-breaking of one man—and the response of his enemies. His name was
Tiberius Gracchus. Like Trump, he was a member of the elite who turned on the
elites, who channeled the resentments and anger of the common people against a
system that had turned against him. Like Trump, he disregarded the unwritten
political rules of his era. And like Trump, Tiberius prompted his enemies to
disregard the norms themselves.
“You see this escalation very quickly
with Tiberius Gracchus,” Adrian Goldsworthy, a historian of ancient Rome,
told The Free Press. “He crosses some lines, sets some
precedents, and then they suppress him in a way that sets an even worse
precedent.”
Imagine January 6 in reverse: A mob
of angry senators rioting after an election, breaking the legs off their chairs
to fashion clubs, attack the people who supported a populist leader—who had
just won an election. That is how Tiberius met
his end.
In America, we remain a republic
unbroken, but this episode of history offers salutary lessons. We have endured
Trump’s most serious norm violation: his efforts to steal back an election he
claimed was stolen from him by the forces that smeared and defamed him during
his presidency. His attempts to send slates of fake electors to Congress to delay the certification
of that election. His supporters breaking into the Capitol, menacing
legislators.
And yet the cycle of escalations
between Trump and his opponents continues to strain our foundations like no
political crisis since the Civil War. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed—and
eventually, the death of the republic itself. Is this a blueprint for America’s
future?
You probably know about last
year’s trend of American men confessing on TikTok how often they think
about the Roman Empire. I’m a bit different. I’m obsessed with what preceded
the empire, Rome’s republic. Empires are a dime a dozen in human history. They
rise and fall, from Babylon to the Soviet Union. But republics—a form of
government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the people—these are
orchids: rare, precious, and fleeting. If you take the long view of human
history, tyranny is the norm. A system that checks the power of its leaders and
legislators and makes them accountable to citizens? That’s special.
Few republics of significance existed
between ancient Rome and America’s founding.
Of course, there are differences
between the two. In America, we have one chief executive: the president. Rome’s
republic had the equivalent of two presidents known as consuls. In Rome, the
powerful senate, composed of elites known as the patricians, were also the republic’s military leaders.
In the U.S., there’s a bright line between soldiers and politicians.
We have a constitution. In Rome, many
rules were handshake agreements between gentlemen, understood as part of the
long-standing traditions by the ruling class.
But the similarities are nonetheless
striking. Both the Roman and American republics emerged initially out of
revolutions against kings. Both republics were stained by slavery. The Romans
didn’t have political parties the way we do, but they did have politics. There
were great debates over how powers and privileges were divided across society.
And in both the Roman and American republics, the rights of the regular
citizens expanded over time.
Between 494 and 287 BCE, the Roman
republic went through a period of reform known as the Conflict of the Orders.
For more than 200 years, the have-nots pressured the haves to expand liberty to
all men (though not, notably, women). The plebeians—the largest community in
Roman society—wanted political representation. Eventually they prevailed,
gaining legal authority as tribunes, officials who could veto legislation and
introduce laws. Tribunes could make citizen arrests. The 10 tribunes that
represented the plebeians were the common man’s voice inside the republic. It
was strictly forbidden to do any violence to a tribune if he was inside the
city of Rome.
The Rome that Tiberius was born into
had a peculiar problem, not unlike the one America faces today. It was a victim
of its own success. As it swept through the known world with one military
conquest after another, Rome became so rich that by 167 BCE it stopped taxing
its citizens. There was no need. Every few months wagons filled with silver,
ivory, and gold would come into the city, a portion of which would go to the
republic.
This was glorious for the patrician
elite. But the wealth flowing into Rome did little for the plebeians—just as
globalization has enriched America’s coastal elites, leaving factory workers,
truck drivers, and heartland Americans behind. And this endless flow of
treasure relied on endless warfare. A massive military was needed to invade,
hold, and plunder foreign lands. The republic relied on conscription. Citizen farmers were drafted into the army for years
at a time. Often, when they returned home, their neglected farms were in
disrepair, and wealthy patrician elites would swoop in and pay below-market
prices for the land. Desperate farmers would have no choice but to accept these
terrible terms. And it got even worse. The patricians didn’t hire the farmers
to work the land they once owned. It was far more profitable to use slave labor
instead.
For the everyman small farmer, this
was an unbearable situation, and it was a political problem for the republic
because Rome relied on these men to fight their forever wars, to borrow a
phrase from today. They needed the plebes invested, not rebellious.
And so, just like our politicians
today, the patrician Senate sat around and argued over what to do about it. One
faction wanted the status quo, claiming that since small farmers received a
portion of the booty from Roman conquests abroad, there was no real problem.
Another faction argued for reform. Soldiers would not fight if it meant losing
their farms. The idea was to apportion public land to the plebes. You might say
it was the socialism of antiquity. And Tiberius would become its champion.
Before he was a politician, like most
Roman elites, Tiberius had been a soldier. Three decades after Rome stopped
taxing its citizens, Tiberius was part of a campaign against a tribe known as
the Numantines in today’s Spain. There he served under an incompetent Roman
commander, Mancinus, whose army fell into a trap: 20,000 Roman soldiers were
surrounded, certain to die. And would have, had Tiberius not interceded. He
went over the head of Mancinus to negotiate a truce with the Numantines. The
Numantine tribe ransacked the Roman camp, as you would expect, but allowed the
legion to depart for Rome unscathed.
One might think this was a triumph of
military pragmatism from the young Tiberius. But none of this played very well
back in Rome. As the ancient historian Plutarch wrote in his volume of
biographies, Lives: “On his return to Rome, the whole transaction
was greatly blamed as dishonorable and disgraceful.” The Senate voted to strip
Mancinus of authority, put him in chains, and send him back to the
Numentines—and, though they did not officially censure him, they also heaped
abuse on Tiberius.
For an ambitious young Roman, this
was a major setback. Yet there was a silver lining that would shape his future
as a populist. The families of the soldiers whose lives Tiberius saved rushed
to his defense. He was their hero. Tiberius earned contempt from the
conservatives in the Senate, but bolstered his reputation with the plebes. It
would become a pattern.
Tiberius was clever and ambitious and
had a plan. If he was loved by the people, he would build his political career
upon those very people, and he would do so as a tribune, representing the
plebes. Most tribunes rarely made waves because they were bought off by the
patricians. Tiberius would be different.
He was genuinely troubled by the
treatment of Rome’s dispossessed farmers and their terrible living conditions.
On a journey through Tuscany, Tiberius observed the political graffiti scrawled
on sign posts in the countryside, raging that the farms of plebeian soldiers
were being snatched up on the cheap. The young Roman was outraged, and his
indignation would lead him to challenge the establishment of Rome as no one had
before.
It began with a land bill known as
Lex Agraria, which proposed that public lands be apportioned to small Roman
farmers. The law also allowed for compensation to the wealthy Roman families
that had effectively taken over these public lands. So it was in many ways a
compromise.
Tiberius introduced the legislation
in the people’s assembly. His speech on its behalf is a stem-winder for the
ages. This is the version recorded by Plutarch:
“The wild beasts of Italy had
their dens and holes and hiding-places, while the men who fought and died in
defense of Italy enjoyed, indeed, the air and the light, but nothing else:
houseless and without a spot of ground to rest upon, they wander about with
their wives and children, while their commanders, with a lie in their mouth,
exhort the soldiers in battle to defend their tombs and temples against the
enemy, for out of so many Romans not one has a family altar or ancestral tomb,
but they fight to maintain the luxury and wealth of others, and they die with
the title of lords of the earth, without possessing a single patch of earth to
call their own.”
Now Donald Trump could never dream of
hitting that level of eloquence—it’s one of history’s great speeches. But if
you go back to Trump’s inaugural address, you can see the similarities. “January
20, 2017, will be remembered as the day that the people became the rulers of
this nation again.” American citizens, Trump likes to remind us, are being
deprived of their birthright by the moneyed elites. And you could say Tiberius
wanted to make Rome great again. This high-octane populism scared the togas off
of the conservatives in the Senate.
The Roman system, like our own,
relied on unwritten customs in addition to formal law. These standards, which
were known as “the way of the elders,” helped keep the delicate republic in
balance. And Tiberius Gracchus was about to steamroll these norms in order to
ram through his land bill.
But there would be consequences. The
senators opposed to the land bill found a more pliant tribune, Marcus Octavius,
to be their proxy inside the people’s assembly, and Octavius vetoed the
introduction of the bill time and again.
Tiberius at first tried to reason
with Octavius in debate. He even offered to compensate him for any loss of
property he might incur personally. But none of it worked. So he took a drastic
step, arguing that when a tribune defied the will of the people he was no
tribune at all. He called for a vote to strip Octavius of his office. That had
never been done before.
The plebes voted to give Octaviuss
the boot, and Tiberius dispatched one of his bodyguards to physically remove
him from the orator’s platform, a humiliating spectacle. And in the fracas, as
the plebes chased Octavius away, one of his slaves had his eyes gouged out.
Imagine that you are a blue-blood
senator, and you’re watching all this. You’re horrified. Never in Rome’s
history had a tribune used his power like this.
But it worked. With Octavius gone,
the land bill passed easily and became Roman law. Tiberius then created a
commission that would be distributing public land to dispossessed farmers.
Conveniently, it was comprised of himself, his father-in-law, and his little
brother, Gaius Gracchus. There is a fair argument that Tiberius was not acting
entirely out of noble conviction. If the Gracchus family controlled the
distribution of public lands, the beneficiaries would be indebted politically
to Tiberius and his brother.
The Senate’s conservatives seethed.
Their next move was one that any contemporary politician would find familiar.
They couldn’t stop the land reform bill from becoming law, so they did the next
best thing: They starved the land commission of funding.
And that would have been the end of
the land bill had Tiberius not experienced a stroke of good fortune. Attalus,
the king of a wealthy territory called Pergamum in modern day Turkey, had just
died. And in his will he bequeathed his entire kingdom to the people of Rome.
Tiberius argued before the assembly that the money should go to land reform
because Attalus left his fortune to the Roman people, not to Rome.
This shattered another norm.
According to Roman custom, it was the senate—not the people’s assembly—that
voted on Rome’s finances and foreign policy. When Tiberius put the matter of
Pergamum to the people’s assembly, the patricians were incensed. “The Senate
met in a furious session to denounce Tiberius as a reckless demagogue aiming to
make himself a tyrannical despot,” Mike Duncan wrote in his history of
this period, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of
the Roman Republic.
Sound familiar? Recall how leading
Democrats, including Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden, have warned that
Trump will be a dictator if he is reeelected?
Tiberius confirmed the suspicions of
his foes with his next move. He announced that he would run for an
unprecedented second consecutive term as tribune of the plebes. Again, if there
was a rule against it, it was an unwritten one.
One senator in particular was
determined to prevent Tiberius from having his way. His name was Scipio Nasica,
and he was also a high religious official, the pontifex maximus. He hated the
land reform bill. He hated how Tiberius ran roughshod over the ways of the
elders.
As voting got started, Tiberius’s
supporters flooded the hill near the Temple of Jupiter where the assembly met,
and controlled the area where the votes were to be tallied. Across the plane,
in the Senate, Nasica boiled. He implored the consul, Rome’s highest elected
official, to stop this affront to Roman tradition.
“Tiberius Gracchus was becoming a
king, a tyrant,” he warned. “If he is not stopped, then we will lose the
republic forever.”
But his pleas fell on deaf ears. The
consul only promised to stop Tiberius if he violated a law, but he would not
condone violence against a Roman citizen without a trial. Nasica then said,
according to Plutarch: “Well then, as the consul betrays the state, to those
who wish to maintain the laws follow me.”
At this point, Nasica pulled his toga
over his head and led a mob of like-minded senators to the hill where the
voting was taking place. They broke the legs off tables and chairs, and began
filing through the crowd, swinging their crude clubs at the plebes as they
approached Tiberius.
Plutarch writes that Tiberius was
attempting to escape the mob when he fell to the ground. As he tried to get up,
a fellow tribune clubbed his head with the leg of a bench. Another senator
struck him again. Tiberius was beaten to death, along with 300 of his plebeian
supporters.
After the bloodbath, the
dead—Tiberius Gracchus included—were denied a proper burial. Their bodies were
thrown into the Tiber River.
This riot was the first political
violence in the Roman republic since the Conflict of the Orders. It would not
be the last. Nasica broke the prohibition against political violence inside
Rome. And that prohibition would never be restored.
The next century for Rome was soaked
in blood. The republic was now stuck in a cycle of escalating violence. Nasica
was never prosecuted for leading the lynch mob. So it’s not surprising that a
decade later, when Tiberius’s brother, Gaius Gracchus, proposed even more
sweeping reforms, he was also swept up in a tide of violence that left him
dead. Over time, because conscription was becoming more difficult, various
warlords arose, commanding their own private militias. The old safeguards
against putting too much power in the hands of one man were eroding. Rome would
be ruled by dictator-generals for stretches at a time.
Eventually, a loose alliance of three
Roman leaders emerged: Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar. They trampled on
Rome’s remaining political traditions and customs. After Caesar, Rome was a
republic in name only. The Senate still met, but it no longer had power over
affairs of the Roman state. A once-mighty republic was gelded by a century of
norm violations.
Savor the irony. Nasica and his
allies in the Senate thought they were preventing a king from destroying the
republic when they murdered Tiberius Gracchus. And yet it was that murder—that
massive norm violation—that planted the seeds for Rome to be ruled by an
emperor.
So, what does this teach us about
today?
The main lesson of Tiberius Gracchus
is that republics are fragile. The laws as well as the unwritten rules of our
politics only work when they are observed by all parties. When one side defies
the norms, it’s an invitation for the other side to do the same, even if the
rules were violated for the most noble of reasons. American senator Frank
Church summed up this idea as follows: “Crisis makes it tempting to ignore the
wise restraints that make men free.”
He was warning about the overreach of
the national security state during the Cold War, but it applies to the Trump
era as well. In Rome, the crisis posed by Tiberius tempted Nasica to lead a mob
that murdered him.
In America’s recent history, the
crisis posed by Trump tempted Democrats to warp the justice system into a
partisan weapon. It tempted the elite media to lash itself to the Democratic
party. It tempted the FBI to pursue a meritless investigation into the sitting
president long after the flimsy theory of Russian collusion was debunked by the
FBI’s own investigators. It tempted state legislatures to try to remove Trump’s
name from the presidential ballot. Every one of these norm violations was
justified—in their minds—to stop Trump, a dictator, a traitor, an orange monster, especially after the
transgressions of January 6.
So consider this a warning. Nasica’s
lynch mob believed their actions were justified to save the republic; instead,
they set it on a path to ruin. The Romans went from the rule of law to the rule
of the emperor in just over a century.
In two years, our republic turns 250
years old. We’ve survived one civil war. Compared to Rome, our January 6 really
wasn’t so fatefully terrible. After the mob was dispersed, Congress finished
certifying the 2020 election that evening. We’ve been lucky. So were the
Romans, until Tiberius Gracchus.
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