CommentsPOLITICS-It took the Roman Republic five centuries to devolve into a centralized despotism. It may take ours roughly 240 years to get to the same place, but with decidedly less upside.
Concern over a crossing of a constitutional Rubicon – the northern Italian river whose passage by Julius Caesar and his legion in 49 B.C. occasioned the death of the Republic – has centered on Donald Trump. The Donald might not have conquered Gaul, or written a brilliant account of his exploits, but his Caesarist attributes – overweening self-regard, contempt for existing institutions and a touch of glamour – are all too obvious.
No surprise, then, that some on the left, perhaps rehearsing their roles as cheerleaders for Hillary Clinton, see Trump as a “tyrant” – a Caesar in training. Others see a reincarnation of Italy’s fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and link Trump’s success to that of the rising European populist parties, which progressives often label, sometimes accurately, as protofascist.
Many on the intellectual right also see in The Donald an imperial pretender. New York Times Republican stalwart Ross Douthat has called the likely GOP presidential standard bearer “a protofascist grotesque with zero political experience and poor impulse control.”
Two faces of incipent fascism
Trump may seek, as House Speaker Paul Ryan suspects, an imperial presidency. His proposed mass deportations of undocumented immigrants or proposed ban on nonresident Muslims entering the country would certainly require a robust and oppressive central state. As Rich Lowry of National Review notes, “Donald Trump exists in a plane where there isn’t a Congress or a Constitution. There are no tradeoffs or limits. There is only his will and his team of experts.”
But there’s also a progressive side to incipient fascism in America. After all it’s the militants of the Left who try to shut down Trump rallies, not the other way around. Free speech? It’s now common place for social-justice warriors to shout down conservative speakers. And their influence seems leading to new forms of control over the Internet, as recently seen at Twitter and Facebook.
Even the establishment Left appears increasingly Caesarist, brooking no real restraint on executive power, if they hold the reins. Hillary Clinton has already made clear she won’t follow her husband’s path of compromise with the Republican Congress; if they refuse to go along, she will go around them – just like President Obama has. Her “results”-oriented authoritarianism, notes left-leaning journalist Matt Yglesias, seems increasingly alluring to progressives.
Here in California, our septuagenarian state duce, Jerry Brown, enthusiastically embraces “the coercive power of the state” in order to enforce his dictates on climate change. And, for his part, Barack Obama has extended rule by decree to unprecedented lengths. During its first six years, the Obama administration promulgated more than twice as many major rules as during the first six years of the predecessor George W. Bush administration.
Progressive variations of fascism may be more accepted by the media than the Trump version, but both represent a remarkably similar impulse.
Roman Replay?
Restraints on central power are critical to the great republics, but these are clearly loosening in America. Our founders were highly conscious of the Roman Republic’s structure and sought to emulate it. They saw the need, as did the Romans, for a balance of interests, with limited tenure for consuls, and ways for the common citizenry to express their preferences through elected tribunes. The whole system, notes historian Adrian Goldsworthy, was built around “the desire to prevent any one individual from gaining to too much permanent power.”
Roman Republican ideals helped shape our constitutional system – with its emphasis on checks and balances – but Rome’s eventual demise also presents a cautionary tale. As the Roman Republic extended its reach, including more races and peoples under its domain, old structures began to fray. The Senate became a pit of corruption, and there was the rise of various charismatic leaders – Sulla, Marius, the Gracchi – who uprooted the old system and gradually denuded it of meaning. When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon en route to seizing power, he assumed complete control of the state, dismantling the old system.
Caesar was an effective reformer, notes historian Mary Beard, modernizing everything from transportation to time-keeping. He created new colonies to resettle the capital’s poor and extended Roman citizenship to those living far north of the city. His essential argument was that great things could only be accomplished by dismissing the old republican system with its checks and balances.
So the Republic gave way to the Empire, which, tragically, did not always have leaders of the quality of Caesar or his adopted son Octavian, later know as Augustus. Trump, sadly, has a personality more reminiscent of Nero or Caligula.
The public: Both problem, potential solution
Trump’s appeal, like Caesar’s, has its roots in changing social mores and economic changes. In Caesar’s Rome, displaced farmers and ex-soldiers felt little sympathy for the patrician elites of their day. Similarly, America’s middle and working classes, particularly among the white majority, hate the economic and political leadership that have flourished while they have suffered through more than a decade of falling real earnings and depressed middle-class opportunities. They also see a popular culture that largely disregards, and even demeans, the traditional values of family, small enterprise or patriotism. Further, they face an oligarchy – mostly lining up behind Hillary Clinton – that dominates both the economy, media and the political system.
These voters, as the New York Times’ Nate Cohen has observed, are not primarily the uneducated, racist bumpkins often portrayed in the media. Voters embraced Trump not just as an expression of “hate,” as progressives claim, but because he, like Bernie Sanders on the left, has intuited their concerns. Like Mussolini, who wished to revive the glory of Caesar’s Rome, however, Trump’s xenophobic notion of “making America great again” is classically fascist.
Rather than a choice, we face a contest between two different kinds of imperial pretenders. After all, liberals, not conservatives, advocate witch hunts against those with dissenting views on such issues as climate change, and even seek to exclude the politically incorrect from donating to museums, seeking to make sure our cultural institutions also follow the party line.
So are we threatened – as in pre-Imperial Rome, post-World War I Italy and Weimar Germany – with witnessing ever more intense battles, possibly in the streets, as two authoritarian movements seek to control the national agenda by seizing power in Washington.
The only hope for changing this course relies on what used to be thought of as the common sense of the American people. If both Trump and Clinton have little regard for constitutional niceties, the people of this country – Republican, Democrat, independent – still generally favor solutions developed at the local level and suspect the power of the federal government.
Roughly half of Americans, according to a 2015 Gallup poll, now consider the federal government “an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.” In 2003, only 30 percent of Americans felt that way. Survey research finds confidence in large governmental institutions – beyond the military and police – now sits at record lows.
Even millennials, although largely liberal in their orientation, particularly on issues such as immigration and gay marriage, appear to favor community-based, local solutions as opposed to “top down” approaches to key problems. A recent National Journal poll found that millennials, are far less trusting of major institutions than their Generation X predecessors.
“Millennials are on a completely different page than most politicians in Washington, D.C.,” notes pollster John Della Volpe says. “This is a more cynical generation when it comes to political institutions.”
These sentiments are likely to be submerged as Americans get to choose between two utterly unlikable authoritarians. Yet, if the Republic survives either of these likely miserable regimes, there is hope that, at some point, Americans will turn back from the idea of an imperial presidency and again see the wisdom in the dispersal – not the concentration – of both political and economic power.
(Joel Kotkin is a R.C. Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism in Houston. His newest book is “The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us.” This was first posted at newgeography.com.
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Battle of the Imperial Pretenders
