Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny
economist.com
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In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state.
Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written.
edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-...
The more interesting period politically is the ascent of the Gracchi, who consistently violated unwritten political norms. The response of the establishment was to murder them, as there was no institutional mechanism to reign them in.
The Gracchi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were Romans who both served as tribunes in the late 2nd century BC. They attempted to pass land reform legislation that would redistribute the major aristocratic landholdings among the urban poor and veterans, in addition to other reform measures. After achieving some early success, both were assassinated by enemies of these reforms.
The saga of the Gracchi is when the cracks in the Republican order first began to appear. This pattern of norm-breaking back and forth between progressives and reactionaries would repeat until there were no norms left and it took six decades of civil war until peace and stability was restored by the imperial dictatorship.
The story of the fall of the Roman Republic is not so much a story of the decay of democratic or governing institutions as we know them as it is the story of a ruling oligarchy that gradually loses the ability to discipline its own members and keep them united in a common policy.
"democratic norms" are behaviors in the public sphere that are expected under the assumption that politicians are interested in the good of everyone and that the popular will has political meaning.
"progressives" are politicians who want to improve society through reform and the redistribution of wealth and power.
"reactionaries" are politicians who want to return things back to the way they were before progressives existed.
These terms are perfectly appropriate to describe the political climate in the late republic.
You keep asserting that there was a "ruling oligarchy" when this is simply not true. If Rome was ruled by an oligarchy, then the Gracchi never would have got off the ground.
It is a historical constant that rich people are more likely to find themselves in office. Campaigning takes time and effort and you don't get paid for it, so you pretty much have to have some wealth stashed up before you can run for office. That was true then as it is true now.
That doesn't mean that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. No matter how wealthy you are, in order to get those jobs, you have to convince people to vote for you.
I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.
The sky isn’t so much blue as it is light that has a wavelength around 450-495 nm.
I understand that a historian would take great offense to the anachronism you’ve pointed out, but I still can’t help but to think that we’re describing the same thing with different words. Yes yes, words matter, but, there’s some underlying truth about when groups of apes stop being able to govern themselves that comes out, no matter the words.
When people are feeling desperate, and it's become clear that the system is not working, it's easy for populists to come in and promise to fix all the problems if only you'll let them do away with that pesky free press, and take votes away from those frustrating opposition people, and get rid of the annoying rules about making profit while in office.
It is told from the point of view of Tiro, slave of Cicero and inventor of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian_notes.
The conceit of the series is that it is actually a biography of Cicero that in really was written by Tiro but has unfortunately been lost to history since. (We know about it by references to it from other ancient works.)
The question will remain if as long as the right to bear arms remains a right. No tyranny can survive an armed and angry population.
The problem that follows that, though, is something the French faced during their revolutionary years. We could be in for a bloodbath if we don't move correctly.
If there is a deep commitment to protecting their rights, no defamation will stop them.
I think this idea would make an interesting speculative novel: America is on the brink of tyranny. The Constitution has been set aside (for some 'sufficient' reason) and freedoms summarily stripped from the people (in essence, we have become what China is now).
What do Federal law enforcement agencies have to do in order to quell rebellion? Psy-ops? Kill teams and other wet work? Propaganda? Probably a liberal mashing up of these and other tactics.
How would rebellion work? Who succeeds and survives? Why and how do others fail? What is the best outcome? The worst?
Spread reports of election interference by "liberals". Use it as a pretext for cancelling polling in certain counties. Stage a couple of mass shootings at polling places. Bingo.
I am more cynical and think that the 2nd amendment does protect against sudden tyranny but slow insidious tyranny is quite able to work around it.
On the other hand, I'm pretty hopeful that the first amendment will be able to get us out of our terrible situation.
And it seems ironic that you oppose Citizens United, but favor the First Amendment. If Citizens United had been decided the other direction, that would have been a blow against the First Amendment.
The US needs to heavily reform how election funding, free speech and volunteered labour all relate and it is a complicated question. But Citizens United did take us a big step in the wrong direction by lowering the impact of individuals' expression of free speech in relation to financial endorsement.
Tell 51% of the population that they are gods and if they don't feel like that it must be because of the other 49% percent.
fascists. tyrants. populists.
1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Fl...
Here's a little game that pop historian Mike Duncan released a little while ago. See if you can figure out the political moves you have to make to pull the Roman Republic back from the brink: https://www.riddle.com/showcase/165065/narrative
Umm...:
Press Denunciations:
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/21/us/sherman-letters-show-c...
Voting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_New_York_state_election
Courts:
http://www.scotusblog.com/2013/07/the-first-court-packing-pl...
Denunciation of the Constitution:
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
The 'different' democracy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_(slave)
The problems of our ancestors remain just as alive today. Learning from history means to learn about the holes in ourselves.
My feeling has been that Sulla's purges were the effective end of the Republic. Rome had no bureaucracy. It instead relied on great administrators (like Pompey, for example) to carry out public work projects effectively. The conflicts of the 80s not only thinned out talent from entering into the oligarchy, it required the entry of new men or men with families with less auctoritas like Cicero and Caesar. The emergence of new men created a rift between the optimates (conservatives, traditional oligarchy) and new folks that reduced compromise and lateralized society further.
Cicero was very moderate most of his career until his attempts to split up the Caesarians after the assassination, even so he found himself butting heads with stubborns like Cato his entire life. Caesar felt as though his hand was forced in the civil war, as the optimates wanted to arrest him for his land reform a decade earlier as consul as soon as he put down his imperium from the Gallic campaigns.
I would perhaps argue that the largest parallel the US has with Republican Rome is the breakdown of compromise and trust alongside increased lateralization. One can examine vote pairing incidence in the US Senate to observe this: recently Lisa Murkowski voted "present" during the Kavanaugh vote to allow a republican colleague to go to his daughter's wedding. Vote pairing used to be commonplace, and is seen as a gesture of compromise and good will, but it is very, very rare nowadays.
Have you read Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project? Lewis has basically chronicled the destruction of large swaths of the American bureaucracy. The parallels between Sulla and Trump are so striking, even down to the hair!
But I haven’t read the book so I could be talking out of my ass
The final years of the Republic were characterized by fights over citizenship for the Italians, consolidation of land in the hands of a small number of slave-owning oligarchs, meaning that more and more people were unemployed and ineligible for political advancement, and politicians breaking the political rules to push their agenda (kick out the guy vetoing my popular bill) or halt someone else's (kill the guy who passed that popular bill).
The exciting part of the fall of the republic that all the plays and history books are written about, with the civil wars and the dictators for life and the "friends, Romans, countrymen", that was all enabled by the earlier boring but highly consequential political fighting and norm-breaking.
Oh, and this was totally recognized at the time. Sulla tried to address these problems directly with his constitutional reforms, but it was too little to late. Later politicians like Cato and Cicero tried to re-normalize democratic behavior, but failed because their opposition had learned how much profit there was in abusing the system.
well, that sounds very much like today!
I recommend checking out The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan. It illustrates the process from "hey, the rules don't technically say bills have to start in the upper house..." to all-out civil war, step by step.
Along the same lines, fans of Mike Duncan's "History of Rome" podcast should consider purchasing his book "The Storm Before the Storm." It covers this period with nuance and depth.
I highly recommend it.
Not that they’re wrong, but the people (at least almost half of them) voted for someone who promised to break these norms. As far as I’m concerned, we signed a contract for 4 years of bull in china shop. Smart people need to be focusing on he silver lining and coming up with new, better norms and institutions that we will need when the rage winds down.
It is in every politician's best interest to obstruct their opponents, prevent their opponents from voting, destroy ballots, jail their enemies on made-up charges, halt investigations into themselves, pack the court that will oversee their cases with allies, etc.
"Democratic norms" are a gentlemen's agreement to not use these highly effective tactics against each other, in the mutual interest of republicanism and democracy. They are highly advantageous, but the consequences are dire.
This is why, during the Obama presidency when Republicans first started deploying them, they called it "the nuclear option". Once one side has gone nuclear, the other side must reciprocate or die.
This, more than any one election outcome, is what scares me most about our present moment. We've certainly seen malicious and undemocratic practice in the past and survived. Presidents from Nixon to Jackson have been utterly ruthless to opponents, and while Trump criticizes the press with particular zeal, he seems to achieved less actual influence than a lot of predecessors. (GWB, Nixon, and FDR all come to mind as having more actual influence over the press.)
What's more alarming is that it looks like our actual infrastructure doesn't work right and it simply took ~200 years for some of the cracks to show (or develop). The filibuster went from a rare protest or blackball to a motivator for bipartisanship to a minority veto, and then it went away. "Advise and consent" becomes a way for the legislative branch to cripple the others. Failure to appoint (and recess appointments to back it up) lets the executive cripple the judiciary and bypass the legislative. The only legal check on the executive is reserved to an increasingly partisan Congress, under rules of impeachment and pardon which have never been put to a full test. And all of that is before we touch on any of the more controversial representation, districting, and voting rights issues.
I'm not predicting national doom like some people have, but I'm definitely worried about a situation that alternates between paralytic divided governments run on recess appointments and executive orders, and united governments openly favoring their constituents in the absence of real minority-party or judicial checks.
(As for the nuclear metaphor, I can't help noticing that it seems to be about attack, rather than armament - in which case the dying part happens regardless of reciprocation...)
Isn't this a necessary action in order to preserve any semblance of norms? If no one said anything, we'd just silently drift to a new field, let alone a moved set of goalposts.
We are in the anti civil rights era. Where the position of segregation and identity politics is being sold as the answer for the outcome of the equality era.
This is not a position argued , but a position felt. Many dont like minority quotas and many dont trust white men. The diversity is our strength idea while not wrong does not come without costs.
If I told you a new norm would be secession would you accept that?
Rome survived when their political structures fell apart in the first century BC too. Does that mean you would be equally happy to live under the thumb of Nero as you would to live in the free and open democratic society of the second century BC republic?
The jury is still out on whether or not the US will survive.
The current US government is actually not all that bad in practical terms by the standards of its behaviour in the 60s and 70s, but this is mostly because it's corrupt and ineffectual. They can't even prevent their own money launderers from being jailed.
Let's not forget that Rome was broke when it met its demise, having debased its currency as tax revenues declined, and after taxing land owners to the point that additional revenue was unavailable and - anecdotally at least - some land owners sold themselves into tax-free slavery rather than face the consequences of non-payment.
One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answer is “it’s more complicated”.
Think about it, if Rome wasn't a democracy, then why did the Populares exist at all? In an oligarchy, wouldn't a political party that panders to the masses be utterly powerless?
While Romans didn't call what they had liberalism, they definitely practiced a liberal society. People were free to speak their minds, travel as they wished, and speak for or against people in power however they wanted (see: Catullus and the invention of slam poetry).
All of these freedoms were locked down tight the moment Augustus came to power. People were okay with it, because having your speech, movement, and life trajectory restricted is better than being dead in a civil war, but Roman society under the Empire was way less free than Roman society under the Republic.
For some values of "majority vote". The voting was by centuries / tribes, both of them being extremely unbalanced in voting power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republi...
If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and other elected offices.
The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal and senators and equites aren't allowed, elected Tribunes who had an absolute veto over all government activity, including the senate and the consuls, and controlled the treasury.
This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy. You can't just ignore the rest of the government and its other electoral mechanisms.
No, the voting was by tribe, with the vast majority of voters crammed into the 4 urban tribes and the wealthy were enrolled in 31 much smaller rural tribes.
> and senators and equites aren't allowed.
Sure they were, as long as they were not patrician. By the first century BC, the vast majority of senators were plebeian.
> This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy.
The US indeed has oligarchic tendencies already. Now imagine if the constitution guaranteed that citizens with $1M+ in property had 50+% of the vote, and that your "state" was not determined primarily by residence, but anybody without substantial property was automatically registered in California, Texas, or New York...
That's very, very wrong. First of all, the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Political power was monopolized in the hands of very few families who formed the nobility. When somebody outside this incredibly tiny elite, a homo novus, completed the cursus honorum, it was a seen as sensation.
Furthermore, the most important offices of the cursus honorum were not selected by something we would recognize as a democratic election. If you did not belong to the equites or the first class, your vote in the comitia centuriata which elected the consuls, the praetors and the censors had basically no effect.