What the Framers Knew about the Fall of the Roman Republic and We Should: Power’s Inevitable Corruption Then and Now

Everyone is familiar with the historical catastrophe called “The Fall of the Roman Empire.”

What’s less familiar, but far more relevant to our political situation today, is “The Fall of the Roman Republic.”

A couple of sentences in an op-edit in a daily newspaper by a political commentator — whose so-called ‘conservative’ views are far from my own — recently caught my attention.

“Trump’s claim that he can pardon himself epitomizes the fundamental challenge he poses to the formal and informal rules of the American republic,” wrote Niall Ferguson, a British historian living in (and off) the United States. The piece continued:
“All the accompanying symptoms of the transition from republic to empire are already visible. The plebs despise the elites. An old and noble senatorial order personified by John McCain is dying. A cultural civil war rages on social media, the modern-day forum, with all civility cast aside and character assassination a daily occurrence…”

The important point here, that prophesied ‘transition’ from republic to empire, is what Americans need to be paying attention to today.

And Ferguson’s allusions to Roman Republic politics — ‘plebs’ and ‘senatorial order’ — are not insignificant. The constitution and political history of the Roman Republic were chief subjects of study for the framers of the American Constitutional system of government, which Jefferson, Madison, Adams and the others proudly christened ‘a republic.’

Most of us probably know something about the events that led up to the creation of the Roman Empire — and the fall of its republic — with the crowning of Caesar Augustus (aka Octavius) in the year 27 BCE.

If we were required to read Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” in high school, or at least watch the classic movie version with Marlon Brando in the role of Marc Anthony, we were introduced to some of the major events in the collapse of republican government in Rome. But Julius Caesar was not the first power-seeking general from a wealthy (might we say ‘Trumpian’?) background to seek autocratic rule over Rome.

According to the major Roman historians who wrote about their country’s troubled first century BCE, the rivalry of Caesar and the similarly motivated politician-general Pompey had antecedents in a previous generation when power-hungry aristocrats Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla contended for more power than the Roman Constitution permitted one man to hold. Sulla, in fact, revived the ancient office of “dictator,” after marching with an army on Rome and defeating Marius on the battlefield. He used his autocratic powers to strengthen the power of the Senate — an oligarchic body in the Roman system of government — and reduced that of the tribunes, who represented the people.

These tactics were very much in Julius Caesar’s playbook — and were copied in turn by his followers Marc Anthony and Octavius. The latter succeeded in grabbing the ultimate gold ring of an emperor’s crown.

The lesson the Roman historians teach is that ‘constitutional government’ — designed to preserve personal liberties and prevent the accumulation of too much power in one leader’s hands — does not by itself guarantee the preservation of individual liberty and rule by the people. The reason the Republican form of government weakened and eventually crumbled was that its public men abandoned the country’s ingrained tradition of honorable and public-spirited conduct by those serving in public offices.

According to the historians Plutarch, Sallust and Cicero, “republican virtues” such as restraint, honesty, fairness and disinterested conduct were inculcated in the country’s political class throughout the early and middle periods of Rome’s Republican history. The very word ‘republic’ comes from the Latin phrase res publica: public things.

As opposed to monarchy, dictatorship, autocracy or any other name for one-man rule, the republican form of government implies a government headed by an elected leader. A ‘democracy,’ literally ‘rule by the people,’ implies a top leader elected by all the people. Rome was far from a democracy, since the aristocratic Senate held most power and selected the heads of government. But power was shared with the commons through the office of ‘people’s tribunes’ and by officials with local authority called ‘magistrates.’

In an atmosphere in which the good of the nation was placed before personal gain and conduct restrained by shared moral values, the Roman Constitution led to a government in which the highest positions tended to go to the most able candidates, and the most important questions were decided by reason and regard for the public good. Taken together, these practices and traditions offered the citizenry of the Roman Republic legitimate protections against the abuses that the consolidation of power in a single figure or ‘dynasty’ always brings.

Roman leaders motivated by these virtues succeeded in guiding their country to unquestioned pre-eminence in the Mediterranean region. But political dominance led to the accumulation of great wealth in private hands. And, as Plutarch wrote, the absence of any significant national rivals allowed powerful Romans born into dynastic (‘Trumpian’?) families to get away with putting personal goals — the so-called ‘great man’s’ obsessive quest for power and fame — over the public good. Plutarch cites private motives such as burning ambition, rivalry, ostentatious wealth and what today we would call celebrity status and ‘conspicuous consumption.’

Given the analysis offered by Plutarch and others of the causes of the Roman Republic’s decline and destruction, followed by the accession of imperial one-man rule — unchecked, absolute, driven by ambition, vanity, love of power — no constitutional system, however well devised, is likely to survive the loss of sane, moderate, rational, morally decent standards of conduct by its leaders.

Values such as honesty, fairness, respect for others — including those who hold opposing ideas — and for the rule of law, for facts, for science, and for traditional humane ideals are at least as important as an enlightened constitutional structure to the preservation of popular self-government.

This is why the current travesty of America’s national government is no laughing matter, even though I am sorely tempted to laugh at it — and frequently yield to that temptation. And why I found Ferguson’s comparison of the American political scene to the breakdown of Roman self-government and the evil travesties of ‘empire’ so provocative.

Because I’ve also been thinking (more than I wish to) over the past two years of comparison points between the last years of the Roman Republic and the contemporary breakdown of the American system of self-rule — what Ferguson airily refers to as “the transition from republic to empire.”

Perhaps, as his essay suggests, there may something valuable to that “old senatorial order” of which John McCain may be seen as an exemplar. After all, it was US Senators who exposed Nixon’s chicanery 44 years ago and drove him out of office. Senators used to behave with a degree of independence, instead of blindly bowing to a President’s bad ideas and atrocious conduct out of fear that their ultra-partisan party — called with sickening irony ‘Republicans’ — would screw them at their next election. As it probably would. Today the only Republican congressmen who call out Trump’s misdeeds are those who have already announced they won’t run again.

The ” president-emperor,” Ferguson further writes, “dominates public discourse.” Sadly true. Even media outlets hostile to everything he says and does lead with the latest ‘revelation’ every night.

I’ll say what the minions of the newspaper industry (and I am one) have always said: There is no such thing as bad publicity.

The media’s obsessive coverage of Trump’s primary campaign — while largely ignoring Sanders’s — normalized a buffoonish candidacy. Now the media obsess over his ‘reality show’ White House usurpation, legitimized by a stolen election, as if President Shithole were just another POTUS. Presidential news stories have always dominated political coverage, especially on all-image TV. But media personalities, and commercial considerations, lack the gravitas, smarts, and historical knowledge to put the contemporary threat to American democracy in true perspective.

We’re witnessing the accelerating breakdown of a form of government that has lasted 229 years without the instances of unpunished corruption, cruelty, boastful stupidity, evil deeds, and clear and present dangers posed to human survival in this country (and every other one) that take place every day — ‘in our name,’ so long, that is, as the United States remains a self-governing republic.

The media custom of superficial ‘balance’ in media news coverage cannot begin to cope with this ‘story.’ No simple ‘two points of view’ approach tells the truth of the current American political crisis, as if the clown running for President, and the asshole currently in office, were simply another politician.

He isn’t. At best he’s a transitional autocrat — and at worst the real thing.

And “emperor” is the right word for the way he sees the office. The Roman Emperor Caligula appointed his horse to the Senate. Our President Dumpster pardons his favorite felons. I’m waiting for one of these monsters to get a judicial appointment.

In an autocratic system of government the king, or emperor, or dictator is innately above the law. His word is the law. That’s exactly what 45 believes.

Also, I’ve just exemplified (about three times) Ferguson’s point on the breakdown of public civility by my scurrilous references to the one-time respected office of POTUS. When it comes to the political pornography emanating from America’s most powerful governing institutions, including some recent Supreme Court decisions, I readily admit that my mind is in the gutter.

For the record, however, unlike the smirking, empire-OK Niall Ferguson, I don’t think that America’s transformation into an “empire” is an acceptable alternative, even if that’s the only way (as Ferguson writes) to “slow China’s ascendancy.”

Who cares what your ‘rival’ is up to, if your own country is no better?