If you listen to America’s pessimistic populists, America is so over. We are all in the position of Emperor Honorius watching the Visigoths come over the seventh hill as the sack of Rome begins. (Guess who the Visigoths are in this analogy. Some, I assume, were good people.)
Or to update things a bit, this is the “Flight 93” election, at least according to a recent viral essay. This argument, as I recently described it, posits America’s doom “unless those who value an isolationist, protectionist, and perhaps paler America ‘charge the cockpit’ in Washington and seize control from the open borders–loving, free trading, perpetually warfighting ‘Davoisie oligarchy.’”
That’s not how I see things. My views are more in sync with this notion put forward recently in by Jonathan Margolis in the Financial Times:But he misses the point. The pessimists are not arguing that America is the Roman empire ready to fall. We are arguing that America is the Roman republic about to be destroyed and replaced by the empire. It's not the Visigoths we worry about, it is Julius Caeser and his army. The consuls and senate are about to be replaced by an emperor, or maybe already have been.
So for all its failings and warnings that the US is “over”, in reality, it is not just the new Roman empire, but a reincarnation of the Roman empire at the height of its power, perhaps around 117AD — 170 years before it began to fall apart.
He links an article he wrote at Vox which argues more in depth that, since America's economy is still strong, America is OK. His entire argument is economic.
I don't care how well the economy is doing if I am not free. If the republic is dying, the state of the economy is irrelevant. After all the ink and pixels that have been used to get that point across, to not understand that the populist argument is fundamentally about political freedom and the culture of freedom is a form of self-imposed intellectual blindness.
9 comments:
Aside from the purely economic basis of his argument, I don't think he's far wrong, republic or empire. Powerful barbarians are in the woods just across the river in both the east and the west. The nation is at serious risk, whether empire or republic.
If the nation falls, there'll be no possibility of recovering freedom for the 1,000 years of the ensuing Dark Ages.
Eric Hines
This is the sort of discussion you could enter, were you a Ricochet member. [g]
Eric Hines
If you want to use the Late Republic analogy, it fails, because the army has not got involved in domestic politics, and nobody credible is saying that the armed forces are going to start shooting citizens at the order of the government.
Granted, the Roman Republic had no such entities as the local, state, and Federal law enforcement agencies--those are all a sort of army in and of themselves, but again, they've all been around for centuries now and that's hardly going to change.
If you want to compare at all, I'm now beginning to think if what we are seeing is not more similar to the Early-mid republic--The Republic that got dragged into the first Punic war that went on for 20 years, and at the end of it Rome was the premier power in the Med with still powerful nations and entities around it.
Aside from the purely economic basis of his argument, I don't think he's far wrong, republic or empire. Powerful barbarians are in the woods just across the river in both the east and the west. The nation is at serious risk, whether empire or republic.
Well, he's arguing the opposite. He is saying that the pessimists are wrong, that since the US is still an economic powerhouse, the nation is perfectly OK.
If you want to use the Late Republic analogy, it fails, because the army has not got involved in domestic politics ...
I know so little Roman history that I don't try to make close analogies. The point isn't that someone today is really like Julius Caesar or that the US military is really going to subvert the government. The point is that Pethokoukis doesn't seem to understand what the populists' real anxiety is about. It isn't whether the nation, per se, is in danger, but rather that our republican form of government and the very culture of republicanism is in danger. I think it is also in the location of the danger; for populists, the danger is not some foreign power, but a large body of fellow Americans who seem intent on subverting the republic. To that extent, I do think the analogy holds.
That said, I would be very interested if you wanted to expand on your analogy.
Marius and Sulla, maybe. Or maybe there's no exact analog. History doesn't repeat, although it sometimes rhymes.
But your broader point—that he seems to be saying the economy is fine*, and therefore there's no problem—is very well taken. It seems a strange sort of blindness, but one that's common to the political class. I recall a Tea Party rally attended by a reporter from CNN, I think it was, who started arguing with one of the attendees: the attendee, the reporter argued, should not be protesting Obama's policies, because he was eligible for a $400 tax credit. The mindset was revealing: see, you're not really being looted, because you can get some goodies too! That's the argument in little. In large it's: see, America is an economic power so there are no problems!
I genuinely don't understand how we have managed to create an entire political class that has no idea what America is. They think it's an economic conglomerate. How did this happen? Even a generation ago, such people would have known better. Is it poor civics education? Self-interest leading to willful blindness? Something else?
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*For certain values of "fine". If the stock market is up and the aspirational class living in the various favored cities is doing well, then apparently people who can't find work and communities that are despairing and dying are just a puzzling hallucination. But that is another aspect altogether.
My not-so-short list of US problems that have nothing whatever to do with the economy:
1) Certain topics are not discussed -- and those who would like to "have the conversation" are being repressed. The list of topics is almost immaterial, although it includes Islam, manifestations of racism outside the US, and technological advances in obstetrics since 1973. If we can't even raise the question we can't negotiate towards a better answer.
2) We've grown accustomed to a class of professional govern-ers, including un-elected civil servants, who live from their births to deaths as, and among, those who make the rules, enforce them upon others, grant waivers only as favors to the chosen few, but expect such waivers -- (or forgiveness, or deliberate non-enforcement) when the rules might apply to themselves. Note, this is "non-economic" because the problem here is not that the professional govern-ers get rich moving other people's money around -- though that is a problem, too. It's because these people contribute nothing else to our society but various restrictions and bottlenecks to all except the favored.
3) We've grown accustomed to the the governing class to be those inheriting or marrying into the rule-making role.
4) The real and necessary discussion about such nepotism, cronyism, and the favored class has become distracted by unserious issues of race or sexist or nationalist "privilege" -- see problem 1.
5) The lack of discussion encourages protest in more destructive forms: "occupation" of public lands or private businesses or civil institutions; the destruction or defacement of infra-structure such as pipelines or signage; and the coarsening of language that is still permitted. (Run them down! "Tar, feathers, some assembly required." "Shit in her mouth then send her off to raise her idiot brat.")
6) The governing classes, despite their generations of family and personal experience, seem to confuse war-making, peace-keeping, and revenue-gathering officers. "He wears a uniform, shows a badge, and carries a gun. He'll do what I tell him to do, against any of 'them' I tell him about." The classes from whom those uniformed individuals are recruited are not so confused; and the loyalties of those in such uniforms may not be either as blind, or as well-targeted, as the govern-ers expect.
This could go on for some while. But surely the point becomes clear. Real problems exist that have little to do with who makes how much money.
...how we have managed to create an entire political class that has no idea what America is. They think it's an economic conglomerate.
That's not what they think at all. They're not even thinking in those terms. They're thinking in terms of what gets them their personal power. They may intend to use that power for the good of the nation, but they're after their personal power first, whether as tool or as goal.
Eric Hines
If the nation falls, there'll be no possibility of recovering freedom for the 1,000 years of the ensuing Dark Ages.
Arthur made it happen.
Charlemagne did much more, though he was illiterate due to some kind of autism. Didn't hurt his warrior leadership though.
Caesar, like previous consuls, were working within the system. It wasn't his use of power that destroyed the Republic, it was when the Senators and their latifundia slave farms, assassinated Caesar that they destroyed the Republic which was on its last legs.
BLM, both of them, have already conducted insurgency, sabotage, or assassination operations. People aren't far off from seeing a dead leader in DC sooner or later, which will probably set things off. Right now most people still want power in DC, for their clan or tribe or faction to feed off of, even conservatives are thinking like that with Trum.
The moment when people realize that going to DC is a death sentence, is the moment when all the factions in America turns their safeties off and puts their finger in the trigger guard.
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