{"id":1549887,"date":"2022-07-12T07:36:19","date_gmt":"2022-07-12T11:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1549887"},"modified":"2022-07-12T07:36:35","modified_gmt":"2022-07-12T11:36:35","slug":"will-the-u-s-fall-just-as-rome-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/will-the-u-s-fall-just-as-rome-did\/","title":{"rendered":"Will The U.S. Fall Just As Rome Did?"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">16<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwill-the-u-s-fall-just-as-rome-did%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1549887&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/07\/Death_of_Julius_Caesar_2.png\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>When exactly was Rome\u2019s republic doomed? That ancient question has a special urgency now, as our American republic seems to be flirting with its own downfall. When will we \u2014 or did we \u2014 pass the point of no return? Maybe Rome\u2019s example can furnish some guidance.<\/p>\n<p>By the time Julius Caesar rose to prominence in Rome, the republic was so warped that few informed observers expected it to last the century. Rome\u2019s borders had exploded outward during the 200s and 100s B.C. Legislators had devised a plan to distribute newly acquired land more or less equally among the citizenry, making room for an expanding population and a healthy middle class. But wealthy patricians, exploiting loopholes in the system, sucked up vast tracts and cultivated them with imported slave labor. Soldiers who fought to capture new territory found themselves dispossessed of it upon their return home.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually a charismatic nobleman, Tiberius Gracchus, gave eloquent voice to the common people\u2019s discontent, earning election as their official representative \u2014 a tribune of the plebs. In \u201cLife of Gracchus,\u201d the biographer Plutarch attributes to Tiberius a memorable policy speech in which he lamented that \u201cmen who fight and die for Italy enjoy shared access to air and sunlight\u2014but nothing else.\u201d His proposed solution was a land redistribution scheme, which met with furious opposition from those who stood to lose property.<\/p>\n<h2>Debates Settled by Sword<\/h2>\n<p>In hot pursuit of his aims and convinced of their virtue, Tiberius bent the rules of Roman politics almost to the breaking point. He ejected a fellow tribune from office and ran for what was probably an illegal second term as tribune. Things turned violent in the summer of 133 B.C., when Tiberius was clubbed to death by his senatorial detractors in a riot over the reelection campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Until then, it had been understood that debates were not to be settled at sword-point. \u201cThere was no civil slaughter in Rome until Tiberius Gracchus became the first victim,\u201d writes the Greek historian Appian in \u201cCivil Wars.\u201d Looking back, Tiberius\u2019s death seemed like the beginning of the end. His brother Gaius proposed still more aggressive land reforms, which amounted, in the words of the great historian Theodor Mommsen in \u201cHistory of Rome,\u201d to \u201cnothing other than an entirely new constitution.\u201d When Gaius died in another political melee, a true crisis was underway. \u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The old constitutional system was hemorrhaging public trust, yet proposals for a new one only seemed to make things worse. Attempts to reimpose order through unilateral rule, most notably by the general Lucius Cornelius Sulla, ended in more bloodshed and recrimination. By the 50s B.C., bribery and threats of violence were standard electoral operating procedures. Corruption, always a feature of republican politics, became its essence. \u201cIntelligent men,\u201d wrote Plutarch in \u201cLife of Caesar,\u201d \u201cwould be happy if nothing <em>worse <\/em>than a monarchy resulted from this deranged state of affairs.\u201d In the chaos, it was clear that a daring statesman \u2014 if he combined the popularity of a Gracchus with the military ruthlessness of a Sulla \u2014 stood a chance of seizing total control.<\/p>\n<h2>Rise of Julius Caesar<\/h2>\n<p>That statesman was Julius Caesar. As governor of the Gallic provinces, Caesar was granted authority by appointment to wage war in the regions north and west of a little stream called the Rubicon. Up there, for nearly ten years, he performed spectacular feats of domination and amassed an unstoppable fighting force. Then, in the winter of 49 B.C., the conquering hero returned to seek election as consul, the city\u2019s highest office. He brought his army with him.<\/p>\n<p>It was a severe breach of Roman law for anyone but an elected magistrate to lead military operations in Italy proper. But that is what Caesar now threatened to do, in part because his only remaining rival, Pompey the Great, stood at the head of his own army. The senate, acting collectively as a rather feckless middleman in this standoff between two giants, demanded that Caesar dismiss his troops before entering Italy and face trial for prior breaches of protocol. Caesar suspected this was a ruse designed by Pompey to strip him of his power \u2014 as he put it to his soldiers, \u201cPompey had been led astray by Caesar\u2019s enemies through envy.\u201d When negotiations collapsed, Caesar gathered his troops and marched across the Rubicon.<\/p>\n<p>It is at this point that Caesar is supposed to have quoted the Greek playwright Menander: <em>anerriphth\u014d kubos<\/em>, \u201clet the die be cast.\u201d Or, in the more famous Latin version recorded by the imperial court historian Suetonius in \u201cLives of the Caesars,\u201d <em>iacta alea est<\/em>. The dice are rolled, and the rest is up to fate. But Caesar himself left behind no written record of any such momentous proclamation. The Rubicon moment only took on its quasi-legendary status years later, after Pompey lost the war and Caesar was named \u201cdictator for life.\u201d His heir Octavian would still have to fight another civil war to become Rome\u2019s first emperor. But in retrospect, it came to look as if that one fateful river crossing sealed Rome\u2019s fate.<\/p>\n<h2>Destined to Decay?<\/h2>\n<p>Did it? Or was the fall already foreordained long before Caesar? To many ancient philosophers, it seemed that governments inevitably declined and passed away in a process called <em>anacyclosis <\/em>\u2014 the cycle of regimes. This was a tragic view of life, informed as much by playwrights like Aeschylus as by historians like Herodotus. These observers saw arrogance and self-interest as fatal human flaws that consigned even the greatest civilizations to eventual replacement. \u201cEverything that exists falls victim to decadence and change,\u201d wrote the historian Polybius in<em> \u201c<\/em>Histories,\u201d his comprehensive account of <em>anacyclosis<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Both Rome\u2019s republic and ours were intended to forestall such decay by balancing the strengths and weaknesses of the three basic forms of government \u2014 monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy \u2014 against one another. An executive (for us, the president) leads his country as a monarch might, especially in times of war. Yet his power is restrained by a chosen few, the legislators, who are in turn accountable to the people \u2014 theoretically.<\/p>\n<h2>Our Oligarchs Bidding for Control?<\/h2>\n<p>But republics have their own vulnerabilities, one of which is despotic ambition among the rich and powerful. As Machiavelli observed, the \u201ccorrupt and insolent behavior\u201d of those \u201cundertaking to retain power\u201d can be fatal to a republic\u2019s legitimacy. When state authority becomes a mere pretext for class hierarchy, as the Gracchi suggested it had in Rome, the system starts to look like a sham.<\/p>\n<p>Some would argue that this is exactly our situation. The ideological capture of <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2022\/04\/30\/bill-maher-says-twitter-failed-for-censoring-posts-report-on-hunter-biden-laptop\/\">major<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/salvo\/woke-capital-isnt-a-game\/\">corporations<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/06\/10\/why-media-failure-is-a-major-story-of-our-time\/\">media<\/a> outlets, the relentless exportation of American jobs and <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/salvo\/someone-orchestrated-the-border-crisis\/\">importation<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/salvo\/thats-not-happening-and-its-good-that-it-is\/\">foreign labor<\/a>, the pretextual use of Covid-19 to transform election procedures, leaving them <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/memo\/democrats-versus-the-vote\/\">highly vulnerable<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/06\/23\/yes-biden-is-hiding-his-plan-to-rig-the-2022-midterm-elections\/\">fraud<\/a> \u2014 all these trends, and others besides, indicate that our elites are making a bid for <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/10\/20\/leftist-shadow-governments-control-a-lot-more-than-our-elections\/\">oligarchic control<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps Donald Trump, then, was a kind of Gracchus \u2014 giving voice to justified populist frustration, encountering relentless subversion by entrenched state actors, then getting both implicated and defeated in a disastrous season of politics by riot. If so, then is our Caesar next? \u201cWe think we\u2019re in a democracy; we\u2019re actually in an oligarchy,\u201d said the provocative theorist Curtis Yarvin recently. \u201cThe only thing that you\u2019re left with, if you don\u2019t like the way this oligarchy is trending, is\u2026monarchy.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2>Our Rubicon Moment<\/h2>\n<p>And yet\u2026 even in late stages of decline there is still that Rubicon moment, the moment before the end is set in stone. Both Suetonius and the last great republican, Cicero, suggested that Caesar might not have been destined to deal the republic its death blow. It was a choice he made, dictated more by ambition than by necessity. For there was another snatch of verse that shaped his career, besides Menander\u2019s words of resignation. Apparently Caesar never forgot the moment in Euripides\u2019 tragedy, \u201cPhoinissai,\u201d when the would-be autocrat Eteocles says: \u201cif we must ever do wrong, it is best to do it for the throne.\u201d Like Eteocles, Caesar chose power over what was right.<\/p>\n<p>He could have chosen otherwise, and so can we. Our own national lore begins with the inverse of that Rubicon story \u2014 with a man who led an army but foreswore a crown. George Washington is the foundational American hero because he surrendered sovereignty to the people when he could almost certainly have seized it for himself. The Supreme Court\u2019s recent decision in <em>Dobbs v. Jackson Women\u2019s Health<\/em> shows that this American spirit is still alive in some corners of our government. In <em>Roe v. Wade<\/em>, the Court unjustly usurped the prerogative to legislate about abortion. But <em>Dobbs<\/em> returned that prerogative to elected representatives. It is still possible to resist the will to power in the name of the common good.<\/p>\n<p>And so the most important line in \u201cPhoinissai\u201dfor usis not the one Caesar kept close to his heart. A few lines later there comes a response from Eteocles\u2019s mother Jocasta, who presents her son with a choice: \u201cdo you wish to rule your city or save it?\u201d That is the choice each of us must face, in whatever sphere of influence is ours, if we hope to remain Americans. From the statesman to the average voter, from the Rubicon to Washington, D.C., nothing is written in the stars until it happens. We can still choose to live free.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<div class=\"article-author-description fst-italic\">\n  Spencer A. Klavan is features editor of <a href=\"https:\/\/americanmind.org\/\">The American Mind<\/a>, associate editor of the <a href=\"http:\/\/claremontreviewofbooks.com\/\">The Claremont Review of Books<\/a>, and host of the <a href=\"https:\/\/youngheretics.com\/\">Young Heretics podcast<\/a> podcast. His book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/How-Save-West-Ancient-Wisdom\/dp\/1684513456?tag=youngheretics-20\">&#8220;How to Save the West&#8221;<\/a>, is available for pre-order on Amazon.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When exactly was Rome\u2019s republic doomed? That ancient question has a special urgency now, as our American republic seems to be flirting with its own downfall. When will we \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":312,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1549887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1549887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1549887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1549887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1549887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1549887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}