[ed. Prefaced by a lengthy and interesting history of the Roman empire - how it flourished and how it died.]
Class conflict — which, in America, has merged with a profound cultural clash — has split the country into two core interests: the largely white lower and middle classes in the middle of the country, roughly equivalent to Rome’s
populares and susceptible to populist appeals by powerful men and women; and the multicultural coastal elites, whose wealth has soared as it has stagnated for the rest, and who pride themselves on their openness and meritocracy: the
optimates. And just as in late-republican Rome, each side has begun not to complement but to delegitimize the other.
The result, as in Rome, is a form of deepening deadlock, a political conflict in which many on both sides profoundly fear their opponents’ power, and in which compromise through the existing republican institutions, particularly Congress, has become close to impossible. Think of Pompey’s and Caesar’s armies not as actual soldiers but as today’s political-party members and activists, mobilized for nonviolent electoral battle and dissatisfied, especially on the right, with anything less than total victory. The battles in this Cold Civil War take place all the time on the front lines of the two forces: in states where fights over gerrymandering and vote suppression are waged; in swing states in presidential elections; in the courts, where the notion of impartial justice has been recast in the public mind as partisan-bloc voting; in Congress, where regular order is a distant memory, disputes go constantly to the brink, the government is regularly shut down, the entire country’s credit is threatened, and long-established rules designed for republican compromise, like the filibuster, are being junked as fast as any Roman
mos maiorum.
And the American system has a vulnerability Rome didn’t. We have always had a one-man executive branch, a head of state, with exclusive and total command of the armed forces. There is no need for an office like Rome’s dictator for when a systemic crisis hits, because we have an existing commander-in-chief vested with emergency powers who can, at any time, invoke them. The two consuls in Rome shared rule and could veto each other; what defines the American presidency is its individual, unitary nature. Over the past century, moreover, as America’s global clout has grown exponentially, and as the challenges of governing a vast and complicated country have spawned a massive administrative state under the president’s ultimate control, what was once designed as an office merely to enforce the laws made by the Congress has changed beyond recognition. (...)
When you think of how the Founders conceived the presidency, the 21st-century version is close to unrecognizable. Their phobia about monarchy placed the presidency beneath the Congress in the pecking order, stripping him of pomp and majesty. No newspaper bothered even to post a reporter at the White House until the 20th century. The “bully pulpit” was anathema, and public speeches vanishingly rare. As George F. Will points out in his
new book on conservatism, the president of the United States did not even have an office until 1902, working from his living room until Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing.
Some presidents rose above this level of modesty. Lincoln temporarily assumed far greater powers in the Civil War, of course, but it was Teddy Roosevelt who added celebrity and imperial aspirations to the office, Woodrow Wilson who began to construct an administrative state through which the executive branch could govern independently, FDR who, as president for what turned out to be life, revolutionized and metastasized the American government and bequeathed a Cold War presidency atop a military-industrial complex that now deploys troops in some 164 foreign countries.
Kennedy — and the Camelot myth that surrounded him — dazzled the elites and the public; Reagan ushered in a movie-star model for a commander-in-chief — telegenic, charismatic, and, in time, something of a cult figure; and then the 9/11 attacks created an atmosphere similar to that of Rome’s temporary, emergency dictatorships, except vast powers of war-making, surveillance, rendition, and even torture were simply transferred to an office for non-emergency times as well, as theorists of the unitary executive — relatively unbound by Congress or the rule of law — formed a tight circle around a wartime boss. And there was no six-month time limit; almost none of these powers has since been revoked.
Some hoped that Barack Obama would wind this presidency-on-steroids down. He didn’t. His presidency began with a flurry of executive orders. He launched a calamitous
war on Libya with no congressional authorization; he refused to prosecute those who were involved with Bush’s torture program, who continued to rise through the ranks on his watch; he pushed his executive powers to fix a health-care law that constitutionally only Congress had the right to; and, in his second term, he ignored Congress’s legally mandated deportation of 800,000 Dreamers by refusing to enforce it. He had once ruled such a move out — “I’m president, I’m not king” — and then reinvented the move as a mere shift in priorities. To advance his environmental agenda, he used the EPA to
drastically intensify regulations, bypassing Congress altogether. To push his cultural agenda, his Justice Department refused to defend the existing marriage laws and abruptly interpreted Title IX to cover transgender high-school kids without any public debate.
No Democrats regarded these moves as particularly offensive — although partisan Republicans were eager to broadcast their largely phony constitutional objections as soon as the president was not a Republican. And Congress had long since acquiesced to presidentialism anyway, wriggling out of any serious input on the war on terror, dodging the difficult task of amending the health-care law, bobbing and weaving on the environment. And although the worship of Trump is on a whole different level of fanaticism, if you didn’t see some cultish elements in the Obama movement, you weren’t looking very hard. Like Roman commanders slowly acquiring the trappings of gods, presidents have long since slipped the bounds of republican austerity into a world of elected monarchs, flying the world in a massive, airborne chariot, constantly photographed, and now commanding our attention every single day through Twitter.
But Obama was Obama, and Trump is Trump, obliterating most of what
mos maiorum remained after his predecessor. Like Pompey, who bypassed all the usual qualifications for the highest office of consul, Trump stormed into party politics by mocking the very idea of political qualifications, violating norms with abandon. He had never been elected to office before; he was a businessman and a brand, not a public servant of any kind; he had no serious grip on the Constitution, liberal-democratic debate, the separation of powers, or limited government. His tangible proposals were slogans. He referred to his peers with crude nicknames, and his instincts were those of a mob boss. But he offered himself, rather like the
populares in Rome, as a riposte and antidote to the political and cultural elite, the
optimates. A brilliant if dangerous demagogue, he became the first presidential candidate to run not as the leader of a political party, or as a
disciple of conservatism or liberalism, but as a fully fledged strongman who promised unilaterally to “make America great again.” It is hard to equate any kind of republican government with a leader who insists, of any American problem, “I, alone, can fix it.”
No one in the American system at this level has ever behaved like this before, crudely trampling on republican practices, scoffing at the rule of law, targeting individual citizens for calumny, openly demonizing his opponents, calling a
free press treasonous, deploying deceit impulsively, skirting the boundaries of mental illness, bragging of sexual assault, delegitimizing his own government when it showed even a flicker of independence — and yet he almost instantly commanded the near-total loyalty of an entire political party, and of 40 percent of the country, and this loyalty has barely wavered.
If republicanism at its core is a suspicion of one-man rule, and that suspicion is the central animating principle of the American experiment in self-government, Trump has effectively suspended it for the past three years and normalized strongman politics in America. Nothing and no one in his administration matters except him, as he constantly reminds us. His Cabinet appeared to rein him in for a while, until most experienced adults left it as his demands for total subservience became more insistent. Vast tracts of the bureaucracy are simply ignored, the State Department all but shut down, foreign policy made by impulse, whim, nepotism, for financial gain, or from strange personal rapport with thugs like Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, rather than by any kind of collective deliberation or policy process. Pliant nobodies fill administrative roles where real expertise matters and pushback against the president could have been effective in the past. Congress has very occasionally objected, but it has either been vetoed, as in the recent attempt to curtail U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s wars, or, if it succeeded in passing legislation with a veto-proof majority, as in Russian sanctions, been slow-walked by the White House.
Writing honestly about this — and the extraordinary upping of the authoritarian ante this presidency has entailed — comes across at times like a dystopian portrait of a nightmare future, except it is very much the present and greeted either with enthusiastic support from the GOP or growing numbness and acceptance by the broader public. The old-school relative reticence of the republican concept of a president had already been transformed, of course, but Trump ramped up the volume to 11: a propaganda channel broadcasting round the clock, with memes almost instantly retweeted by the president, endless provocations to own the news cycle, and mass rallies to sustain his populist appeal. If the definition of a free society is that you don’t have to think about who governs you every minute of the day, then we no longer live in a free society. The press? Vilified, lied to, ignored, mocked, threatened.
When Trump has collided with the rule of law, moreover, he has had a remarkable string of victories. After a period in which he was amazed that his attorney general would follow legal ethics rather than the boss’s instructions, he has now finally appointed one to protect him personally, pursue his political opponents, and defend an extreme theory of presidential Article 2 power. Checked for the first time this year by a Democratic House, he has responded the way a monarch would — by simply refusing, in an unprecedentedly total fashion, to cooperate with any congressional investigation of anything in his administration. Far from being transparent to prove his lack of corruption, he has actively sued anyone seeking any information on his finances. He has declared a phony emergency to justify seizing and using congressional funds for a purpose specifically opposed by the Congress, building a wall on the southern border, and gotten away with it. He has taken his authority to negotiate tariffs in a national-security emergency and turned it into a routine part of presidential conduct to wage a general trade war. And he has enabled an army of grifters and opportunists to line their pockets or accumulate perks at public expense — as long as they never utter a word of criticism.
He has also definitively shown that a president can accept support from a foreign power to get elected, attempt to shut down any inquiry into his crimes, obstruct justice, suborn perjury from an aide, get caught … and get away with all of it. Asking for his tax returns or a radical distancing from his business interests strikes him as an act of lèse-majesté. He refers to “my military” and “my generals,” and claims they all support him, as if he were Pompey or Caesar. He muses constantly about extending his term of office indefinitely, just as those Roman populists did.
Does he mean it? It almost doesn’t matter. He’s testing those guardrails to see just how numb a public can become to grotesque violations of ethical or rhetorical norms, and he has found them exhilaratingly wanting. And he has an unerring instinct for where the weaknesses of our republican system lie. He has abused the limitless pardon powers of the president that were created for rare occasions of clemency, a concept that to Trump has literally no meaning. He has done so to reward political friends, enthuse his base, and, much more gravely,
to corrupt the course of justice in the Mueller investigation. The concept even of a “self-pardon” has been added to the existing interdiction on prosecuting a sitting president.
He has also abused various laws allowing him to declare national emergencies in order to get his way even when no such emergencies exist.
Congress has passed several of these laws, assuming naïvely that in our system, a president can be relied on not to invent emergencies to seize otherwise unconstitutional powers — like executive control of legislative spending. This, of course, is not a minor matter; it’s an assault on the core principle of separation of powers that makes a republican government possible. But when the Supreme Court recently lifted a stay on the funds in a legal technicality, where was the outcry? The ruling registered as barely a blip.
The whims of one man now determine much of what happens in what we think of as a republic, where power should, in principle, be widely disseminated. And you don’t just see this in what has objectively happened. You can feel the difference in the culture. Every morning, Washington wakes up and needs to ask only one question to figure out what’s going on, as they did in the royal courts of old:
What is the president’s mood today? If that isn’t a sign of a fast-eroding republic, what is? (...)
A republican president respects how the system works, treats power as if it is always temporarily held, interacts with other agents with civility, however strained, and feels responsible, for a while, for keeping the system alive. Trump simply has no understanding of any of this. His very psyche — his staggering vanity, narcissism, and selfishness — is far more compatible with monarchical government than a republican one. He takes no responsibility for failures on his watch and every single credit for anything successful, whatever its provenance. The idea that he would put the system’s interest above his own makes no sense to him. It is only ever about him.
And the public has so internalized this fact it can sometimes seem like a natural feature of the political landscape, not the insidiously horrifying turn in American political history and culture that it is. If there is a conflict between his and others’ interests, his must always win decisively. If he doesn’t win, he has to lie to insist that he did. Everything in strongman rule is related to the strongman, as we are all sucked into the vortex of his malignant, clinical narcissism. You never escape him, every news cycle is dominated by him, every conversation is befouled, if you are not careful. And this saps the republican spirit. It engenders a kind of passivity. It makes submission feel like a kind of relief.
Image: Joe Darrow
[ed. We need another Trump story like we need a hole in the head, but this one is particularly interesting (detailed Roman history notwithstanding). The important point being how dysfuntion in government and society is becoming normalized.]
Some might doubt this lofty view of Peirce. Others might admire him for this or that contribution yet, overall, hold an opinion of his oeuvre similar to that expressed by the psychologist William James on one of his lectures, that it was like ‘flashes of brilliant light relieved against Cimmerian darkness’. Peirce might have good things to say, so this reasoning goes, but they are too abstruse for the nonspecialist to understand. I think that a great deal of Peirce’s reputation for obscurity is due, not to Peirce per se, but to the poor organisation and editing of his papers during their early storage at and control by Harvard University (for more on this, see André de Tienne’s insightful history of those papers).
