Download ARE WE LIKE ROME

ARE WE LIKE ROME?
By
Philip E. Isett
August 2007
The stressful times through which the United States is passing stir in the minds of
many the thought that America’s troubles are comparable to those of ancient Rome.
Something, they surmise, about the transition from “pure” republic to “corrupt” empire is
what caused the “decline and fall” of Rome, and the same thing is happening to America.
But what about that? Did the United States, as has been said of Rome, in a fit of
absentmindedness acquire an empire? And did it then begin almost instantly to decay
morally and constitutionally so that only a collapse and breakup of the American
“Empire” lies in our future?
Probably 99.9 percent of these ruminations go unpublished because they are
informal and generally limited to private conversation or even to the head of the
ruminator. But not all. Likely the most entertaining and almost certainly the most erudite
systematization of these thoughts is the recently published Are We Rome? The Fall of an
Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy. In it, Murphy sets up the problem
very clearly, starting with the fact that even those who have studied the United States
most thoroughly are not able to agree on whether it is or is not an empire in spite of the
fact that the fathers of the Constitution appear to have had Rome in mind when they
created that document. He then puts forth what he thinks to be the most important
similarities in governmental and economic tendencies, with reasons why he thinks those
tendencies weakened the Roman state and may weaken the American. Then he notes
several ways in which Rome and America differ, primarily in the social realm, and
concludes with the mild opinion that just “being American” is the best way to avoid
suffering a fall like Rome’s.
I should like to suggest, however, that in almost every way, the traditional
approach of Americans to the similarity of Rome and the United States has been
wrongheaded, and that Cullen’s approach, insofar as it partakes of that tradition, is
wrongheaded also. The tradition seems to go like this: First, the United States is a big
country and, because of its size, governing an area even greater than the Roman Empire
at its largest, it qualifies as an empire, even though it retains a governmental form that
looks superficially like that of a republic. Second, corruption – delineated in different
ways according to the tastes of the observer – has obviously set in, and corruption is
believed to be at least one defining criterion of imperial Rome. Furthermore, in acquiring
its large land area, America, like Rome, acquired foreign peoples, and a single
government of many peoples is an empire. Therefore, since size, corruption and
multiplicity of peoples all equal empire, comparison of America with the Roman Empire
must be valid.
However, these three similarities between Rome and America are in fact less
important than meets the eye. Take size: Communications in antiquity were limited to the
speed that a man could walk, or a ship could sail during the summer. Hence the Romans
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built roads trying to bind together their area of governance -- the imperium. Other Roman
policies, such as the bestowal of citizenship, were followed for the same reason. Despite
the considerable success of these policies, throughout their history the Romans felt a
strong need to do whatever could emphasize the Romanness of Roman lands, and this
was republican policy as well as imperial. In America, distance counts for little. Modern
communications cut weeks to seconds and unite Florida and Alaska, culturally and
politically, far more closely than Roman Egypt was ever united to Roman Britain. Mere
size, then, cannot be the decisive test of modern empire. As for corruption, was there ever
a polity that did not have problems with it in one or many forms? Multiplicity of peoples
is a more complex problem, but both Romans and Americans have had it from the
beginning. Each polity added to its population through both military annexation and
peaceful assimilation – in America’s case the latter usually coming as immigration. With
Rome, however, it isn’t possible to distinguish republican from imperial population
acquisition, so multiplicity of peoples cannot define empire.
The point that most people seem to forget or ignore is that there was a real
difference that the Romans themselves saw between Republican Rome, which added
much territory and many peoples to the city’s governance, and Imperial Rome, which
widened, streamlined and generally improved that governance and which presided over
its eventual collapse: The former had no Emperor -- imperator, while the latter had one.
This one man might be a good emperor, a bad one, or even an insane one, but his
presence made a difference that cannot be overemphasized. He bore in his person the
right, if sometimes not the ability, to make all decisions of policy and lawgiving. There is
no such individual in the American government. No emperor, ergo no empire.
To realign our view of the Rome-America relationship according to what I think
is a more useful perspective, we ought to return to the fathers of our Constitution and the
opinion they held of the constitution of Rome. It was derived from the ideas of Polybius,
a second-century B.C. Greek historian. Polybius approached Rome with sensitivities
formed by Greek cyclicalism, an historical philosophy applied first to government in
Aristotle’s Politics, though the constitutional divisions were earlier expressed in Plato’s
Statesman. Briefly put, according to the Greek cyclicalist idea, monarchy is the original
human form of government. As time passes, however, and as all systems tend to decay,
monarchy turns into tyranny and the tyrant abuses the important men of his realm
because he fears their power. Eventually the important men tire of this treatment, band
together and overthrow the tyrant, establishing a timocracy, or government of the
worthiest, and rule more fairly until they in turn become corrupted by power and become
an oligarchy or rule of the few for their own benefit. This irks the people, so they
overthrow the oligarchs and institute popular rule or democracy. However, the people are
no more proof against corruption than kings or timocrats, so their government
degenerates into mob rule, and to straighten out this disorder it’s necessary to return to
the rule of one man, a king.
It seemed to Aristotle, and to his follower and elaborator Polybius, that because of
this ineluctable sequence the best kind of constitution was not purely monarchical,
timocratic, or democratic, but a mixed constitution that would combine the best elements
of all three. This was what Polybius saw in Rome: The consulship, he said, represented
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the best parts of kingship, the Senate the best parts of timocracy, and the councils -concilia of the tribes, of the centuries, and of the common people as a whole – the best
parts of democracy. For this reason he believed that Rome’s government, blessed by its
perfect constitution, would prove stable and that the Roman Republic would survive the
vicissitudes of time and politics, essentially forever – Roma aeterna. He was wrong.
The fathers of the American Constitution knew their Polybius. They thought the
ancients were onto something with the mixed-constitution concept, and they were
determined to fix what had made Polybius’s conclusions turn out to be incorrect. Instead
of two consuls, who might act against each other in a crisis, they gave us one President.
Instead of the plethora of lawmaking bodies -- three concilia and a Senate -- they gave us
a bicameral body with one house to represent the states and the other the people and
required every law to be passed by both houses and accepted by the President. Then they
separated the judicial power that had belonged to the Roman Senate and created out of
the whole cloth a judiciary that they thought would perfect the balance. It did not.
From the beginning the three branches have been marked by the tendencies that
continue to darken their history today: The executive and judicial branches struggle to
retain or add to their own power, the legislative – which the Constitution presented as the
leading branch – acts like any mob, pusillanimous and vindictive by turns. The executive
got off to the best start with George Washington, a man keenly aware of his responsibility
to give the presidency appropriately republican traditions. The judicial branch, however,
has sought from the outset to usurp powers from both the other branches. It has
succeeded better over time against the legislative, which has always liked the idea of
sharing the blame for policies that might prove unpopular. While this may sound like a
government of monsters, it is undoubtedly what the Founding Fathers intended, based on
their understanding of human nature. We call it “balance of power,” and it is meant to
protect the people from their predatory government. The early national period, with its
limited voting rights, official state churches, and “Virginia Dynasty” of presidents, etc.
may be said to correspond to Polybius’s age of timocracy.
The Nullification Controversy and later and more definitively the War Between
the States divorced the nation from its Declaration of Independence and from the Tenth
Amendment to the Constitution. The virtually dictatorial powers of martial law that
Lincoln had exercised lapsed at the end of the war, though it may be observed that they
were taken up by the Congress, now dressed in its vindictive plumage, and applied to
Reconstruction. But even so stimulating and lucrative a policy for the central government
as Reconstruction finally grew wearisome and was abandoned. It was replaced by a
period, stretching right into the present, known on high school charts of American history
as “The Rise of the Common Man.” The milestones along this road are familiar to many
of us from those same high school history classes: “popular election of senators,”
“initiative, referendum, and recall,” and topping it all off, “one ‘person’ one vote.” We
have been spared thus far the “participatory democracy” that the hippies of 1970 wanted
to impose on America by means of the telephone. However, the central government was
given a taste of what “participatory democracy” might be like with the popular reaction
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that sank immigration “reform.” It didn’t like it. Still, the present Government of
Confusion seems to approximate, in an American way, Polybius’s mob rule.
But how, if the difference between republic and empire is simply a difference
between the supremacy of many and the supremacy of one, should we define the
boundary of the transition of republic to empire? Can it be defined in such a manner as to
fit both Rome and America? I think it can.
It is when the form of government, based on the influence of few or many that
began by replacing monarchy, proves incapable of overcoming the problems that
confront it and is forcefully replaced by a new monarchy, which can and will solve them.
In the case of Rome, what led to the collapse of the republican state was the presence of
two long-lasting challenges that the Republic just couldn’t overcome. If America makes
the same transition from republic to empire, it will be for the same reason – one or more
existential crises that the Republic is incapable of solving.
Both Roman crises were domestic in effect but in origin – to a large extent –
foreign. The first, which began with the Second Punic War, 218 to 201 B.C., was
agricultural. It started with the displacement of Roman farmers by Hannibal’s marauding
army. This was complicated by the exploitation of grain-growing lands in the provinces
of Sicily, and later Africa and Egypt, which unbalanced the grain market and made smallscale farming unprofitable. The second crisis was military but was derived from the farm
problem. The decline of small farms in central Italy and beyond had pushed into the city
a large underclass of unemployed but proud and able-bodied men who could be taken
into the armies raised for the great independent commands. These armies were led by
Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, and Julius Caesar, all at senatorial behest, against
enemies foreign and domestic.
War for Rome had always been an affair of militias. Every Roman had supplied
his own military equipment and had been assigned duties accordingly. Every magistrate
of the two highest ranks, consul and praetor, was assumed to be suited for command of an
army, an assumption that led to disaster against Hannibal. The independent commanders,
however, since they raised their armies largely from the impoverished landless farmers,
furnished their men’s armor and weapons out of their own private wealth and promised
the soldiers rewards of money and land when they returned victorious. The result was
ruin for the Republic. It brought into existence large armed bodies that owed allegiance to
their commanders and not to the state – SPQR, the Senate and the People of Rome.
Finally, then, the effect of these two long-standing crises was to bring on an open break
between the legitimate government, represented by the Senate, and the party of revolution
in the person of Julius Caesar. So helpless was the Senate before this challenge that it had
to appeal to Pompey, the only non-Caesarian independent commander still alive, for
protection.
As a result of the Roman Civil War, written up in detail by that indefatigable
recorder of his own greatness, Julius Caesar himself, the Republic fell. Die-hard
Republicans refused to accept the initial outcome. Not realizing that they were solving
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and could solve nothing that had made the Republic ungovernable, they assassinated
Caesar, hoping that the ship of state would somehow right itself. It did not. After two
renewals of civil war divided by the mass murder of all the Caesarian Party’s enemies in
Rome itself, the Empire – the new monarchy -- was established.
The United States has met and surmounted many crises in its more than 200 years
of republican history, some of them brought upon it by its own ill-advised policies. As
yet not one, except the War Between the States, has proved intractable enough to
endanger the republican form. For this reason, in spite of a sclerotic bureaucracy, a
detested Supreme Court, a kleptocratic and contemptible Congress, and a sometimes
incompetent President, America continues to bumble forward under what remains of its
Constitution. We may ask this, however: In the fraught history of our time do there exist
crises that might prove so intractable and long-lasting as to bring our country to that final,
desperate moment when – to save the American nation – a monarchy will be substituted
for the Republic? Well, maybe.
Illegal immigration is certainly one problem that might bring down the house, but
it seems unlikely to do so anytime soon. The revolt against the so-called reform bill, in
spite of rather careless and inflamed rhetoric by both sides, was not spurred by anything
more “racist,” to use a popular but inapropos term, than the citizens’ irritation at the
illegals’ marches carrying Mexican flags. That, of course, was a public relations mistake
by the organizers, and in later marches United States flags were carried. Motivation for
the revolt was expressed by many of the people who took part as being almost entirely
against, not the Mexicans themselves, but the government in Washington, which has
failed for decades to keep its promises on immigration and even to enforce its own
immigration laws. In fact, this contempt in which many Americans hold Washington is
the most directly anti-republican element in the entire spectrum of contemporary
conflicts. If illegal immigration is to contribute directly to the fall of the Republic, it will
only be in long-term combination with multiculturalism. The feckless intelligentsia
promotes multiculturalism and national self-hatred in our public schools and universities,
weakening the nation’s social cohesion by following its own imaginings and without
thought for a real future. The central government, entranced by the dreamy voices of the
professional intelligentsia, cooperates in this suicidal journey by making many languages,
especially Spanish, official languages of administration. Rome, more wise than Twentyfirst Century America, made Latin its language of administration from east to west, even
when faced by a higher-cultural tongue, Greek. This policy preserved Romanness until
the Sixth Century A.D., even in the Greek East, and far longer in the West.
Other needs for reform, like that of Social Security, will lead to crises that are
equally inescapable, but perhaps even more distant. The Congress, however – now
wearing its pusillanimous plumage – prefers to let them all wait, the political parties no
doubt hoping to make electoral profit from them when they become more threatening.
The political parties, of course, in existence in one form or another since the nation’s
beginnings, have constantly ignored Washington’s warning in his Farewell Address
against “party spirit” as a threat to national union, and stand today, especially the
Democrats, as the very embodiment of that ruinous “party spirit.”
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It is the largely international crisis of Islamic Jihadism that is far more likely to
end the republican form of government in America soon than any purely domestic failure.
The great escape valve for America’s problems has always been elections. The hope of
the Republic has been that the nation’s problems can be fixed by “turning the rascals
out.” Right now the evidence from Congress is that the “turnout” doesn’t always bring
improvement. What hope is there in elections if the rascals out of power are worse than
those in power? Nevertheless, as long as the people believe that their votes can somehow
force the central government to find a solution, the Republic seems in little danger. On
the other hand, if the position taken in our own time by the Democratic Party, amounting
to a complete denial of jihadist threat, is rewarded by the voters, and if, as a result, the
jihadists succeed in imposing an even more damaging attack on America than 9/11, the
Republic’s danger might become extreme.
First of all, there would almost certainly be a declaration of martial law
throughout the land. If the center of civilian government were eliminated by a nuclear
weapon in Washington, D.C., there would be at least a temporary military government.
Considering that the military would not condone surrender and that martial law –
recalling the precedent of the War Between the States – might last as long as the
resistance to jihad, one might foresee a government, monarchical in fact though still
republican in appearance, lasting many years and approximating the Roman Principate.
The Principate, a time of introduction to the Empire under Augustus Caesar, was oneman rule under color of restoring the Republic. It fooled only some, but made monarchy
palatable to the Roman people, who hated the word rex – that is, king. This would be true
even if a provisional military government were to arrange elections for a new civilian
government, relocated -- say -- to Omaha. The two-party system would have been
thoroughly discredited and, depending on how well the new government had met
America’s needs, few might yearn for a return to the old, inefficient Republic when the
national emergency eventually came to an end.
For most of the Twentieth Century the United States was looked upon by much of
Europe as its defender against German or Soviet aggression, but now a Europe that
welcomed NATO seems ready to submit to an Islamic Caliphate just so long as it is
allowed to die quietly. China, reversing centuries of Imperial policy, is building a bluewater navy and a long-range missile capability that can only be aimed first at the United
States and later at a depopulated Russia. These are only a few among the most pressing of
many anti-American foreign challenges. For them also, the cutthroat partisanship of the
Democrats presages governmental inability to deal with the crises.
No, America is not yet an empire, just a big, militarily and economically
powerful, culturally influential republic. It may be, though, that what historians will
someday call its Republican Period is nearer to an end than we suspect.
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