*****

Though I originally published this article in the fall of 2013 during America’s last government shutdown, it is a sad measure of how little progress has been made that I can repost this piece today to explain relatively unchanged dynamics leading to such a debacle. We can just substitute Trump, Tom Cotton, and the Tea Party’s offspring, the Freedom Caucus, for the likes of Ted Cruz and the Tea Party and substitute the issues of DACA children migrants and immigration for the debt ceiling and budget cuts. Even if a shutdown is averted, the dynamics of partisan brinksmanship are alive and well and threaten America’s republic just as they threatened (and destroyed) the Roman Republic.

Published on LinkedIn Pulse January 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) January 19th, 2018; originally published October 3rd, 2013, with the title “In Government Shutdown, Ted Cruz and Tea Party Are Lucky We’re Not Living in Ancient Rome” by then-PolicyMic, now Mic.

UPDATE 12:04 AM Jan 20th, 2018, the one-year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration: the government is now in a shutdown.

HBO. Rome’s forum—the equivalent of Washington, DC’s national mall—dirty and largely empty, closed for business during one of its many government shutdowns before the fall of the Roman Republic’s democracy.

AMMAN — As someone who’s written about ancient Roman history, I find these repeated Tea-Party-initiated shutdown and default crises amusing when, knowing that American troops might very well have their pay and benefits threatened, I think of how Roman legionaries would have reacted in similar situations and smile a bit thinking of Ted Cruz running through the streets of Washington with Roman troops in hot pursuit.

Contrary to popular belief, our Founding Fathers did not base our Constitution on the British constitutional monarchy, but on the Roman Republic. There were many historical and cultural similarities: from 509-49 BCE, the Roman republic functioned with a government based on popular sovereignty, with a deliberative legislative body called the Senate, with the people voting both for major office holders annually and yes-or-no on legislation coming from the Senate. Rome’s system was one of checks and balances, divided power, and compromise. The Republic needed its parts to cooperate, and the support of the people, to do much of anything.

Sound familiar?

And because of this superior system (so argued the ancient Greek historian Polybius), Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean world with it citizen-soldiers. But with amazing success came obscene corruption and partisanship, and from 133 BCE, after the first political violence in Rome since the early days of the Republic, Rome experienced internal conflict that would eventually destroy its republic.

Obstructionist (mostly) self-interested conservative elites — optimates — took on a group of (often) self-interested populist reformers — populares — for most of the next century. After decades of optimates stubbornly fighting all reform, when a conservative elitist general named Sulla and a populares former general named Marius (Caesar’s uncle!) had a major political falling out, Sulla marched his troops into the city of Rome in 88 — the first time Roman troops had ever marched on Rome — the streets flowed with blood, and there were years of civil war. Sulla later had himself appointed Rome’s first dictator since 202 (at the height of the Second Punic War), but gave those powers up a few years later after scrapping many hard-won populares‘ reforms.

Roman veterans were often left to languish in poverty or limbo by the conservative optimate-dominated Senate, fueling support for a major rebellion in 62-63. Even the most famous general of the day, Pompey “Magnus,” was rebuffed when he advocated for his own veterans. Julius Caesar, himself one of the moderate populares, was elected a consul for 59 but also found only obstructionism from the optimates, led now by Cato (namesake of today’s pro-Tea-Party, libertarian Cato Institute). One of Caesar’s major pieces of legislation also aimed to settle Pompey’s veterans, but Cato, who even admitted the bill was good, filibustered and obstructed every time he could to prevent its passage. Only some mild violence meted out by Caesar’s supporters, including Pompey’s veterans, against the obstructionist optimates and Cato during the assembly that voted overwhelmingly for its approval kept the law from being blocked on a ridiculous religious technicality.

An extreme member of the populares faction, Clodius, succeeded in terrorizing the city with increasing mob violence throughout the 50s, repeatedly causing major government shutdowns. Elections were long-delayed, important offices remained vacant, major scandals erupted, senior officials were attacked in public, and when Clodius was killed in 52, his supporters burned down the Senate with his funeral pyre. The Senate reluctantly authorized Pompey rarely-granted emergency powers to restore order, and soldiers were brought into the city under arms for the first time since Sulla.

Yet legionaries lining courts and public areas in Rome under a sole consul was not at all the way the Republic was supposed run. Cato and the optimates still hated Caesar so much that over the next few years they made clear to him that they would never let him rest and would do everything they could to drive him to ruin, including prosecution and exile. It was easy for Caesar to convince his soldiers that the Senate did not have the interests of them or the people of Rome in mind, that a mad faction had hijacked the Roman state and needed to be swept aside. 

After Caesar crossed the Rubicon in January 49, a new civil war erupted in which many senators were killed, and true republican government would never return to ancient Rome.

So when you say, “That couldn’t happen to America today!” realize that mass political violence, Roman armies marching on Rome, and government shutdowns had all either never happened or hadn’t in centuries, and were all unthinkable to Romans living before they actually happened; escalation begets escalation. That is what is so disturbing about the Tea Party today: its members’ willingness to do anything legal, even if unprecedented and previously unthinkable, to accomplish their goals against the will of the people sets dangerous precedents and deeply undermines the credibility of the government. And as we’ve seen with Rome, credibility that takes centuries to build can only take a generation to destroy. 

Learn your history, Tea Party.

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Check out my related book chapter:

The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations (Chapter 10 in Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding)

See related articles:

Redistricting at Heart of DC Dysfunction: Gerrymandering Making Politics More Partisan

Trump, the Specter of Political Violence, & Lessons From the Roman Republic (Or, We Have a Problem America!)

Caesar & the Politics of the Fall of the Roman Republic: Lessons for USA Today

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Trump’s flirtatious waltz with hints and threats of political violence cannot be ignored and should not be underestimated. Apart from echoing some of America’s own worst episodes in the South after the Civil War, such dangerous dancing brings to mind the lessons of the ancient Roman Republic, and how, after centuries of peaceful politics and peaceful transitions of power, one horrible incident of political violence begat many others in subsequent decades, culminating in civil war and the death of Rome’s democratic Republic; the Roman Republic far outlasted America’s republic (so far) even before that violence began, so anyone who thinks the United States is immune from a similar fate is suffering from a hubris that ignores history and human nature and the terrible consequences of precedent-shattering political violence.

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse October 23, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) October 23rd, 2016 (UPDATED 10/26 to further discuss race & politics in America)

AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

Silvestre David Mirys (1742-1810) – Figures de l’histoire de la république romaine accompagnées d’un précis historique Plate 127: Gaius Gracchus, tribune of the people, presiding over the Plebeian Council

AMMAN — We have already had people being punched at Trump rallies, clashes with police, a mini-riot by Bernie Sanders fans inside a Democratic state convention in Nevada and that Bernie Sanders himself all but seemed to fully excuse at the time, and now, a firebombing of a Republican HQ in a county in North Carolina.

Trump Fanning Flames of Unrest

In the midst of all this Trump has convinced many of his supporters that there is a global top-to-bottom conspiracy to cheat him of the election and that this election—which is only just beginning—is already rigged against him and, by extension, his supporters (never mind how astronomically impossible that such a rigging as he describes it would actually be happening). In fact, he has been so successful at this that almost 70% of Republicans believe Clinton can only win by cheating and half of Republicans would refuse to accept her as president. At the final debate, he even raised serious doubts about whether he would accept the results of the election, putting in jeopardy an unbroken tradition going back to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in 1796-1797 of a peaceful transfer of power between presidents and the loser accepting the outcome, even in hotly disputed or controversial elections like those in 1800, 1824, 1876, 1888, 1960, and 2000. The day after the debate, he doubled down on this rhetoric and failed to alleviate the concerns he had raised the previous night, joking(?)/stating(?) that he would accept the election results “if I win.”

If that wasn’t bad enough, Trump has been saying that there is a need for volunteers to “watch” polling places to make sure there is no “voter fraud” and is encouraging his partisan supporters to undertake this task that is supposed to be bi-partisan and non-partisan, and he and his surrogates are specifically suggesting monitoring of certain urban (code word for heavily-black) areas. In places like Texas and Florida, over 80% of Republicans think that voter fraud is a major problem, with zero evidence to support this but ample rhetoric from Team Trump and the GOP trumping reality yet again with their misinformation and disinformation.

Yes, angry, white, possibly-well-armed Trump supporters—people who number in the tens of millions, who are passionately convinced Trump is right and should be president, who are now talking of assassination, revolution, and coups should Hillary be elected—are already talking about descending upon minority-heavy polling areas on Election Day in an effort to make sure such shifty (in their view) minorities, prone to election malfeasance (in their view), don’t try anything funny; and yes, many of these people own guns and will show up openly armed because in many locations they will be allowed to do so, and yes, out of Trump’s tens of millions of devotees, we can certainly expect many thousands to show up as he has asked them to, and to show up in this manner, at polling places on November 8th, something that will more likely than not lead to trouble, especially in America’s increasingly racially-tense atmosphere. For those who don’t know their history, this was how white Southerners intimidated and usually prevented freed slaves and African-Americans from voting, from Reconstruction all the way through the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Never mind that Republican and Democratic officials at all levels, including local election officials from both parties, have dismissed as absurd the idea that the election is rigged or that any local polling places are going to be compromised or part of a voter fraud scheme. Never mind that voter fraud is practically non-existent, and that campaigns claiming to want to deal with voter fraud are more about denying minorities the ability to vote than anything else (for actual voter fraud on a staggering scale, see Vladimir Putin’s Russia).

Unfortunately, this election is a moment of terror, and for many Latinos, Muslims, African-Americans, and others, it must on a personal level be a terror that far exceeds any emotions I have on the issue as a white male. I am not sure if state and local authorities are up to the challenge, are aware of what could really happen in a realistic worst-case scenario here: thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, maybe more, of Trump supporters, many who could be armed, are going to be seeking to either harass and intimidate people they falsely believe, with no evidence, are committing voter fraud—picking people out by skin color almost certainly—or maybe even just be flat-out seeking to disrupt voting in liberal precincts in an effort to suppress minority votes (again, nothing new in American history and something that has happened in living memory). Violence, riots, voter disenfranchisement—all are in the realm of realistic possibility on Election Day now. We have already recently seen what crowds and individuals can do when animated by racial animus, crowds on different sides of the debate, from crowds of mainly angry black citizens to crowds of paranoid police in a cycle that seems to have been reignited since Ferguson after decades of near dormancy.

I am not being hyperbolic. I am not being paranoid. And Donald Trump’s rhetoric to millions of his supporters that the election is being stolen from them and that they need to go “watch” polling places is not abating or going away; nothing inherent in American society makes it immune to internal violence or breakdowns of law and order. This is the reality mere weeks before Election Day, and I hope federal, state, and local law enforcement are planning accordingly; some are aware of these dire possibilities, but whether they are given the resources to deal with this possibility, or if their plans are competent, remains to be seen.

Jeff Swensen/Getty Images

Lesson’s From Ancient Roman Politics

Is this a Rubicon moment for America?

HBO/Rome

Not really a Rubicon moment, but more of a Gracchi moment.

By a Rubicon moment, I am using a colloquialism of a point-of-no-return when a drastic action is taken. This word Rubicon in this case refers to the moment in 49 B.C.E., when Julius Caesar crossed south over the Rubicon River with his army, a river which marked the boundary between a province where his army was authorized to operate and Roman Italy proper where it was not after the Senate left him a choice between what would have been an unjust prosecution at the hands of his political rivals on one hand and starting a civil war (only the second since the founding of the Roman Republic in 509. B.C.E. but also the Republic’s last, the Republic itself not surviving this final round) on the other. But the Roman Civil War that began in 49 B.C.E. was merely the culmination of a number of awful trends that started in 133. B.C.E.

We are clearly not at a Rubicon moment in America, the second most successful republic in history after Rome’s ancient one.

But, still terrifyingly, we may be approaching a 133 moment: the snowball which starts an avalanche.

What happened in 133? After the Romans’s version of the Revolutionary War that overthrew the rule of kings in 509. B.C.E., apart from some minor incidents early in Rome’s history as a Republic that are more legendary than anything certain, Rome essentially had three-and-a-half centuries worth of relatively stable, democratic republican government; political violence was a minimum or nonexistent, and nothing like an officially directed assassination, civil war, or use of the military to settle internal political disputes ever occurred. Sure, its democratic qualities evolved over time and like even modern democracies there were factors that favored elites, much like in the United States, which did not even begin with allowing all white adult men to vote, let alone blacks or women. In fact, some states in America did not even have popular votes in the first presidential election, during which all had property-owning requirements for voting for president if there were popular votes at all, requirements that were only gradually abolished in the coming decades, starting with New Hampshire in 1792, though a greater degree of democracy was practiced at the state and local levels. Still, it was not until 1856 that all white male citizens in America were finally able to vote regardless of property ownership, and that was only 14 years before freed slaves and all adult males were given the right to vote with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

By 133 B.C.E., common Romans had long had an important role in selection of the Republic’s senior magistrates, and, in particular, there was one office that from Rome’s earliest days was created to be a sacred, inviolable protector of the people: the tribunate. The tribunes of the plebs (short for plebeians, the members of the lower class) were elected each year and could prosecute any other government official for abuse of power, as well as veto any government act, and introduce legislation of their own accord and even bypass the Roman Senate and go directly to the people’s assemblies to pass their programs, even though this was against unofficial custom. The most powerful political officeholders were the two annually elected chief executives, the consuls (think of America having to co-equal presidents elected every year), who presided over the Senate and had more power than any other elected officials. These two offices are important to understand when looking at the events from 133 on, and the below chart I created gives a good idea of how the Roman government operated:

It is also important to understand the seismic changes going on in Roman society at this period in its history. After well over a century of on-and-off-again conflict, Rome had finally succeeded in literally wiping its greatest rival Carthage off the map in 146 B.C.E., a Carthage that was just a shadow of its former self long before that final last gasp. As a result of Rome’s successful wars, a huge influx of slaves into Roman lands meant that many small freeholding farmers were put out of business as wealthy elites created huge estates run by slave labor and greedily gobbled up the land of small farmers. Rome had gone from a primarily small-farming Republic to an overseas empire dominated by large slave-owning landowners. Roman cities swelled with newly landless urban poor, many of them veterans and their descendants, veterans who had been unable to maintain their family farms fighting for years at a time in long, overseas wars; Rome’s elites were clearly leaving the concerns of the poor masses unattended. 

While Carthage and others were a threat, the different classes of Roman society were forced to work together in a spirit of pragmatism to fend off so many existential foes (this is similar to the moderation and bipartisanship exhibited in American politics during its Cold War with the Soviet Union). But a new political culture of selfishness, greed, and ambition, each rising to new heights, was emerging in Rome with the destruction of Carthage. There was just so much unprecedented power to be had that the stakes of and how far people were willing to go in politics had reached new levels; competition became much stiffer as a few of the most powerful elite families were drowning out the other lower aristocrats. Corruption grew by leaps and bounds as a result, and the tradition of the abstemious, stoic, small farmer ideal had become just that, that ideal further from being a reality than at any time in Roman history and that gap only about to get worse. In fact, it got so bad that the governing Romans began to be worried that the military was going to lose its base of recruitment, at that point limited to landowners. And decades later in the first century B.C.E., the interests of large multinational corporations called publicani helped to put so much money into the political system that Roman senators could not be trusted to fight for the people over their own and publicani pocketbooks.  

Even at the time, many contemporary Romans of the first century B.C.E. were aware that the post-Carthage culture of Roman elites of greed, corruption, ambition, scorched-earth politics, and extreme partisanship bieing placed over both the common good and a spirit of compromise; this new culture was at the heart of the disease which led to the death of the Republic (nominally in 27 B.C.E. but really in 49 B.C.E.); in the words of the ancient Roman historian Sallust, it was peacetime, not war, which undid Rome:

“Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity took over. the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity. For the aristocracy twisted their ‘dignity’ and the people twisted ‘liberty’ towards their desires; every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated…

And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-10)

To place Rome’s rapid rise in perspective, consider that by 133, Rome had gone in living memory from surviving multiple existential threats from Carthaginians, Gauls, and Greeks, had gone from just controlling Italy, Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia, and some of Spain’s east coast to dominating nearly the entire Mediterranean either directly or indirectly; specifically, 133 was year of remarkable fortune for Rome: the late King of Pergamum—a wealthy Greek kingdom in what is now Turkey un western Asian Turkey—had actually willed his entire domain to the Roman Republic, and it passed to Rome upon his death in 133. Rome had already grown dramatically in size, wealth, and power, adding most of northern Italy, all of Greece, most of Spain, most of Southern France, and much of Carthage’s old African holdings to its domains. But Rome’s Western territories were far less developed than the older, fabulously wealthy cities and kingdoms of the East. The addition of the Asian Kingdom of Pergamum to the Republic’s empire had Roman businessman salivating as the prospect of the profits from the riches of doing business in the Asian east.

The Gracchi and Rome’s Descent Into Political Violence

Jean-Baptiste Claude Eugène Guillaume- The Gracchi

The year this remarkable gift to Rome came about, one of the tribunes of the plebs that had won election for that year of 133 was an ambitious but high-minded would-be reformer: Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, hailing from two very famous and elite Roman bloodlines. A champion of the masses, the Greco-Roman historian Plutarch has GRacchus giving a passionate speech in which he lamented that while the

“wild beasts of Italy have their dens and holes to lurk in…the men who fight and die for our country enjoy the common air and light and nothing else…The truth is that they fight and die to protect the wealth and luxury of others. They are called the masters of the world, but they do not possess a single clod of earth which is truly their own” (Plutarch Tiberius Gracchus 9). 

And this was the center of his program: doing something about the wealthy’s assault on the small-farm landowners who were disappearing as a class. But Gracchus was hardly looking to liquidate the rich: his proposal was to use a preexisting law that had been on the books for centuries that had long been unenforced, one which limited the amount of public land that any one individual could own. That limit was still quite large, but far less than what the ultra-wealthy had accumulated in the years of Rome’s great expansions, during which many Romans elites had used fake names to accumulate more than the legal limit. The excess land would be handed over to the poor, but in return for accepting this legal limit, all the legal-sized holdings would be formally recognized as legitimate and each son of these landowners would be given a portion of land equal to half the maximum size.

As would be expected, though, these wealthy landowners dominated the Senate, and they refused to go along with this compromise scheme even though the problems of ultra-concentration of land and wealth and the rapid rise of landless poor were all at a crises points.

Thus Gracchus, as was his legal-but-frowned-upon-and-untraditional right, called an assembly of the people and got his bill passed with the people’s enthusiastic approval. Equally as uncommon were for senatorial elites to orchestrate a veto of such a popular measure, but that the Senate did, co-opting one of the other nine Tribunes to veto Gracchus’ bill. Quite dramatically, Gracchus convened another assembly and had the people vote that tribune out of office: this dramatic move was extremely unprecedented, but was very likely still legal. The elites opposed to Gracchus were shocked at this move, and began a public relations campaign suggesting the Gracchus was out to make himself a king—just as offensive a suggestion to Roman sensibilities then as it would be to Americans today—and a portrayal Gracchus played into when he appointed himself and two of his relatives as the three-person commission to oversee the land reform. The Senate’s response to this was to refuse to allocate funding for Gracchus’s commission (if this sounds familiar to current U.S. politics on anything from Obamacare to the Zika virus, it should). In turn, Gracchus moved to get funding from future revenue from newly bestowed Pergamese lands in Asia, stepping into both financial and foreign affairs, policy spheres traditionally run by the Senate.

In pursuing his land reform and in its efforts to stop him at any cost, both Gracchus and the Senate were showing a willingness to discard centuries of compromise and precedent that had served Rome well, though Gracchus could at least in part be said to be acting on behalf of a Roman people and Republic in desperate need of land reform while the primary concern of the senatorial class was preserving their own power and obscene wealth. 

Against such odds, Gracchus did something no Roman as a tribune had ever done before: he made it clear he would stand for election again to serve a consecutive second term as a tribune, signaling to the Senate that it could not just stall in the hopes of outlasting him or hope to simply overturn his legislation when he was gone. A group of Senators, in part feeling this was a major step towards Gracchus moving to make himself king, and obviously acting to preserve their own power and wealth, marched on an assembly of the people where Gracchus was present and beat him, and hundreds of his supporters, to death; afterwards, other supporters of his were executed, imprisoned, or exiled without trial.

*****

This was a terrible turn for Rome: for hundreds of years and not since the earliest days of the Republic had anything even remotely like this happened, and even then nothing remotely this bad: tribunes were as a matter of religion sacrosanct and inviolable; to try to harm one was considered a terrible sacrilege. Elites, even members of the Senate, had resorted to settling a political dispute with mass murder, killing a major elected office-holder. And from this point, Rome’s politics would be driven by two main parties: the optimates—self-dubbed “best-men” who were the conservative leaders of the aristocracy and the Senate and generally acted against reform or anything that would redice their wealth and power—and populares—bold men from within the aristocracy who were willing to challenge the optimates, drawing support from the people with populist programs aimed helping the masses—and the conflict between the two would eventually destroy republican government in Rome altogether.

In order to prevent mass unrest, however, the Senate let much of Gracchus’ land law stand, but this was a temporary measure and the Senate stopped the reform in 129, to the dismay of not only Roman citizens; at this point, much of Italy was not so much directly controlled by Rome as by other Italians whom Rome considered allies and were not legally full Roman citizens, and it was clear to all that these Italians were the junior partners in the relationship; these Italians had not been consulted on the ending of the reform, to their consternation. This provided an opportunity for the murdered Gracchus’ younger brother, Gaius, who, it seems, sought to gain their support when they were shut out of the decision-making process by the Senate, apparently by supporting a bid to make many of them full Roman citizens. 

But when Gaius sought and won a tribunate for the year 123, this was only one of his many aims; he also ran for and won the tribunate for the next year, 122, without the cataclysmic reaction suffered by his brother for attempting the same thing. 

If Tiberius could be thought of as something of a Bernie Sanders of ancient Rome, then Gaius was going to take more of a Hillary Clinton-like approach, trying to build a broad coalition designed to appeal to many swaths of society instead of a more narrow populist program and to make it harder for the optimates to brush him aside like they did his brother. 

As such, Gaius Gracchus passed a law ensuring access to grain for bread to win over the urban poor; for the poor of the countryside, he suggested creating a new colony to settle people on the site where Carthage had once stood, in Africa; for an emerging middle-class of lower aristocrats and businessmen known as equites (who ran many of the publicani), he allowed them to bid for the lucrative tax-collecting contracts in the western parts of Pergamum’s former lands, now organized as the new Roman province of Asia (taxation was not undertaken directly by the government but was a task the Roman state contracted out to private companies); to this end, rather than have the bidding take place as would normally happen in the province itself (often abused by whichever Roman governor was there), Gracchus made sure it would take place in Rome, and instead of than splitting the taxation responsibilities for the province of Asia into multiple contracts, he made it a single contract for the whole province, an appeal to the support of the upper Roman business-class since only larger corporations could handle a contract on that scale (this move would have unintended blowback as it gave rise to the obscene growth in power of the publicani that would be such a huge problem for Romans decades later). 

On the legal front, he ensured capital trials could only be conducted through a law or people’s assembly, preventing the Senate from conducting trials by decree, and any senator or official who tried to bypass this restriction was subject to prosecution. He also brought equites into juries, so that the dominant portion of the pool from which judges and jurors in most civil cases were drawn were now equites over senators by a two-to-one margin; additionally, one of his allies passed a bill that made equites total replacements for senators on the juries of extortion courts that tried provincial governors and other senatorial-level officials for corruption (senators had generally avoided convicting their peers), and a permanent extortion court was established.

But in casting such a wide net, Gracchus made himself vulnerable as well; his wily Senatorial opponents used his effort to help Rome’s Italian allies against him, convincing many Romans that extending citizenship to these people would weaken the power of Roman citizens themselves, and the senators also used their individual patron-client ties with many of the non-Roman Italian to keep a good number of them from supporting Gracchus. They also preempted his attempt to win over the rural poor by having two of their own put forth bills to establish colonies. His support apparently undercut, Gaius lost an election in which he ran for a newly-unprecedented third tribunate in a row, and a fight broke out between some of his supporters and those of one of the current consuls, a consul who had bitterly opposed Gracchus and was a personal enemy of his; the fight resulted in the death of one of the consul’s supporters.

The Senate’s response to this was swift and unprecedented: it passed an emergency decree against Gracchus, authorizing the consul to do anything whatsoever to take Gracchus down: Gracchus and thousands of his followers were killed in a brief yet bloody fight and subsequent executions.

From the Gracchi to Caesar: the Cycle of Political Violence Explodes Into Civil War

Sadly, violence would come with frightening ease and regularity over the following decades.

Close to four centuries had passed in Roman history without violent episodes other than some disturbances early in Rome’s history, but after the deaths of the Gracchi brothers in 133 and 121, violence increasingly became a political tool, beginning mainly with the Senate’s optimates’ efforts to squash would-be reformers challenging their power too much for their liking, first in 100 and again in 91, both used against tribunes and the latter being used on a man pushing for citizenship for Rome’s Italian allies; the assassination of their champion sparked a rebellion by many of Rome’s Italian allies called the Social War (91-88), which was only ended by Rome’s granting of most of them the citizenship they had wanted to achieve through peaceful means. But an actual civil war between roman military units fighting for supporters of one generally popularis consul (Gaius Marius) against the forces and supporters of another optimas consul (Lucious Cornelius Sulla)—Rome’s first civil war in over four centuries of republican government (consider it took the United States only 85 years before it had its Civil War from 1861-1865)—broke out the same year (along with a major overseas conflict in Greece and Asia). The period of conflict between supporters of Marius and Sulla would not finally end until 72 (and that foreign war not ending until 63). 

But no rest for the weary: one ambitious popularis tried to overthrow the Republic after losing an election in 61, and he and his makeshift army were annihilated in 62. As the 50s unfolded, tension was constant and bouts of mob violence frequent, while the many pressing problems facing the Republic were left unaddressed by obstinate optimates who showed a total disregard for the Roman people. (Gaius) Julius Caesar would be their champion as a popularis, but his foes in the Senate would never forgive him; with a veteran army after his victorious war in Gaul, the Senate issued its emergency decree again in 49, basically authorizing tCaesar’s death because he would not step down from office; but this was after intense behind the scenes maneuvering in which Caesar’s supporters tried to negotiate a way for him to take up a new office when his term as consul expired, without which Cesar would be out of office and therefore open to legal prosecution, which his enemies were certainly planning for him. Essentially, they were daring Caesar to start a civil war or accept disgrace and prosecution and who-knows-what-punishment, in addition to an untenable political situation for the Republic and its citizens.

Caesar chose civil war.

By the time the wars which grew out of the civil war beginning in 49 ended nearly twenty years later in 30 with Caesar’s nephew Octavian defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Rome’s people were so exhausted by war that they didn’t mind that Octavian set up a dictatorship masquerading as a republic, and thus the Roman emperorship was born. There would not be another large-scale democracy or democratic republic with as much participation by the people until the United States of America grew to be a major power roughly 1,800 years later.

America’s Own Problems With Political Violence: Civil War to Civil Rights

Harper’s Weekly- October 19th, 1872

That time would roughly coincide with America’s Civil War. The war itself did not really end in 1865: during Reconstruction, the Republican-dominated federal government with its army acting as an occupying force put into place new state governments in the Southern states that had rebelled that enforced racial political and legal equality for freed slaves, but over the course of the next decade and then some, Democratic extremist terrorist white supremacists carried out insurgencies and violently overthrew almost all these governments, putting in place racist governments highly oppressive and violent to black Americans that lasted until the 1960s; southern whites finally negotiated the withdrawal of federal troops left in the only remaining states southern white insurgents had not violently taken over after the disputed election of 1876, an election, like so many others between 1865-1876, marred in the South by widespread violence, fraud, and voter suppression.

Harper’s weekly- “Of Course He Wants to Vote the Democratic Ticket:” White Democrats intimidate a black Republican,October 21st, 1876

With the exception of the election of 1948, in which many southern whites punished Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman for supporting civil rights for African-Americans and voted for racist third-party candidate Strom Thurmond, Democrats would continue to be the party of racists until John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson embraced equality for African-Americans in the 1960s, causing the parties to swap positions on issues of race, with white southern voters then defecting en masse to the Republican Party mainly because of racism, where they are now the Republican Party’s primary base. And, disturbingly, most of the states where today the state-level government is leading the charge in suppressing black and other minority voters are former “Confederate” states in the South.

America is fortunate that apart from riots and strikes, many of them race-based, there has been very few period of civil unrest since the 1870s, the main exceptions being the sporadic taming of the “Wild West” and later the Civil Rights Era’s 1960s and early 70s. But now, starting with the Ferguson riots in 2014 that was the first in a series episodes of racial unrest that have so far culminated in the dark days of racial tension of this very summer of 2016, we are seeing the most unrest this country has faced in more than 40 years.

Trump: The First Major Party Candidate to Stoke Unrest While Running for President?

And in the middle of all this is Donald Trump, the most polarizing major-party candidate since the election of 1860 that precipitated this country’s only civil war.

As history and even our own world today amply demonstrates, the sinister genie of political violence is prohibitively difficult to get back into its bottle once it has been unleashed; often, the attempt to rebottle it fails to succeed before the self-destruction of whatever state-structures were in existence, or before people turn to autocracy out of weariness of violence, with the violence itself often bred by a disintegrating public trust in major institutions. Most worrisome about Trump is that he is mixing subtle, implied threats of mass violence and/or intimidation with a very overt effort to obliterate trust in such institutions; just to recap, from the beginning of his candidacy and throughout, Trump falsely exaggerated how bad problems were with our institutions, even allowing for their increasingly problematic nature: first, he assailed the media and the party presidential nomination process as being “rigged” by elites to keep him down (that is, until he won and then stopped caring); added to this are his repeated allegations that the presidential voting system is rigged from top to bottom, with exhortations of his (largely white) supporters to be enthusiastic volunteer Election Day poll-watchers (in minority-heavy precincts), a task that only trained professionals are qualified to do (the parts in parentheses are understood even as candidate Trump does not emphasize them). Combined with his casual references to beating up dissenters at his rallies, his earlier threats/hints of possible violence (and his campaign’s preparations for intimidation tactics) were the Republican Party to try to deny Trump the nomination at its convention, his repeated musings as to what gun enthusiasts could show Hillary Clinton, especially if she were to be stripped of her Secret Service protection, and his stated desire to put Clinton in jail were he to be elected president along with his encouraging of chants of “lock her up” with crowds at his rallies, all Americans paying attention who have any sense of decency left should be feeling chills down their spines.

And yet for millions of Trump’s deplorable supporters, who are hanging on to every word in person at mass rallies, watching him on TV, or listening to him on the radio, they hear all this, easily understand all the implied subtleties about race and violence, and eagerly absorb every word joyfully, salivating at the very prospect of being able to assert their white dominance yet again on the political system, with far too many of these people also delighting in the prospect of political violence as a means to achieve these ends.

I wish I could say that I firmly believe such a prospect of political violence on anything other than a minute scale is a remote possibility, but I can’t; Trump’s recently far more sinister rhetorical turn is driving delusions and fantasies of violence in the heads of far, far too many of his flock, especially if that recent poll that had half of Republicans refusing to accept Clinton as president is even remotely accurate (and it probably is). I honestly don’t know what will happen, so extreme has Trump’s rhetoric become, so extreme have the views of many of his supporters been for some time, that I fear what will happen should this toxic mix boil over.

All Americans, regardless of political affiliation, in an atmosphere of increasing racial animosity and rumblings of political violence, should be afraid, and demand that Trump cease such rhetoric immediately, before it may be too late to prevent the unimaginable. But, as a consequence of all of this, we must begin to imagine the unimaginable, and prepare for the worst.

In some ways, that in itself is close enough to a 133 moment that we are in trouble regardless of what happens on and/or after Election Day.

Conclusion: A True Test for America, Its System, Its Leaders, Its People 

I want to also be careful here to note I am not arguing inevitability here: 133 did not make Sulla’s and Caesar’s civil wars inevitable, and Trump doesn’t make anything inevitable about today’s America. But each made and make, respectively, the possibility of really bad things happening far more likely: once such things occur in a society, they are far more likely to occur again than if society had prevented them from occurring at all in the first place.

Do I think Trump really wants to spark violence and riots? To undermine democracy? Maybe not, maybe it’s just bravado, but maybe not; either way, I do not think he appreciates or understands the raw hatred and emotion with which he is toying; in fact, the Republican Party did not realize how dangerous a game they were playing for decades stoking these fires, and Trump blew it all up right in the Party’s elites’ face. These forces are larger than Trump, and it remains to be seen if he can contain them, or if he even wants to. At the final debate, he said he wanted to keep us “in suspense,” and no matter what happens, we can all agree he has succeeded wildly on that front, and not for the good of our republic. The example of Rome’s self-destructive descent into civil political violence and strife is frighteningly instructive for our times, then, and should give us all pause, and we will have to judge ourselves very much on the basis of what happens over the next few weeks. In some ways, no less than the fate of our (and even Western) democracy itself is at stake.

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 19, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 19th, 2016 UPDATED August 21st to include information on “evidence” against Gülen

tccb.gov.tr

AMMAN — Since the failure of the dramatic coup attempt in Turkey, we are witnessing the methodical destruction of everything democratic about Turkey, save the exception of the majority’s ability to impose its will on the nation as a whole through periodic voting: a true Tocquevillian “tyranny of the majority”  empowered and sustained through Orwellian means.

Erdoğan’s Mob Rule: The Tyranny of the AKP Majority

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly using rhetoric that credits he and the people with “victory” over the coup plotters.  The lesson: Erdoğan is the people, and the people are him; they are one: he speaks for them, they speak for him.

Using such rhetoric, Erdoğan for weeks exhorted his followers to engage in nightly demonstrations since the coup failed, providing free public transportation to—and free food and water at—the rallies throughout to encourage mass attendance and culminating in series of final, massive rallies in 80 cities on Sunday, August 8th, including one with millions of people in Istanbul that might have been the nation’s largest rally ever. Though these rallies received robust support and encouragement from the government, the country’s main Kurdish political party—the HDP, the third-largest party in Turkey’s parliament—was excluded.  Considering that many other demonstrations not favorable to Erdoğan’s agenda are banned and met with force at the hands of the police, considering that Erdoğan’s ruling AKP party is using government funds to stage repeated, continuous political rallies that exclude a major party representing a minority with which the government is in a brewing mini-civil war (or insurgency, if you like, which is claiming lives even now) in Turkey’s southeast, this must certainly be considered an improper use of power in a country that is supposedly a “democracy.”  

Kayhan Ozer/Presidential Press Service via AP

The again, this should not be a surprise, as Erdoğan is a man who seems to have deliberately stoked violent conflict with the Kurds as a way to reverse his party’s June 2015 electoral setback in which it lost its parliamentary majority, and the country’s Kurdish HDP won seats for the first time; in response to this, the Turkish president campaigned on fear and offering to be a strongman for Turks against the Kurdish militants (whom he falsely blamed for ISIS attacks); he and his party reveled in the ensuing divisiveness and conflict and the ploy would succeed in increasing support for the AKP in time for new elections. 

The new elections came about because a coalition failed to form in time after the June elections for the first time in Turkish history, and many saw Erdoğan violating the constitutionally-mandated neutrality the president is supposed to observe during the coalition-forming process, as he aggressively pushed for new elections (an unprecedented move) rather than exhaust the options for coalition-building, declining to ask the main opposition party to form a coalition after his own party failed to do so, clearly hoping that his AKP would perform better if given another chance in snap elections.  His AKP was able to erase those setbacks to the tune of catapulting itself to a solid majority in the ensuing November 2015 elections while the Kurdish party lost some seats.  Notably, that election’s legitimacy was questioned both in terms of the run-up to the election suffering from a climate of government hostility to Erdoğan’s and his party’s critics in the press and in terms of violence in the country’s southeast, which made it difficult for many of the country’s Kurds to vote.

The recent post-coup rallies were also taking on a sort of cult-like quality, as the populist overtones merged with a passionate devotion to the singular man, Erdoğan, with signs at the rally held by participants displaying such slogans as “You are a gift from god, Erdoğan” and “Order us to die and we will do it.”  Official banners advertising the rally, besides emphasizing the free transportation, noted “The triumph is democracy’s, the squares are the people’s,” a slogan also emblazoned on massive banners hung from major buildings and bridges.  In texts to his supporters, Erdoğan has made it explicitly clear he wanted these rallies to “To teach the traitor, the terrorist, a lesson,” referring to Gülen’s supporters and Gülen himself, whose movement Erdoğan has for some time dubiously labeled a terrorist one.  The lesson is clear: Democracy and the people have “won,” they support Erdoğan, and the people and Erdoğan together now own the public square and have a monopoly on acceptable discourse and demonstrations; the message behind all that is that those with a different message are not welcome and are being put on notice, including Gülenists and Kurds, together consisting of a huge chunk of the existing opposition to Erdoğan’s politics.

As expected, these rallies and this message have had a chilling effect on Turkish citizens who don’t support Erdoğan and his brand of populist, religious, and chauvinistic nationalism.  As Tocqueville wrote two centuries ago:

“Monarchs had, so to speak, materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind as the will which it is intended to coerce. Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.””

The Recently-Unprecedented Numbers of Turkey’s Purge

CNN

Even more ominously, these rallies are also set against the backdrop of a massive purge, a crackdown not seen in the world for years and not seen in a democracy for much longer, one drawing comparisons to the purges in more (relatively) recent history of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China and following Iran’s 1979 revolution.  As of August 2nd:

• Almost 9,000 police have been fired
• Over 10,000 soldiers have been detained and almost half of the top generals and admirals have been arrested or fired
• Over 2,700 members of the judiciary have been suspended
• Some 21,000 private school teachers have been suspended
• Some 21,700 staff members of the Ministry of Education have been fired
• Some 1,500 university deans—every university dean in Turkey—have been made to resign
• Some academics who added their names to a petition calling for an end to Turkey’s war against Kurds were suspended
• Over 100 news media outlets were forced to close
• Over 1,500 ministry of finance officials were suspended

Overall, about 35,000 people have been held for questioning, with about half of those undergoing formal arrests and facing trials and over 81,000 officials have been suspended or fired from their positions.  The aforementioned major Kurdish political party has had its offices raided and some its people detained, as well.  The arrests are continuous and ongoing, include non-servile religious clerics, and as of just this Monday, the judiciary’s preeminent Palace of Justice was raided, with well over 100 people there being detained, and the same is just now beginning to happen to dozens of private-sector businesses, with well over 100 executives now being sought to be put in detention.

And the thing is, all this has been planned for years.

A Far-Reaching Purge Long-Planned

Erdoğan’s people have been anticipating potential coups for years, even claiming this recent one has been something that has been building up for decades.  Whatever their assertions, what is less debatable is that Erdoğan’s people in the government have for years had plans and lists of people ready to be acted upon were just such an event like the recent coup to occur, and possibly even in its absence (indeed, Turkish officials admit preparation was already underway before the coup).

In other worse, this purge is not a natural, organic reaction to a surprise event. Erdoğan even referred to the coup attempt as “a gift from God,” which makes total sense once you understand what he is doing with Turkey’s current purge.

The ostensible targets are people who seem to support, no matter how vaguely or minutely, the movement of reclusive Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who lives in a sort of self-imposed exile in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and whose movement the Turkish government accuses of a massive, society-and-government-wide fifth column infiltration of Turkey, with the government using rhetoric reminiscent of Josef Stalin’s manner of describing vast conspiracies of supposed enemies of the Soviet State.  In reality, the current Turkish purges go far beyond coup plotters to anyone who is pro-Gülen and clearly even beyond that—all this is even by Turkish officials’ admission—and Erdoğan is clearly using the purge to blunt opposition and cement his own hold on power.  Even nearly 100 Turkish soccer referees have been accused of being coup plotters, and drama around the coup has even ensnared one of Turkey’s soccer greats who was key in Turkey’s remarkable 3rd-place finish in the 2002 World Cup as well as a Turkish NBA basketball star, with Turkey recently issuing an arrest warrant for the former.  

In fact, so many people are being arrested that Turkey has decided to release tens of thousands of non-violent criminals from prison to make room for all the judges, teachers, lawyers, journalists and others who have been arrested as part of the purge, since the prison system is now newly over-capacity because of the purge.

Gülen and Erdoğan: From Allies to Enemies

Selahattin Sevi / Zaman Daily News via EPA

Ironically, Gülen and his movement were allied with Erdoğan and his AKP years ago; each side operated on a platform of religious reformers pushing back against Turkey’s longstanding secular establishment elite in the early ’00s, and Erdogan and his party needed Gülen’s and his movement to get enough public support, to have the bodies to carry out purges of many of the secularists, to provide the manpower to replace those purged.  

However, the more restrained and more moderately-Islamist Gülenists eventually became alarmed at Erdoğan’s lurch towards authoritarianism and when they moved to prosecute close allies of Erdogan for very real corruption in 2013 (the largest corruption scandal in recent Turkish history), the two had a massive falling out, with Erdoğan’s government since questionably labeling Gülen’s movement as terrorist group.  

It seems in Erdoğan’s Turkey, there is no room for rivals or shared credit: in seeking to discredit Gülen’s movement, Erdoğan is trying to rewrite the narrative of history that saw Gülen and his movement work hand in hand with Erdoğan and his AKP to reshape Turkey and wrest control of it from the secular elite establishment put in place by Atatürk when he founded the modern Turkish state from the post-WWI ashes of the Ottoman Empire; much like the ancient Roman occasional tradition of damnatio memoriae of trying to wipe disgraced (or sometimes just rival-to-the-new-ruler) figures from history, Erdoğan is seeing to it Gülen and his followers are removed from the story in any positive light, that only he and his AKP supporters (“the people,” as the pro-Erdoğan language characterizes them, as if there are not patriotic Turks who are against Erdoğan) will be seen as the founders, builders, and saviors of the new Turkey.  As Orwell wrote in early 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits atrocities but that it attacks the concept of objective truth: it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

Having now pushed Gülenists out of the public sphere and electrified his base, Turkey’s president can rely on his supporters, then, to help stifle current and future dissent through social pressure, easing the burden on the government, which, of course, will still be there to use force when social pressure fails.  The failed coup has given Erdoğan and his rather unlettered, chauvinist, now loudly-assertive AKP crowd the ability to control even more so Turkish education, police, courts, media, even the military—essentially, all the tools needed to have a stranglehold on societal mechanisms used to form public opinion—so that over time, the ease and ability to stridently go against the majority will be limited, indeed (in case you’re wondering, the government already had a strong dominance over the country’s clerical religious establishment).  For Tocqueville: 

“When an opinion has taken root among a democratic people and established itself in the minds of the bulk of the community, it afterwards persists by itself and is maintained without effort, because no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false ultimately receive it as the general impression, and those who still dispute it in their hearts conceal their dissent; they are careful not to engage in a dangerous and useless conflict.”

Gülen’s Extradition: A (Useful) Excuse for Anti-Americanism

The fact that Gülen is living in Pennsylvania is extremely convenient for Erdoğan, who has decided to play the anti-Western, anti-American card for fairly full effect in Turkey.  Most Turks actually think that the U.S. government was behind the coup, a belief amply fed by senior Turkish officials directly accusing the U.S. of supporting the coup, by wild reports in the Turkish media, and by even Erdoğan himself implying the U.S. at least supported it in some ways: the Turkish president  went so far as to accuse a top U.S. general of “siding with coup plotters” and to exclaim that “This coup attempt has actors inside Turkey, but its script was written outside. Unfortunately, the West is supporting terrorism and stands by coup plotters” (ironic because it is Turkey that seems to actually be supporting terrorism, according to evidence).  Such accusations made by Erdoğan are more or less red meat for his base, and he has been rhetorically issuing ultimatums to the U.S. government, offering a stark choice: hand Gülen over to Turkish authorities or lose your relationship with Turkey.  

Erdoğan’s repeated calls for the U.S. to hand Gülen over are basically a well-orchestrated ploy to drum up anti-Americanism in Turkey: the U.S., of course, will only seriously consider a formal extradition request with compelling evidence, and Erdoğan can keep repeating these calls without submitting a formal extradition request and keep fomenting anti-Americanism in the process.  In fact, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım even explicitly linked the future level of anti-Americanism in Turkey to whether or not the U.S. handed over Gülen, saying “Whether or not the anti-Americanism in Turkey will continue is…dependent on this.”   There is certainly some truth to this, but it is also hard to imagine Turks suddenly having a dramatically more favorable opinion of the U.S. just because the U.S. would hand over the government’s prime suspect in a coup for which America is being blamed as a major player anyway.

What is certain is that there is no shortage of people who will be absolutely convinced that the U.S. is siding with Gülen and that it support the coup, and America not immediately handing him over only adds fuel to that fire.  This is a winning situation for Erdoğan: he gets to keep fanning anti-Gülen and anti-American sentiment, and especially since Gülen is still safe in Pennsylvania, Erdoğan can keep Turkey on a crisis footing, allowing him to easily continue his abuse of power, since Gülen, shielded by American non-extradition, can be framed by Erdoğan as a continual threat justifying extreme measures.  Clearly, then, Gülen is infinitely more useful to Erdoğan as a distant, U.S.-residing boogeyman than as a vanquished (possibly even executed) “traitor” in Turkey.  

August 21st UPDATE: Thus far, while Turkey has submitted documents related to Gülen, the U.S. did not consider the first batch it has reviewed to comprise a formal extradition request, and, in the words of one Justice Department official, those documents only detail “allegations of certain alleged criminal activities that pre-date the coup” effort, that “[a]t this point, Turkish authorities have not put forward a formal extradition request based on evidence that he was involved in the coup” plot; in other words, zero evidence about Gülen’s involvement in the failed coup has been provided.

While it is theoretically possible that Turkey will be able to provide a formal extradition request with evidence sufficient to merit the U.S. honoring an extradition request, I would wager that this will not happen.  For one thing, there may be no such evidence in existence; another point to consider is that if Turkey did have such documents, Erdoğan and other Turkish officials would not likely be so intensely publicly pressuring the U.S. to hand Gülen over; if they had a rock solid case, it would be an unnecessary rocking of the boat.  Instead, because they are seeming to lack the appropriate evidence, Turkey’s president may be hoping that his leverage on issues related to Syrian refugees, to ISIS, and to NATO will be enough to get the U.S. to cave in under pressure (thinking that is likely hubristic and a course of action that is not likely to happen without evidence).

Then again, maybe Erdoğan seeks anti-Americanism and drama with NATO for its own sake…

In NATO Marriage, Erdoğan (Turkey’s Putin) Flirts with Putin

Photo by Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky

Another more devious game would be that Erdoğan might even be seeking to court Russian favor; if Erdoğan is not delusional, he has to realize his increasing authoritarianism may very well eventually earn Turkey an expulsion from NATO, at which U.S. Sec. of State John Kerry recently hinted.  The Turkish president is already making nice with Putin even after Russo-Turkish relations reached a nadir late last year when Turkey shot down a Russian combat jet after a series of repeated Russian violations of Turkish airspace on the Syrian border.  It should not go unnoticed that the pilots who shot down Russia’s jet were arrested shortly after the coup for allegedly being part of it, with the arrests announced after Putin had earlier quite forcefully condemned the attempted coup and had personally called Erdoğan to offer his support.  Perhaps this was a quid pro quo that lay the ground for their August in-person meeting, in which both leaders signaled the beginning of a new, more positive phase in their relationship.  Perhaps Erdoğan is warming up to another potential ally—one very similar to himself—in Putin, even as he distances himself from current allies that are very dissimilar to him.  In in the next few years, if I read that Turkey has left or been forced out of NATO and joined a military alliance with Russia (which would only be a dream come true for Russia on so many levels), I will hardly be surprised.

Make no mistake, Erdoğan is Turkey’s Putin now, just more impatient and without Putin’s relative charm and subtlety.  No wonder the two seem to be patching up their differences and coming together: they operate in very similar ways.

Conclusion: In Erdoğan, A Tyranny Orwell Would Recognize All Too Well (and One that Is Here to Stay)

Chris Mcgrath/Getty Images

For now, Turkey is clearly becoming a repressive society, and the moment of the failed coup marks a decidedly rapid increase in Erdoğan’s program of centralization, consolidation, repression, Islamicization, and anti-Westernism/anti-Americanism.

Last year, in between the two Turkish parliamentary elections, we saw how professional official investigators were stating certain attacks were very likely ISIS attacks, while Erdoğan claimed they could be the work of Kurds and/or the Assad regime, twisting the facts to suit his own end and contradicting his own officials in his own government.  I would not at all be shocked if it turns out those law enforcement officials have just been purged, and Erdoğan will almost surely make sure that now, any government official will speak one thing and one thing only: whatever Erdoğan wants to be said.  Now, when there are terrorism attacks in Turkey, the world should not give much credibility to whatever information comes from official Turkish channels; those interested in the truth are gone from the picture, because those remaining, as the propaganda slogans remind us, are there to serve Erdoğan, because his will is the people’s will and those who don’t agree, who are not on board with the program, are traitors and terrorists.  Just like Gülen and anyone who even sympathizes with them…

It seems again appropriate to return to Orwell, who was only too well aware that dictators will do everything they can to control language.  In his famous “Politics and the English Language” essay, Orwell remarked that “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”  This purge shows that that is exactly what Erdoğan is doing, and I, for one, won’t be trusting much of anything the Turkish government says from now on because I know I won’t be hearing the words of professional public servants, but acolytes to Erdoğan’s increasingly Stalinist-like cult, all while Erdoğan seeks to eclipse Atatürk both as the preeminent modern Turk and and as the embodiment of Turkey itself, a Turkey he is now successfully remaking in his autocratic, religious image, pushing aside the democratic, secular values of Atatürk.

Orwell realized that systematically attacking basic freedoms of expression was, in effect, a demonstration of contempt for rights and people in general when he wrote that “Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

Before the outcome was certain, the coup attempt was, I noted at the time, the definitive battle for the soul of Turkey and its future.  Well, for the foreseeable future, that soul and that future will be embodied by Erdoğan and be devoid of most democratic norms, respect for human and minority rights, a free press, and honest political discourse.  We seem more and more surely to be approaching a point where it will be impossible to say otherwise about Turkey, if we have not already arrived at or passed by it.

Long after the Roman Republic’s political functionality and integrity had crumbled, Caesar was said to have remarked that “The Republic is nothing—just a name, without substance or form” (Seutonius Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 77).  Today, the substance and form of Turkey’s republic is in dire straits, the prospects for its survival quite poor, its future for anyone concerned with democracy bleak; such is Erdoğan’s Turkey.  For me, Erdoğan’s resilience and increasing power was one of the big stories of 2015, and I noted at the beginning of the year that Turkey’s would-be sultan was poised to be quite a problem in 2016, and thus far, he has certainly exceeded even my grim expectations.

See related article: The Definitive Battle for the Soul of Turkey & Its Future Is Happening Right Now & It Is This Coup

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Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 15, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 15th, 2016

HBO

The following is a small excerpt from a graduate school paper of mine from late 2010 (revised mid-2011 and mid-2012) that is also part of an ongoing scholarly book project.  A related short eBook of mine on the legal and political legacy of Ancient Rome in America’s founding can be found here.  For a PDF of the full graduate paper on which this piece is based and more background, including full footnote citations and works cited, click here

“ …the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.”—Sallust,  The Jurgurthine War  41.1-10 

Dramatis Personae and rough political alignment 

Populares (liberals)

Tiberius Sempronius GRACCHUS- tribune; elder of the two reforming Gracchi brothers

Gaius Sempronius GRACCHUS- tribune; younger brother of Tiberius

(together, the Gracchi)

Gaius MARIUS- Roman general and statesman; plebian champion; uncle of Julius Caesar

Lucius Cornelius CINNA- consul; ally and successor to Marius; father-in-law of Julius Caesar

Marcus Aemilius LEPIDUS- consul

Quintus SERTORIUS- Roman general and rebel for the Marian cause

Publius CLAUDIUS Pulcher, later Publius CLODIUS- tribune;populareschampion; rival of Cicero

Lucius Sergius CATILINE- populares champion

Gaius Julius CAESAR- yes, THAT Caesar; Roman general and statesman

Titus Annius MILO- tribune; ally of Pompeius; rival of Clodius

Marcus ANTONIUS (Mark Antony)- tribune; Caesar’s deputy and ally

Optimates (conservatives)

Lucius Cornelius SULLA- Roman general and statesman; patrician champion

Lucius Licinius LUCULLUS- Roman general; deputy of Sulla

Marcus Porcius CATO- an uncompromising leader of the optimates; paragon of traditional values

Quintus Caecilius METELLUS Celler- leading optimate

Marcus Calpurnius BIBULUS- co-consul and great rival with Caesar; Cato’s son-in-law

Gaius CASSIUS Longinus- one of Caesar’s assassins; main ally of Brutus

Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius SCIPIO Nasica- leading optimate and ally of Cato

Marcus Junius BRUTUS- friend (later leader  assassin) of Caesar ; descendant of Lucius Junius Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic who overthrew the last Roman king; fought against Octavian and Antonius

In-between

Gnaeus POMPEIUS “Magnus” (Pompey)- Roman general and statesman; plebian

Marcus Licinius CRASSUS- Roman financier and statesman; richest man in Rome

Marcus Tullius CICERO- lawyer; orator; moderate; one of the great Roman statesmen

Gaius OCTAVIAN Thurinus- Caesar’s great-nephew/adopted heir; later Augustus, Rome’s first emperor

The Rest

MITHRIDATES VI Eupator- King of Pontus; one of Rome’s great nemeses

SPARTACUS- Thracian slave gladiator who led largest slave rebellion in Roman history

CLEOPATRA VII Philopater- last of the Egyptian Pharaohs; ally of Caesar and Antonius

Why the Republic Fell, and Who and What Is to Blame

In December, 50. B.C.E., the Roman Senate passed a motion that Caesar should step down, failed to pass the same for Pompeius, and voted yes on a tribune’s proposal that both step down.  No further action was taken, but on January 1, 49, a letter of Caesar’s, severe in tone, was read to the Senate.  In response, Scipio proposed that Caesar dismiss his armies or be named an enemy of the state, but this was vetoed by two tribunes, including Antonius. After this, the Senate passed its senatus consultum ultimum against Caesar, warning Antonius not to interfere; he and other agents of Caesar’s fled the city in disguise.  In response, on January 10, Caesar crossed the Rubicon River—the border of the province of Cisalpine Gaul with Rome/Italy proper—with his legions.  Republican government in any meaningful way for the people of ancient Rome, after nearly five centuries, would never operate again.  It is likely that there were many misunderstandings between Pompeius, in Rome, and Caesar, far away in Gaul.  Neither seemed to seek conflict directly, yet at the same time, the optimates were clearly trying to use Pompeius to destroy Caesar, which Pompeius may or may not have realized, so eager was he to be on their good side.  That the Senate was willing to call a man with active veteran armies an enemy of the state, in the confidence that Pompeius would defeat Caesar in a civil war, rather than allow such a powerful man to avoid prosecution and disgrace, and find some way to come together peacefully to deal with the problems of the Republic, is very troubling indeed.  The way events developed, it seems that it would be fair to say that the Senate pushed Caesar into marching on Rome, while he anticipated they would leave him the choice of war or disgrace and prosecution.  The Senate and Pompeius did not anticipate how much Caesar had prepared for this possibility before they called him a traitor and left him no desirable options other than war.  Short of being a sacrificial lamb, Caesar’s only option was war then, while Pompeius might likely have been manipulated by the Senate into thinking Caesar was trying to ruin his career and overthrow the Republic.  Caesar, as opposed to Crassus and even Pompeius, was always the peacemaker among the triumvirate, and his career suggested that he usually sought moderate and conciliatory measures first, so it is an argument with little evidence that claims he was always out to destroy the state and republican government for his personal gain.  Perhaps if Julia had not died, or the two great men had been able to meet in person, the final falling out, and civil war, could have been avoided.  The world may never know. Conversely, there was little action on the part of Cato, the Senate, and the optimates that indicated they would have behaved in any kind of moderate, conciliatory, or non-obstructionist way.  As opposed to the civil war between Marius and Sulla, then, the civil war between Pompeius and the Senate on one side and Caesar on the other seems, relatively, to have been driven and caused not so much by the individuals themselves but by a Senate which intentionally drove a wedge between Caesar and Pompeius and then felt powerful enough, with Cato in the lead and in many ways driven by a long-standing opposition to all of Caesar’s actions, to isolate and destroy Caesar,  through civil war, if necessary, this being their preferred course of action above all else.[1]

Years of war would follow: Caesar against Pompeius with Cato, Scipio, and the optimates, then Caesar’s nephew and adopted heir, Octavian, against Antonius, then Antonius with Octavian against Brutus and Cassius, and finally Octavian against Antonius and Cleopatra.  Throughout all the years up to 49 B.C.E., there was a functioning republic, even if it was rotten on the inside; yet after 49, the Republic was only a farce, and competing generals controlled virtually everything until, after nearly twenty years of war, Octavian reigned alone as “first citizen,” laying the foundation of the emperorship as he would soon become Augustus.  Caesar had famously remarked that “The Republic is nothing—just a name, without substance or form” (Seutonius Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 77), but his actions, like Cato’s, Pompeius’s, and many others before, contributed heavily to this fact.  It was the majority of the ruling elite, the Senate, populares, and optimates together since the days of the Gracchi, who had brought Rome to where it was in 49.  Things might have turned out differently.  Had Brutus and Cassius prevailed, a republic might have been restored (though one likely to embody the optimates’ obstinacy and unable to function well without severe change).  If Caesar had not been assassinated, he might have restored the Republic in time, after much reform; it is impossible to know such things, and those who succeeded Caesar did not restore republican government.  Before Caesar was assassinated in 44 B.C.E., Pompeius, Cato, Bibulus, Scipio, Domitius, and Milo would be casualties of war.  The wars that brought Octavian to power would see the deaths of Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Antonius, and Cleopatra.  Only Octavian among the major players would remain.

“Caesar was born into a Republic already prone to sudden outbreaks of savage political violence,” notes Goldsworthy.[2]  With the mass civil violence in Rome in the years before the civil war of 49, the final clash of armies against armies was simply the next step in a natural progression and escalation of violence which began in 133.  From 133 on the political violence steadily increased until it peaked when Marius and later Cinna fought with Sulla and his followers and had a high plateau for years through Lepidus and Sertorius and Spartacus, receded and then spiked again with Catiline, immediately after went down to a low level of relatively bloodless controlled violence until Clodius targeted Cicero and others with the collegia, became even greater when Milo finally responded, and then escalated out of control, disrupting basic and vital functions of the state from commerce to elections to court proceedings, until Clodius was finally killed; but then his supporters burned down the Senate house and it was only after this in 52 when a breakthrough occurred, when the feuding parties agreed to have Pompeius restore order. Pompeius was then able to implement meaningful electoral reforms and harsher measures against violence and bribery, but this as sole consul and with his own troops in the city; that was not how the Republic was supposed to function, with only one consul and uniformed soldiers keeping the peace in the city of Rome itself.  One can easily speculate that under “normal” circumstances, the optimates would have tried to block such reforms of Pompeius as they had blocked most of his agenda, and most major reforms, in the past.  While calling on Pompeius to restore order during the civil war which started between Marius and Sulla and ended with Pompeius’ defeat of the Sertorian rebels in Spain, against the pirates and against Mithridates, the elites consistently blocked his political agenda, preferring to let his veterans languish and the political situation in the new eastern acquisitions remain up in the air. From 133 onward, only twice before 52 had the optimates even grudgingly compromised on major domestic reform (unless one counts awarding Pompeius the position of a unified grain administrator, then it is thrice): first by having some of their own officials propose establishing colonies for veterans during the tribunate of Gaius Gracchus, if mostly seemingly to counter Gaius’s similar proposals, and at the end of the Social War in extending citizenship and Latin status to allies when faced with the disintegration of Roman Italy. The social war ended and three-and-a-half decades would pass before had the factions came together in such a meaningful way as in 52, but it literally took near anarchy and the destruction of the Senate house to bring this about. Not even three full years of tense calm followed before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  And while all this was going on, Rome was fighting wars against foreign peoples, from Germanic and Gallic tribes, to Jurgurtha and Mithridates, from the deserts of North Africa to the shores of Britain, from Armenia to even the walls of Jerusalem.  Considering both the domestic and foreign conflicts, Rome was involved in non-stop violent conflict for the vast majority of the history of the Late Republic covered in this paper. One should not doubt that at least indirectly, and quite likely directly, this contributed to the increasing level of violence in Roman society as a whole.  Rather than soldiers being a part of normal civic life while out of uniform when Rome was at peace, as they had for much of the Early and Middle Republic, now soldiers were quite outside of normal life; the maintenance of a large overseas empire and the economic changes of the later Punic Wars discussed early in this paper, left unaddressed by the Senate, meant there was little for the solider to be able to come back to in civilian life.  As Goldsworthy notes:

the Senate…refused to take responsibility for these men and provide them with some sort of livelihood.  This encouraged a trend whereby legionaires became more loyal to popular commanders than they were to the State itself.  The Roman Army had ceased to be the entire State under arms, each class serving in accordance with its wealth so that men fought to preserve a community from which they benefited, and became something outside normal society.  This was the change which allowed successive Roman generals to lead their armies against each other and Rome itself.  Scipio Africanus [hero of the Second Punic War (218-201 B.C.E.) and one of Rome’s greatest generals] could not even have dreamed of turning to the men who had served under him to bring armed force to bear against his [domestic political] opponents in the 180s. [3]

For von Ungern-Sternberg, “[t]hrough its refusal to produce a solution to these problems [i.e., the plight of the urban poor and land and farming issues including settlement of veterans], the Senate created serious doubts about its own legitimacy as the ultimate governing body, which in turn caused the soldiers to stage repeated “marches on Rome.”[4]

It is tellingly ironic that the optimates were the first to bring political violence into the forum, against the Gracchi, and that it was violence that would undo them.  Most of the reforms the Gracchi were calling for were sensible, even essential; but their tactics, their challenge to the status and power of the old-school of Rome’s elite, was more than that elite was willing to tolerate.  In general this was the pattern the optimates would follow from 133 to 49: nearly a century of near total obstruction.  They rarely put the interests of the people or Rome as a whole above their own.  The tribunes’ physical bodies were made religiously sacrosanct when they held that office, which existed as the people’s constitutional mechanism for influencing the higher mechanisms of the state, so the Roman elites’ willingness to use violence against the tribunes who did put Rome’s people first is very revealing, for it shows that they fought to preserve tradition as long as such traditions were beneficial to themselves, but the tradition of the tribune being sacrosanct, going back almost to the founding of the Republic, was repeatedly ignored by the optimates and the Senate. Such actions by the optimates furthermore meant that anyone who wanted to succeed in such matters had to counter the optimates with violence, or they would end up dead like the Gracchi and their political heirs if they seriously tried to push reforms through.  This repeated initiation of targeted political violence by the optimates meant that anyone serious about reform or addressing the Republic’s most serious problems had to be prepared to meet violence with violence or likely would only meet with failure and death.   Even up until Caesar, these optimates continued the same tactic; the fanatically stubborn Cato, seen in later years as a martyr for the Republic, left his opponent, Caesar, with no choice but of that between prosecution and disgrace or a fight, between an unacceptable and dangerous status quo and political violence.  After Caesar had defeated Pompeius’s and the optimates’s forces decisively at Pharsalus, Suetonius quotes a source who fought with him there and throughout the conflict that has Caesar looking out over the battlefield filled with dead enemies and saying “It was they who wanted this, for I, Gaius Caesar, would have been found guilty, despite all my achievements, if I had not turned to my army for aid” (Lives of the Caesars The Deified Julius Caesar 30). 

Without the threats of his enemies, keen to tear him down, it seems more than possible that Caesar would have found an alternative to marching his legions into Italy.  But as Cicero’s speeches and career, and the episodes between him and Clodius, and Milo and Clodius, and Sulla and Marius (among others) would show, the politics of personal destruction in the post-Gracchi order would prove to be so destructive as to destroy the Republic.  People that feel threatened often make more extreme decisions, have more extreme views.  So it was that from Tiberius Gracchus down to Caesar, almost all of the major populares of Rome were threatened with political violence at least in part orchestrated by the optimates; this generated a mentality among reformers of extreme risk-taking which became a modus operandi.  The gambling started with legislation under the Gracchi, but the chips came to be legions and the Republic itself in the days of Caesar.  But a special blame must be assigned to the optimates leading the Senate: they compromised on virtually nothing from 133-49 B.C.E., daring someone to destroy the Republic in order to get even the most basic reforms that were wholly necessary passed.  Caesar took them on their dare, but apparently tried to avoid doing so; but Cato and his ilk never let him sit easy, and made it clear they would do everything they could to tear him down for his “sins” of his consulship of 59.  They did this to a man with a personal, veteran army, and they were willing to fight a civil war just to take him down.  Caesar, for his part, let his own sense of self worth get in the way of working out a better deal with Pompeius, as did Pompeius with Caesar.  Sadly, the stakes set by nearly a century of life-and-death struggle over basic governance left little room for alternative and too much risk for those thinking of compromise.  It is important to note that Caesar generally offered clemency and eventual reinstatement to his opponents during and after the civil war, something unique among all the generals in Roman history who had seized power by force, for which Caesar was famous in his own lifetime, and something, it should be noted, his opponents would clearly not have shown him, except perhaps for Pompeius, and did not show him when many of these former opponents, pardoned by Caesar, assassinated him in the Senate.  His successors, Octavian and Marcus Antonius, were not prone to the same clemency.  This clemencia regularly offered by Caesar further adds to the argument that unlike his opponents, Caesar was conciliatory and willing to work with his opposition peacefully before the outbreak of hostilities.  Furthermore, one must ask how different things would have been if Caesar had not been away from Rome for most of the 50s.  His personality was exceedingly charming and he was able to boldly reconcile others throughout his career, notably Pompeius and Crassus twice, and even Pompeius and Clodius.  With his record and skills of personal diplomacy, and the personality to make him excel so well at this, it is not unreasonable to speculate that, had Caesar spent more time away from his provinces in Rome in the 50s, like Pompeius did, the forces that pushed Rome to civil war might have been ameliorated just enough to prevent civil war.  One might assume that there would have been a fairly good chance of his relationship with Pompeius not deteriorating as much as it eventually did, and one must remember that this was one of the final factors that led to open war.  Though one cannot know such things, the point should be considered all the same.  And, though even more speculative, it is certainly possible that Pompeius and Caesar working together for a much longer period of time might have peacefully reformed the Republic into something worth preserving, or at least with far less violence than ended up occurring.  Instead, the real world outcome was massive bloodshed on a continental scale and the destruction of the Republic.

At the heart of the process leading to the end of the Republic was corruption, especially the corruption of the senatorial class/optimates and the publicani (Roman multinational corporations), but certainly also of the later populares, not terribly discriminating in their methods.  There is the obvious material corruption, and the corruption of those seeking power, which, despite many attempts at reform and all sorts of legislation, proved ineffective abroad until Caesar’s reforms of his consulship for officials in the provinces and ineffective at home until Pompeius’s reforms during his second consulship, both just before the civil war between the two great men.  As a class, the senators were atrocious; Cicero makes this more than clear in his prosecution of Verres, but Verres’s blatant guilt was one of the few instances that the senatorial class ever demonstrated even an inkling of a willingness to convict one of their own, unless personal vendettas or bribery were there to offer an incentive.  For decades, senatorial elites abused their power to an extraordinarily extreme degree and thought nothing of it.  Men like Lucullus and Rutilius paid a heavy price for their attempts to be fair and just and avoid corruption.  Whenever their interests were seriously threatened, the publicani were able to buy off large portions of the Senate.  This did not matter even if it hurt the interests of the state, as shown most blatantly in the cases of the pirates and the war with Mithridates.  Without the senators, the publicani would not have been able to carry out their exploitation of the provinces, and without the publicani, it would have been much harder for the senatorial elite to pay off their campaign debts, and this relationship was a large source of the cash that ruined the extortion courts and elections.

But it is the corruption of the institutions of the Republic themselves which is perhaps most striking.  Rather than use the rules, laws, and institutions as their creators intended, courts, Senate procedures, legislation, even armies became the tools of individual office holders to use to further their own individual interests and vendettas.  This general abuse of governance ensured that the politics of personal destruction became inextricably woven into the fabric of the Republic itself.  Prosecutions were rarely conducted, for example, to pursue justice; rather, they were a form of escalation in personal disputes, more often than not, between individual members of the ruling class.  Procedures and rules in the Senate and in government, as demonstrated starkly by Cato’s filibustering, Bibulus’s use of interpreting religious omens, and the dispute between Metellus and the tribune that resulted in the Senate being convened in a jail, are only some of the examples.  This is telling: for the senatorial elites; they were the Republic; their interests were the Republic’s.  Before in Roman history, the interests of the state had tended to be the interests of the senators; but in the era discussed in this paper, the interests of the senators became the interests of the state.  Even when good legislation and good magistrates were present, if the senators had a personal grievance against something or someone, or the people presenting the reforms or legislation were from a different class or rival faction, paralysis was the norm.  Even Pompeius and Cicero found, for most of their careers, acceptance among the elite optimates almost impossible to attain, despite their many accomplishments, and despite their many attempts to ingratiate themselves to these elite optimates.  First and foremost, then, the senators cared for themselves, and defined the Republic in terms of themselves.  On the other side, populares leaders used their popularity so much to advance their programs that they themselves became synonymous with their agendas.  Any personal blow to themselves had to be fought with every measure available, because their own personal failure meant that their causes would fail, too.  In the high stakes game of politics in the Late Republic, this may have been true, with any reformer who did not cultivate public opinion as a check against the governing elites who would use violence against them appearing as too easy a target for that very violence; but often like the optimates, populares put their own advancement at the head of their programs and accepted nothing less, risking their very lives and taking even more and more drastic measures in the face of senatorial threats and intransigence.  The careers of Cicero, Pompeius and Caesar show how utterly futile it normally was searching for common ground with the optimates, however, lending some legitimacy to the view that it was the optimates who left men like Caesar little choice.  The triumvirate, then, can be seen as a semi-peaceful attempt to sideline the fairly useless Senate from getting in the way of necessary reform, while also advancing the careers of the reformers and their supporters, to be sure; but taken too far, this would, and did, have the effect of destroying the Republic’s institutions, as the next level of escalation, on both sides, was the use of street gangs and, after that, armies, to achieve political aims.  The stakes being what they were, neither the optimates nor the populares were willing to take a step back and avoid further escalation; doing so, because of the intensity of the politics of personal destruction, often meant that they risked prosecution, exile, or even death, though these risks seemed to be more true for the populares, who were generally not more than a few powerful men and their supporters who would face a Senate generally united behind the optimates or courts dominated by the same men and the publicani. Yet at the very end, the leading populares, men like Caesar and Clodius, had armies and gangs at their disposal, the only weapons they could use against a rigid opposition. The optimates, facing such powerful men, did not change their tactics but only intensified them; such behavior made a clash all but inevitable, and yet, if a few leading optimates had been able to go against the trend of initiating violence and selfish and partisan obstructionism, one can see a path where compromise would have been possible and republican institutions could have been adapted and renewed to the changing demographics and realities of the Late Roman Republic.

While the Conflict of the Orders between elites and the masses in the Early Republic had been bitter, it helped drive consensus and compromise and made Rome better able to deal with external threats, while the same external threats helped to bring unity to Rome and drive down class conflict.  By the Late Republic, cultural changes in how the leading Romans conducted themselves and how they used public institutions had profoundly produced a complete reversal in this trend: class conflict and conflict between the elites themselves helped to make consensus and compromise particularly elusive and made the Romans less able to deal with external threats, while the external conflicts, much farther, generally speaking, from the city of Rome itself than in previous centuries, helped to fuel conflict over who would lead and benefit from these wars, and what to do with the results, be they new territories or thousands of idle soldiers from victorious armies. The various measures and compromises, laws and regulations, did nothing to solve Rome’s critical issue of corruption before it was too late.  It took a war to give the Italians voting rights, and much civil violence just to settle veterans and poor who needed assistance from a state that had marginalized them.  But no matter what the state did, it could not cause the individuals in charge of Rome to exercise restraint, either in the pursuit of office, the acquiring of wealth, or in how they chose to oppose those of other political blocs.  These men proved unable and unwilling to retrain themselves, and this lack of restraint caused an escalation of too many negative trends that ended up swallowing the Republic.  The system worked when Romans were more austere and less avaricious, but could no longer work when the level of greed and ambition became as extreme as it did.  Thus, the belated reforms only succeeded in delaying what was seemingly inevitable for a society that could no longer restrain itself:  a collapsing in on itself.  Only Romans restraining themselves could have preserved the Republic; they did not, and it did not survive.  “All over Italy men were conscripted,” wrote Caesar of the civil war that began in 49, “and weapons requisitioned; money was exacted from towns, and taken from shrines; and all the laws of god and man were overturned,” (The Civil War 1.6) yet all this had been happening for decades before 49; the Republic had been dying long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

The populares of Caesar’s day might deserve more of the short term blame, then, in the specific events that led to the Republic’s downfall, but it was the optimates who ensured the long-term conditions which ate away at the Republic from the inside long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.  Blame must certainly be shared heavily across parties, but if one wants to pick one side or another as being more culpable, much of it will depend on how the individual assigning blame views the world: a view that is more liberal and inclined to look at long-term, structural reasons for the fall of the Republic might put more of the blame with Cato and the optimates, while a more conservative, individual-responsibility-oriented viewpoint might single out Caesar for being the man (or the populares as the party) responsible for destroying the Republic.  Roman historians, even living under the emperors who saw themselves as the heirs of Caesar, would debate this for centuries.  The debate still rages on, and will likely never be settled, having been and likely to be framed through the commentary of those wishing to make points about their own times and societies. Still, objectively it should be noted that men are responsible for actions and shape structures over time, but also are shaped very much by the structures in which they find themselves.  In the case of the Republic, generational failure on the part of the several generations of optimates leading the Senate set the stage on which Caesar was an actor, an actor who clearly generally tried to avoid bloodshed and escalation but was left by these same optimates, and the structures they had failed to reform, with little choice.  Both the actions of men like Cato and the optimates and Caesar and the populares should both inspire and be cause for concern for those preoccupied with the future of the American republic.  For all their differences in their lives, times, and actions from the modern world, denying the similarities and the lessons they present dooms America’s republic to failure.  While this period presents far more lessons of what not to do than what to do, this is but one chapter of the history of Rome’s republic; Rome’s greatness was established long before Caesar and even the Gracchi, and other periods not covered in this paper provide many positive examples.  At the close of the Revolutionary War, the veterans’ organization the Society of Cincinnati was founded for American and French military officers who had served in the war, winning the United States its independence; it was named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who, after being called from his farm to serve as consul and then dictator of Rome in a time of crisis in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E., gave up his extraordinary power and returned home to farm his fields.  It was an example which America sought to emulate among those who served in its armed forces, George Washington himself the best example when first he tried to stay out of politics after the Revolution and then retired after his second term as president, and is today a huge part of American culture and tradition.

Web Gallery of Art: The Death of Julius Caesar, Vincenzo Camuccini, 1798

Romans Lessons for America 

There are major, thematic similarities going on in the U.S. today that are similar to the above dynamics concerning Rome.  If left unchecked, the U.S. system could be in danger in several decades of collapsing as well, though not likely in as violent a way as the Roman Republic did.  If this seems implausible, just remember how it took only a few decades for Rome’s republican institutions to cease to function and then crumble.   

Three specific themes emerge.  Firstly, there is the increasing role of money and big business in politics.  In the U.S., elections are more often than not now determined by which candidate spends the most money.  Like Rome, the increase in money has led to a narrowing of who can compete to hold office.  The influence of this money especially buys large corporations, but also large unions, influence in the halls of power and their interests, not the people’s as a whole, are what are often considered.  What is good or necessary for the country is not done.  Halliburton’s donations gave it much influence, and resulted in it being awarded no-bid contracts where it was later found it had committed fraud and had overcharged the U.S. Government; in this sense, Halliburton, and others, are just modern publicani, their supporters in Congress no different than corrupt Roman senators.  But the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (nicknamed “McCain-Feingold”) campaign finance law of 2002 is perhaps the best example of how loopholes undermine the best of intentions.  The law itself has been basically struck down by the Supreme Court with its 2009 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, itself a 5-4 decision split along partisan lines, but was already severely weakened by loopholes before that.  Sen. Feingold lost his re-election, and Sen. McCain is becoming increasingly marginalized within his own party; there are other reasons besides this for each of their troubles, but it is important to note what is happening to the two men who did more than anyone else to attempt to change the role and scale of money in elections.  Another major theme is the increase in the politics of personal destruction and partisanship.  These forces saw a dramatic increase in the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency and have escalated ever since, especially during campaign season.  Today, newly elected Republicans are speaking not of their agenda, but of stopping Obama. The level of personal attacks on candidates and the extent of distortion of an opponent’s record (Obama is apparently a Marxist revolutionary, a Muslim intent on imposing Islamic Sharia law, and is a foreign-born person ineligible to be president, just to list a few) are only increasing.  This is making it harder for both parties to work together.  And procedures, like introducing amendments or placing nominations on indefinite hold, have become hijacked for blatant partisanship in an increasing fashion.  Clodius would not find himself totally out of place in today’s climate, save for his violence.  Another theme is that of the rise of obstructionism and paralysis.  Different factions are not trying to work together, they are trying to stop the government from functioning when something one faction does not like is being adopted or likely to be adopted, though, unlike Rome, this has not turned into a violent process.  Whether out of genuine disagreement or a desire to prevent the other side from reaping credit, Congress has done little to tackle long-term problems at all in the last several decades while America’s schools, health system, infrastructure, entitlement programs, and debt/deficit (just to name a few) were all facing massive problems which grew steadily worse and are making life as Americans know it unsustainable.   Such obstructionism, from filibusters or other tactics, was common, too, in Rome, and contributed significantly to the long list of massive problems that festered due to government inaction. The change in money and corporate involvement, tone and tactics, and the increase in obstructionism and paralysis are all feeding each other, and threaten to undermine the ability of the system to function not only well, but at all.  These dynamics will undermine America’s government and Constitution without the personal warlord armies of Caesar or Pompeius, Marius or Sulla being necessary.  The example of Rome should infuse American policy makers with even stronger motivation to tackle these three major challenges before the damage is too great.  Unless major action is undertaken, the whole American system might find itself caving in on itself under the weight of these three problems and their amplifying effects. 

Yet there is also one broad, societal theme: the general lack of restraint that is ever more present in American culture today.  There is little else to be said about that: either Americans—individual citizens, government, society, and private enterprise—exercise more restraint, or three specific trends discussed above will doom America to destroying itself.  Whatever the reforms were passed, corruption, and corrupt people, found a way to circumnavigate them in Rome.  The U.S. is having the same problem today: laws and regulations are not something to be respected and observed in the U.S., it seems, so much as they are obstacles to be creatively bypassed or changed with the right amount of money thrown at the right number of senators and congressman.  CEOs, senators, individuals, and presidents all reach beyond constraints regularly, whether legally, financially, morally, or procedurally established.  If America keeps finding ways to reward, rather than punish, such behavior, it will find itself in a similar position to Rome in the twilight of its republic: the reckless, high stakes gambling will become so commonplace and accepted that few with the opportunity to push the limits of acceptable behavior will ever refrain from doing so.  Individuals may spend, living for the moment, with reckless abandon; corporations may treat their customers as prey, to be bled dry for maximum profit for the company; government officials may tell people what they want to hear so they can be reelected and see to their own personal interests through the benefits of office; society as whole might not questions its own behavior and focus on short-term material gain, greed, glamour, unsustainability, personal success at all costs, and selfishness as “values” it demonstrates and passes onto the next generation. When such behavior becomes too common, then the U.S. will be like the republic Caesar described, “nothing—just a name, without substance or form.”

Only a few decades after Rome had formally turned most of the Mediterranean into provinces administered by the Senate, the very system which had brought it to dominate a large portion of the world collapsed suddenly and violently, though the symptoms of its fatal disease had been present for at least a generation if not more.  One should shudder when one thinks that Rome had centuries of a tradition of no political violence at home, to only, in mere decades, episodically resemble some of the scenes common in sub-Saharan African cities, even with no history of such behavior.  For the U.S., the ugly specter of anarchy appeared, though only very briefly, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and in the past, riots and disturbances were even more commonplace.  The United States today, only two decades after the end of the Cold War, found itself on the brink of financial ruin and even still has an unsustainably massive and expanding deficit and debt, this only a few years removed from the booming years of the 1990s; its parties for decades have been unable to come together to deal with debt and many other major issues from immigration to education to social security, and the fact that Rome’s republican system of representative government and checks and balances collapsed on itself so soon after its total dominance of the Mediterranean should provide a stark warning for America: partisanship and obstructionism that delays tackling essential issues and lets them fester can bring down even the mightiest and most successful nation rapidly, and when corruption geared towards money and power substitutes for true patriotism, when leading elites seek to serve themselves and not the people, when a whole society loses its restraint and self-control, change can come rapidly in such a way that even a political system like America’s, based very much on Rome’s, might become mere history, one of Livy’s lessons from which a future power can learn “from it…what to emulate, from it what to avoid.”  It is now for the republic of the United States to learn from the republic of Rome’s example, or to become mere history like it, another tragic morality tale in the dustbin of history.

Check out my related book chapter: The Roman Republic in Greece: Lessons for Modern Peace/Stability Operations (Chapter 10 in Global Leadership Initiatives for Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding)

See related eBook: The Ancient Roman Legal and Political Legacy in the Founding of America

[1] Holland, 290-296; Tatum, 206-207; von Ungern-Sternberg, 104; Goldsworthy, Caesar,358-374.

[2] Goldsworthy, Caesar, 512.

[3] Goldsworthy, Carthage, 362.

[4] von Ungern-Sternberg, 106.

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July 7, 2014 Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981)

IDE

As more and more nations demand and attempt to enjoy the benefits of today’s globalized economy and community, international development is a field that will only grow larger and become more difficult to understand. Integral to the success of any international development project are growing good relationships and a deep understanding of how all-encompassing development and its effects can be. While the term “international development” and its field as currently constituted are only incarnations of a very recent nature, international development is central to many other fields, and the concepts and practices behind it date back to the ancient world. Even in the year 2014, few entities can match the record of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire when it comes to international development. The Romans could (not that they always did) bring peace, stability, excellent roads, (mainly) free trade, running water, sanitation, and voluntary and enthusiastic cultural meshing and assimilation faster than even the United States of America was able to in recent years in Iraq and Afghanistan (not that the U.S. incapable of this, but in many ways its execution fell far short of this or many would say it virtually did not even happen at all regarding some of these issues).

While both our technology and our own understanding of the field itself have changed greatly since the days of ancient Rome, and while the international development field is today changing as rapidly as almost any other field, the same basic keys to success that existed in the days of Julius Caesar are the same basic keys to success today. One of these is that development always works better when implemented as part of a broader security, political, economic, and social strategy. Another is that both top-down and bottom-up approaches are generally required, and this is quite similar to another point: that the more integrated local elites and locals in general become in the entire international development process, and the more they take ownership of it, the more likely long-term success will be achieved. Rather than a foreign imposition, then, or a simple dumping of resources, international development is all about partnerships—foreign and local, elite and grassroots, private and public—and bringing people into a system as more or less equals and empowering them in the process, rather than simply dominating them. Unlike many other empires, this approach is why Rome, unique among major empires until the U.S. in its inclusiveness, succeeded for so long where so many others either failed or only achieved short-term success. Rome’s success was so remarkable that former enemies often became willing allies and eventually even Romans themselves, often adopting Roman culture voluntarily while still retaining aspects of their own cultural identities concurrently and for long after they fell under Roman jurisdiction.

Today, those same ingredients are just as important and remain the core foundations of most successful international development projects. Currently, international development is increasingly not largesse handed out by big government programs, but partnerships among governments, among international and local actors, among private and public and non-profit institutions, and among different swaths of all the societies involved. And all these types of actors will also further interact with the other types. International development is increasingly led by governments but carried out by non-government actors; budgetary resources go less to governmental aid agencies, and are increasingly directly awarded by these government agencies to contractors and local actors of all sorts. The field is almost unrecognizable compared to a decade ago, and though there is more unpredictability today in it because of this, it is more collaborative and inclusive than ever before, with a larger number of partners and actors providing input and shaping the outcome than in years past. This more organic and local approach is already leading to better results, both in terms of outputs and outcomes, and even how success is measured is rapidly changing. All this means that it can be harder than ever to understand what was already a complex field as it becomes even more complicated, and the margins for error, in turn, become ever smaller.

Furthermore, it has become increasingly clear that international development is an essential component of and/or a complementary item to a whole host of other activities. Today, few military operations can achieve long-term success without a competent development component. Today’s globalized world means that if an area falls into poverty, violence, and chaos after a largely successful military operation, those gains become quickly undermined as the instability spreads to other regions, including, potentially, whichever region carried out the “successful” operation. Hard won battles can become a victory in vain almost overnight, then. The same is true with political aims and public policy, which can easily become stymied if populations are not themselves empowered and become stakeholders in stability, order, and prosperity in a region. Economic success on paper can easily be undermined, too, if that success leaves out the local base of society and ends up sustaining or increasing inequality instead. So in terms of the developing world, without successful international development operations it is hard to see how any kind of major international operation, partnership, or relationship can succeed at all in the long run. A simple look at the perpetual and increasing headaches the underdeveloped parts of the world create for themselves and the whole planet—no matter how many strong but narrow, non-comprehensive operations take place there—should make this obvious. This is why today the U.S. Government stresses the “Whole-of-Government” approach and the United Nations stresses its “integrated missions.”

Thus, in the end, neglecting relationships or failing to understand how incredibly interdisciplinary development as a field truly is dooms a project from the start. Successful development is about establishing deep, genuine, and steadfast relationships with an enormous variety of actors and embracing an approach that takes into account how everything involved in and surrounding development projects can affect those projects and how those projects, in turn, will effect everything they touch and surround, and all over time. Those who understand this can emerge as successful development professionals as we progress into the twenty-first century, while those who do not will experience only failed projects, wasted resources, and dashed hopes.