(via The Romans Tried to Save the Republic From Men Like Trump. They Failed. | Village Voice)
editing by Earl of Cruise
A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He’s rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he’s saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd’s resentment of his own class.
A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He’s rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he’s saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd’s resentment of his own class.
His divine highness Imperator Donald Trump
Call him Donald Trump. But this man
is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Clodius, and a legion of other men who
lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration
for the political system we have today. Long before Max Weber studied
“charismatic authority” or Adorno the “authoritarian personality,”
Alexander Hamilton, unexpected darling of today’s Broadway, would have
recognized the type instantly from his knowledge of Roman history.
He’s
a man of wealth and power, but he tells the people he is an outsider,
just like them. He insists the system is rigged against them by the
influential few. He rails against the people, too: “You’ve given up
everything in exchange for laziness and apathy, thinking you’ve got
freedom in abundance because your backs are spared the lash. The elite
will fight and enjoy their victory, and regular people will be treated
like a conquered nation: This will be more the case every day, so long
as they work harder for total power than you do to get your freedom
back.”
That’s not Trump, though it sounds like him. It’s a
politician called Licinius Macer, haranguing a crowd in Rome in 73 BCE.
It was with men like Macer in mind that in the first of the Federalist
papers, Hamilton identified the claim to fight for popular freedom as
the demagogue’s most insidious and effective tactic. “Dangerous ambition
more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the
people,” he wrote. Far from the innocent meaning of the original
ancient Greek word, “leader of the people,” for Hamilton the demagogue
paves a “much more certain road to the introduction of despotism.”
Trump
now takes office on the strength of his demagoguery. A student of
little else, Trump is an intuitive expert in popular fantasy, and he
plays his American audience like a well-worn instrument. What to the
pundits seemed like outrageous rhetorical excesses (“total and complete
shutdown of Muslims entering the U.S.,” “She has to go to jail,” and so
on) turned out to be the notes roughly half the country wanted to hear.
Since
the election, the excesses have continued, in speeches, casual asides,
and tweets at all times of day or night. The professional classes marvel
that Trump summarily dismisses advice (“I know a lot about hacking”),
jabs at perceived enemies in the press, and tweets bellicose threats to
foreign governments. But this is par for the course. Both as candidate
and president-elect, Trump has invited the elites to bring it on,
rubbing raw the weakest point of the republican constitution: the
relationship between the people and their elected politicians, or as the
Romans would put it, “plebs” and “pauci,” the many and the few.
The
Romans called their state “res publica,” or “public affair.” To be a
citizen of the Roman Republic meant, among other things, the right to do
certain things for the public in the public eye: for instance, to elect
politicians to office, to attend public assemblies, and to vote on
legislation. Though only a small percentage of the total citizenry
participated in elections (you had to be physically present in the city
and able to take the day off from work, too), the raucous contio, or
public assembly, was a signal part of the Roman political process.
The
ballot itself was secret, a late republican innovation detested by the
elites, who had preferred intimidating the less powerful in the earlier
voice vote. But secret ballot or no, for centuries a few dozen rich and
noble houses exerted enormous influence over the policies and the future
of the republic. For as long as the republic lasted, negotiating the
balance between the masses and the elite was a tricky business. Speaking
in the open air at the contio and other venues was a crucial test of
privileged Romans’ backbone and their ability to handle different
factions and patronage groups, and it was a test they had to pass again
and again, over years and decades. Cicero, who put his political
experience to work in a series of enormously influential books about
rhetoric, wrote that the good speaker “must have his finger on the pulse
of every class, every age group, every social rank, and get a taste of
their feelings and thoughts.”
Then, as now, politicians who trod
on populist values risked being shouted down or even suffering physical
violence. One member of the Scipios, an old and famous family, lost an
election after shaking hands with a man on the street, just as
candidates do today. He teased the man, a farm laborer whose hands had
been roughened by work, “did he generally make a habit of walking on his
hands?” Voters from the local countryside took this as a poke at their
poverty and withdrew their support.
As Rome conquered almost the
entire Mediterranean coast, an area stretching as wide as the
continental United States, social and political traditions began to
buckle. By the time Julius Caesar was born, in 100 BCE, the republic had
already seen three decades of political assassinations and gang
violence in the city. Matters would only deteriorate. Much of the unrest
stemmed from a growing sense of disconnection between the people and
the ruling elite. Roman citizens of the first century faced worsened
conditions of income inequality, rising costs of living, a shortage of
decent food and housing, dim job prospects, and levels of immigration
and cultural change that felt out of control. Within their lifetimes,
the traditional institutions and values of the republic had faltered.
Now,
in conditions of inequality and social stress, for ambitious Roman
politicians the art of speaking offered a new set of keys to the
kingdom. Where it had once been the art of justifying traditional elite
control over the system, rhetoric became the powerful tool of individual
men who exploited its powers to unite a fragmented society around
themselves.
Here is one: “Over the past fifteen years you’ve been
sport for the pride and arrogance of the few; your defenders have
perished unavenged; your own spirit has been so rotted with weakness and
cowardice that you can’t stand up even now…. Who are these people who
have occupied our country? Criminals with bloody hands and outrageous
greed, totally guilty and yet totally arrogant, who have transformed
everything — loyalty, their good names, religious piety, everything both
honorable and not — into a source of personal gain.”
Does it
sound familiar? This is the kind of speech that pleases a fractured,
alienated republican audience — one that feels ignored by the authority
figures they traditionally trusted. In sum, Gaius Memmius (now obscure,
but a successful popular politician before he was killed in a riot
during the elections of 100 BCE) is telling the people that all the
institutions that used to protect free citizens have turned against
them; the rulers are criminals, but because they run the courts along
with everything else, they will never be held accountable.
The
only answer is to throw the bums out and replace them with — what?
Memmius’s language is tribal and aggressive, emotional and extravagant,
and in Roman history, it leads in one direction. If the whole system is
broken, no better way to replace it than with the lone hero who is blunt
and brave enough to call it out.
One such man was Gaius Marius, a
contemporary of Memmius and Julius Caesar’s uncle. Born into an Italian
family with few connections to the inner circles of the Roman elite,
Marius made his fortune and his political career in the military.
According to Sallust, a preeminent Roman historian, Marius argued that
other men could compensate for their mistakes by appealing to their
families’ glorious deeds or enlisting the help of their friends. “But my
hopes rest in me alone,” he told one public assembly, “and must be
advanced by my virtue and integrity…. Every eye is turned on me: Good
and honorable men prefer me because my actions help the republic.”
Here
is the same speech in contemporary English: “I didn’t have to bring
J.Lo or Jay Z…. I am here all by myself…. Just me. No guitar, no piano,
no nothing.” That’s Trump at a Pennsylvania rally. As Marius told the
Romans, the only answer for the republic was an alliance between the
defiant ex-soldier and the masses against the debased governing class.
No surprise, then, he liked to say, that the elite “seek any chance to
attack me.”
Marius contrasted his blunt style with the hoity-toity
phrases of his political enemies: “My words aren’t well chosen, but I
don’t care. Virtue shows itself on its own. They’re the ones that need
artificial aids, to cover over their crimes with fancy words.” No
teleprompter for Marius! When he proceeds to dismiss his rivals’
investment in Greek methods of education (and by extension, Greek
cultural values), it’s a brilliant move with a long history in
old-fashioned Roman moralism. Give logic and rhetoric a foreign face,
call it un-Roman, and throw it out the window. Marius ended up winning
Rome’s highest office seven times, breaking every precedent.
In
the late days of the Roman Republic, Marius and his imitators set up a
pattern of marking reason, education, and the deliberative processes of
politics as corrupted tools of the foreign-influenced elite, suggesting
to their listeners that those very habits were part of the problem. The
culmination of the growing violence and fragmentation of Roman politics
was Julius Caesar himself. We have a reasonably good record of Caesar’s
appeals to the public because in addition to his success in wars
domestic and foreign, Caesar wrote the history books — literally. His
account of the civil war he fought with his rival and son-in-law Pompey
the Great records the appeal he made to his army right after crossing
the Rubicon, where he “cast the die” that led to war.
The speech
skillfully makes Caesar’s personal glory one and the same with the
freedom of Roman citizens. He likens all the wrongs his enemies have
done to him to the violence the rich and powerful wreaked on popular
heroes of the past, and exhorts the army to defend his reputation.
Caesar uses the reflexive personal pronoun again and again: He is the
one who matters, and his victory is a victory for Rome. Or as Trump told
his fans at the Republican National Convention, good hard-working
citizens are the “forgotten men and women” who “no longer have a voice. I
am your voice!”
The goal of this kind of speech is to give the
audience a larger-than-life version of themselves to identify with.
Cicero praises his favorite style of ornate, dramatic speech because it
gives the listeners more: more sensations to experience, more
feelings to wallow in. Speakers who reach for this effect but for whom
this kind of theatricality doesn’t come naturally appear strained and
artificial, an impression Hillary Clinton brought to many stages and
town halls. You always had the sense that like Cicero’s friend Brutus
(yes, Caesar’s assassin, a notoriously dry speaker) she was at her best
putting the drama aside and pulling out the spreadsheets.
For
those who do pull it off, intemperateness becomes a central part of
their appeal and proof of their leadership. In his maturity, Julius
Caesar carefully cultivated a public persona of gravity and good
judgment, deserving of public trust. But his actual career strings
together excess, extravagance, violence, and very public rule-breaking.
When his daughter died, he held gladiatorial games to commemorate her
death, an unheard-of mark of recognition for a woman that marked out his
whole family for special distinction in the eyes of gods and men.
Caesar’s soldiers sang songs about their beloved “bald adulterer,” who
had love affairs with both men and women.
Through the campaign and
now heading into the inauguration, Trump’s blustering arrogance (as
well as the revelation of his vices) has never played out as his rivals
hoped and expected. Rather than bring him down, his over-the-top style
gave and continues to give deep satisfaction to his supporters. His
schoolyard-simplistic language (“huge,” “bad guys,” “killers and
rapists”) and the illusion of direct, free-flowing connection he creates
through Twitter fabricates a sense of what the Cameroonian political
theorist Achille Mbembe calls “convivial” intimacy between himself and
the citizenry.
This style offers a pragmatic nod to the corrupt
state of the world, where there are no good men, only suckers and a
leader with the unfettered ruthlessness needed to keep the thieves in
line. It allows his supporters to indulge in a vision of unrestrained
ego, and by extension, a vision of unrestrained national power.
The
popular approval of Trump’s pouting, shouting, grandstanding, partying,
and philandering recalls the Roman crowd’s love of politicians who
broke similar social rules — particularly during the half-century from
the 90s to the 40s BCE, which witnessed what was probably the worst
political violence in Rome’s history under a parade of leaders with
scandalous personal lives. In 63, Cicero was elected consul, the highest
office in Roman government, only to discover that a conspiracy was
brewing against the senate. Its leader was Catiline, a member of a noble
family who had squandered his personal wealth. “His insatiable spirit
constantly craved excess, the monstrous, the gigantic,” says Sallust.
“Even as a young man he had many shameful affairs,” including one with a
priestess to the goddess Vesta, vowed to virginity.
The demagogue
turns personal vice into a source of his power, which now becomes a
sign of state power. He keeps the state safe by being bigger and more
brazen than its enemies, especially the criminals within. As the head of
a conspiracy, Catiline would have delivered his rousing speeches in
secret, but Sallust imagines him telling an audience, “All of us
hard-working good people serve the interests of those few to whom, if
the republic were strong, we would be a source of terror.” Not respect,
not support, but terror. My outrageous transgressions, Catiline and
Caesar and Marius are saying, show how special I am, how powerful, how
perfect an embodiment of the special and powerful Roman people I am, how
“beautiful and important” is this moment in history.
The
convivial intimacy with the people that Trump peddles is new. It offers
Americans the illusion — his partisans will say the “promise” — of a
leader whose lack of filters represents daring, honesty, a willingness
to experiment with ideas and reveal the rough spots in the process.
Raucous, obnoxious, disingenuous, impossible to ignore, the infantile
shrillness of his voice sounds to his supporters like an outgrowth of
the founding fantasy of America as the youngest child in the world’s
family, the risk-taking upstart against the Old World. Against this the
virtues of moderation and self-control, as the traditional Roman elite
discovered, come off as weak and emasculated.
As the old political
balancing act of the republic was crumbling, just a few years before
his beheading at the command of Mark Antony, Cicero gave a series of
speeches that conveyed his despondency about the Roman polity. It was 46
BCE. Julius Caesar had established himself as ruler of Rome in all but
name, packing the senate with his supporters and passing laws that
bolstered his power. In one of these speeches, describing his anxiety
that the republic “was surviving on the breath of a single man,” Cicero
reminded Caesar and the senate of the terrible costs of civil strife and
implicitly called on the senators to take responsibility for creating
the conditions that had led to Caesar’s triumph. His message: We cannot
go back to the old way of doing things.
How to counter the new
speech of the charismatic demagogue by practicing politics that people
can identify with is the puzzle that Rome finally failed to solve. After
Caesar’s assassination in 44 BCE, his heir Octavian could bring Rome to
heel and set up a dynastic monarchy that would last nearly four hundred
years. Rome’s political class never succeeded in refreshing their own
habits of speech and thought. They failed to probe and heal the
alienation that had fragmented the republican community. Like today’s
self-absorbed elites, they had become addicted to their wealth and to
traditional authority, and never imagined their influence could
disappear.
Joy Connolly is provost and professor of classics, the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of The Life of Roman Republicanism and The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome.
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