This post jumps off of one about seven lessons, and was immediately preceded by another explaining why the first three are not so helpful. The lessons are ones that America, if it were to enter its own such late-republican times, could take from Rome’s. So without further introduction, let’s go through the four remaining lessons, the ones more likely to prove useful.
4) The Precise Point of the Republic’s Fall, and of Its Deteriorating beyond Rescue, Will Likely Be Hard to Determine.
The end of the Roman republic is hard to pin down, because doing so always involves determining that further attempts to restore it were from that point impossible. Writing more than a century after the battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C), the battle where Caesar’s army routed Pompey’s, the poet Lucan says “we were overthrown for all time to come; all future generations doomed to slavery were conquered by those swords.”
And yet, he also depicts Cato’s further resistance, whom we know from Plutarch advised fighting on, even after the further defeat of Thapsus in the province of Africa. To the leaders of the well-provisioned city of Utica, he was saying things like this: “Spain was already revolted to the younger Pompey; Rome was unaccustomed to the bridle…and would therefore be ready to rise in insurrection upon any turn of affairs.” This was a serious strategic argument. Were Utica to hold out long enough, Caesar might yet lose.
Cato killed himself (46) only once it became clear that not enough of the locals were willing to carry on. It is usually understood that he refused to live on if the price was accepting clemency from Caesar, lest he seem to assent to a tyrant’s claimed authority, and, that he knew his suicide would become a standing rebuke to Caesar’s new order. However, it is important to also recognize that in his eyes, the defeats at Pharsalus and Thapsus didn’t necessarily end hopes for the republican cause. It is not clear that had he thought he could have escaped Utica and reached the remaining rebels in Spain, that he would have played the suicide card.
The conspiracy of Brutus and Cassius shows that hopes for rescuing the republic didn’t end with Cato’s death, and in some ways were pricked by it. But alas, not enough of the Roman people, and especially not enough of the soldiers, responded warmly to Caesar’s assassination(44). This had something to do with Mark Antony’s speech immortalized by Shakespeare, but it was more than that. As Tom Holland recounts in his excellent Rubicon, in the summer after Caesar’s murder,
Would-be-warlords toured the colonies where Caesar had settled his veterans, currying favors, offering bribes. Even Brutus and Cassius tried to get in on the act. The welcome they received from Caesar’s veterans was, unsurprisingly, chilly. By late summer they had come to the reluctant conclusion that Italy was no longer safe for them. Quietly, they slipped away—for the East…for men who had claimed to be liberators, exile anywhere was a bitter defeat.
So a strong case can be made that the republic was lost right there. Cicero seemed puzzled by the situation: “Liberty has been restored, and yet the republic has not.” Mark Antony ruled Rome, although admittedly as an consul and with the Senate still meeting. By late 44, if the dating of the final draft of in De Officiis is correct, Cicero was writing “our republic is lost forever.” (II.8)
The reason we might suspect a later revision is that late 44 is the very moment when Cicero unleashed his Philippic orations against the tyrannical character of Antony. Holland speaks of these as a “raging against the dying of the light,” but they did stir public opinion against Antony just as his consulship ended. Indeed, by the early summer of 43, armies pledged to defend the Senate, among which was one led by Octavian, defeated Antony’s army twice. For a moment, it appeared that the republic had been saved. Alas, Antony recovered, and simultaneously, Octavian showed his true face, forcing the Senate at the point of a sword to make him consul. Allying with Antony and Lepidus soon after(the “second triumvirate”), he consented to the proscription of Cicero, and of many others.
So Cicero was killed that summer, but still the hopes for the republic were not yet extinguished. The second triumvirate still had to defeat the very substantial forces Brutus and Cassius had raised, which it did in a couple of battles, the final one being Philippi (42). Note that, battles being what they are, the triumvirate’s victory was not guaranteed. And make what you will of the fact that even after this, both Mark Antony and Octavian had moments when they seemed to seriously consider restoring regular republican rule.
So the republic ended when? Philippi? Octavian’s betrayal? The rejection of Brutus and Cassius by the people? Julius Caesar having the Senate declare him dictator for life? Utica’s refusal to hold out with Cato? Pharsalus? Pompey’s strategic error in not trying to defend the city of Rome against Caesar? Rubicon?
Of course, there is a powerful case that the republic was already dead well before the Caesar-initiated civil wars. Caesar said the republic had become “a name only, without body and substance,” and Lucan invented a speech of a commander wanting to abandon Cato’s forces after news of Pompey’s death, in which he said “Sincere belief in Rome’s freedom died long ago, when Sulla and Marius were admitted within the walls.”
Well, you might say, “Of course a commander wanting to surrender to Caesar, and Caesar himself, would argue this way!” But a version of what they said has become the more typical judgment of historians. And Montesquieu, who knew the source literature on Rome’s history as well as anyone does today, was unqualified in affirming this judgment:
If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato, others would have thought like Caesar and Pompey; and the republic, destined to perish, would have been dragged to the precipice by another hand.
He says the same in reference to the aftermath of Caesar’s death:
So impossible was it for the republic to be reestablished that something entirely unprecedented happened: the tyrant was no more, but there was no liberty either. For the causes that had destroyed the republic still remained.
So when was the republic’s doom sealed? Montesquieu appears to also locate it with the coup and proscriptions of Sulla (88-79), but some historians say the doom-point comes later, with the deal drawn between Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey known as the first triumvirate (59), and others earlier, with the public murders of the Gracchi (133 and 123), and others still earlier, to the decades before the defeat of Macedon (148), when the gross inequality and corruption that the Gracchi were trying to respond to became entrenched.
My inclination—which has some Tocquevillian grounding–runs the other way. History is unpredictable enough, and suggestive of scores of significant counterfactuals at nearly every key turn, that against this common judgment of historians, of sage Montesquieu, and of Leo Strauss too(“Cato refused to see what his times demanded because he saw too clearly the degraded and degrading character of his times.”), I think we should take quite seriously what Cato, Cicero, and many tens of thousands of their fellow Romans did, the idea that for many of these years there was some significant chance of putting republican government back on the road to muddle-through sustainability. And I will note that even Montesquieu takes the time to chide Cicero for strategic mistakes after Cato’s death, and to upbraid Brutus and Cassius for choosing suicide after Philippi instead of living on to fight another day, as if he felt that a chance of rescue remained in those periods.
Still, I recognize that the arguments that the Roman republic had deteriorated beyond rescue prior to Antony’s speech, prior to Rubicon, and prior even to the political careers of Cato and Cicero, are strong ones.
And that’s where the lesson here could be scary for us. If we were to enter late republican times ourselves, the question of when it becomes too late to resist the republic’s fall, which in our case might be more a question about when it becomes too late to resist the union’s dismemberment, would be one running through many a thoughtful person’s mind. Different answers to that question sincerely arrived at by different good persons, and even more so by various unscrupulous persons, could escalate mistrust on all sides, and produce irresolvable conflicts.
While again, our society’s present susceptibility to military coup is zero, and nothing in our likely future is liable to reproduce the dynamic that created politician-generals like Marius, Pompey, and Caesar, were we really to enter times of serious uncertainty about the U.S.A.’s future, some of the people asking the above question would be influential officers in military and police units, and in intelligence agencies. It might be more important, for our case, that some asking this question would be governors, justices, national politicians, media leaders, and corporate officers, but we would be foolish to think that we are immune to the rule that when chaos beckons, the importance of armed men increases.
5) At Times the Republic-Preserving Cause Might Have to Ally with Leaders Guilty of Past Crimes against Republicanism.
The obvious example is Pompey, but there are others. At different times and in different ways, both Cato and Cicero kept themselves open to his coming around to a republic-supporting position, that is, kept a “reform thyself” avenue open to Pompey should he want to choose it. He eventually did, wilting under the scorn of the many patricians and plebeians moved by Cato’s actions and speeches. So he wound up being the republic’s defending commander once Caesar crossed Rubicon. Had Pompey won the ensuing civil war, there are a number reasons to think he would not have then demanded the republic-threatening powers that when younger he was constantly pushing for.
During the uncertain decades of the 60s and 50s, Cicero had kept up a continual campaign to win Pompey’s friendship, which obviously had its set-backs, and in which at times he was more the played-one than the player; but eventually, it paid off. Cicero can be criticized for later trying to court Octavian in a similar fashion, and thus gaining trust for him among republicans, but given the context it was an understandable gamble.
How might the larger lesson here apply to us? Imagine that a breakdown of our republican government is occurring in 2035, provoked, let us say, by an out-of-control pattern of executive legislating begun during Obama’s administration. (This is highly unlikely, but stay with me.) Imagine a republic-saving compromise between, say, the “conservative secessionists,” and a splinter group of liberals is hammered out, but it turns out that its adoption depends on Barack Obama making the case for it to certain key Democratic politicians. Does the mere idea of his winding up being America’s savior make your stomach churn? Perhaps you need a stronger stomach. Obama is a positively conservative man compared to someone like Pompey, and if things go badly for America, there will be names of popular politicians far more hateful to constitutionalists’ ears than his.
More generally, while Cicero and Cato can inspire future fights to save republican government, we need to recognize that they weren’t as purist as we’re sometimes led to believe. At times Cato was in alliance with a set of Senators known to be controlled by Crassus. And in Cicero’s case, probably for every inspiring speech of his in defense of liberty, there was a “political relationship” with an unsavory character we can also point to. Even in late republican times, and in some ways even more so, that’s the nature of politics.
Finally, we should notice that in any long-lasting republic such as ours, there is a potent power that republican legitimacy can continue to hold, long after its repeated violation, and even in the hearts of repeat offenders.
6) The Problem of When to Turn to Drastic Measures, Ones That Assume the Republic Will Fall in Its Present Form, Will Become a Live One.
By drastic measures, I mean things like secession, dictator-appointment, and “Caesar-ism” for politics, the strong version of the “Benedict Option” for religion, and things like “becoming apolitical,” or for conspiratorial or “philosophy-between-the-lines” reasons, seeming to, for private life.
Politics first. By drastic measures, I do not mean those of the more dynamic constitutionalism we need more openness to right now, such as ditching the filibuster, a states-called amendment convention, impeachment or the threat of it, my own proposal of a responsibility amendment that makes amendment easier in general, and an overturning of certain key liberal precedents, such as Roe v. Wade, by originalist Supreme Court justices. The key thing to notice is that all such measures are constitutional. (There are reasonable objections against any particular one of these, but you should be wary of anyone, especially Republican, who consistently denigrates all of them as “extremist.”)
I do not even mean those measures that in a limited way violate the Constitution, for the sake of getting everyone back to a firmer compliance with it, such as the proposal for executive-legislating retaliation I once floated on this blog. Nor do I mean emergency measures in wartime that might, to paraphrase Lincoln, violate part of the constitution in order to save the whole.
Rather, by drastic measures I mean those that do not foresee any way back to a republic’s constitution as it once was, at least without wholesale disregard of it for an extended period, and thus which cannot claim to be constitutional in any sense. And most of these measures would constitute giving up on the Constitution, under the conviction that its doom has become certain, for the sake of arriving at the best post-constitutional outcome possible.
One really drastic measure would be a turn to “Ceasar-ism.” This is monarchical rule imposed upon a once-republican people no longer capable of the practice of liberty. It believes it provides a better outcome than the worse chaos or tyranny which would otherwise be the result of the system’s and the citizenry’s thorough corruption. Leo Strauss’s intriguing discussion of it in On Tyranny put it this way:
Caesarism is then essentially related to a corrupt people, to a low level of political life, to a decline of society. It presupposes the decline, if not the extinction, of civic virtue or of public spirit, and it necessarily perpetuates that condition. …Caesarism is just, whereas tyranny is unjust.
It is not clear that Julius Caesar had Caesarism in mind, but very likely that Caesar Augustus (Octavian) did. In a coming post I hope to compare what Strauss, Dante, and Pierre Manent say about it. But for now, note that the Caesar-ist monarch has no intention, at least in Strauss’s formulation, of returning the society to republican government or preparing it for it.
The drastic political measures far more likely to be chosen by conservative Americans if our republic approached the point of no return would be secession or restorative dictatorship. Out of fear of either of these, a pre-emptive leftist turn to their own sort of dictator could likewise be on the table. (My whole series of Late Republic Studies posts presumes that if present patterns continue unopposed, America would gradually—i.e., rather “non-drastically”–descend into what Tocqueville described as soft despotism, whether of a leftist or “liberal-tarian” character.)
I’ll have to say more about secession in another post, but here I just want to note that a turn by future conservatives to a constitution-restoring dictator could easily end up in Caesar-ism or in tyranny simply. Unlike Rome, our republic has no procedure for or tradition of turning to temporary dictatorship, and the late Roman republican precedent is hardly encouraging anyhow, for it was Sulla’s.
Whatever we want to say Sulla really was, given his illegal and taboo-breaking march into Rome, his proscribing and allowing thousands to be killed, and his appointment as dictator at sword-point, it is important to remember that his putative politics were those of a constitutional conservative. And he did, like the dictators of old, step down from his powers, after having made a number of reforms that many such conservatives largely approved of.
So much for drastic measures in politics. With religion, what I mean by the “strong version of the Benedict Option” is that Christians give up on swaying politics, with the exception of votes and legal action upon cases that directly impact their remaining religious liberties, and that they increasingly withdraw from America’s common culture, building their own alternative set of institutions in education, health, sports, arts, news, etc. The energy once directed towards social conservative politics and/or maintaining a regular career would be redirected to a) Wendell Berry-like focus on simple living and local economics, b) to more thorough discipleship of one’s own, and c) to greater concern for spirituality, worship, and church-matters generally.
I call this the “strong version,” since as far as I can tell many of those Christians calling for the Benedict Option, such as Rod Dreher, are divided about what it really entails. On one day it sounds like a retreat to Christian enclaves, but on another, something much more moderate.
The timing question for strong-Benedict-Option Christians is obviously this: if you withdraw your “political forces” too soon, before the writing is really on the wall, you may be guilty of surrendering much more than needed to be. And of course, we all have to wonder: a) Will the more-rapidly secularizing liberal state really leave you be? b) Will you be able to sit by inactive if your coreligionists unconvinced by Benedict Option thinking are being silenced in every area of common life? Rod himself raced directly to the internet forefront of the fight when this Indiana controversy arose, after all.
And this hints at the timing question also faced by anyone toying with the idea of cloaking their political preferences, or opinions on cultural matters, for the sake either of limited private happiness, or for the sake of some larger conspiratorial move to be undertaken a good deal later.
If too many opponents of creeping democratic despotism pretend or resolve not to care about political things before it’s really too late to stop such despotism, this will merely reinforce the public impression that opposition to it is dying out. Picture, if you will, five cloaked small-o orthodox Christians and Jews, four cloaked standard conservatives, one cloaked Straussian philosophy-enthusiast, and one cloaked Ayn Rand disciple, each in their cubicles in an office of twenty workers, none of them knowing that they are not alone in their objection to the progressive dogmatism tightening its grip. Well, in certain ways, that’s already happening, and NRO’s David French was quite right last week to object to the way such “timidity” on the part of certain Christians in academia is “feeding the PC beast.”
If someone tells you that the time has come to cloak your conservatism or orthodox religious belief, that might make sense if America will muddle on through, so that your career can weather the present storms of PC; but it doesn’t exactly make sense if it is no temporary storm and America’s republic really is in danger of collapsing due to it, unless, oddly enough, that collapse is practically guaranteed. You don’t want to be on your death-bed having lived a “successful” American life, but strongly suspecting that your descendants will have to submit to a despotism you deliberately avoided opposing, and which probably could have been prevented if fewer persons had shrunk from doing so. And besides, whether in materialist psychological terms, or additionally in religious ones, this sort of cloaking also seems a way to endanger your very soul.
7) Vague Doom-Pronouncement Is Defeatist Moral Failure, Because the Political Responsibility of Statesmen and Citizens Actually Increases During Late Republican Times
My only Roman example here is the general observation that the likes of Cato and Cicero didn’t give up, didn’t publically moan in a doom-expecting mode, and probably never had the strategic benefit of knowing when the republic’s debility would pass the point of no return.
How this applies to us can be largely gathered from what I’ve written above and from the previous posts, so I’m only going to flesh out the most important point here. We need much less of the common conservative rhetoric about “founders rolling in their graves if they could see x” and about America’s doom being right around the corner. We need more specified worries about certain moves and developments that are altering our republic, along with epistemologically humble explanation of how these seem to be moving it towards fatal perils. The possibility of America entering its own late republican times has simply become too real for conservatives to keep rehashing their common sort of doom-y rhetoric, which has the double disadvantage of feeling essentially unserious, and of being deeply demoralizing whenever it is taken seriously.
And make no mistake–the danger of contagious defeatism is real, and is growing. You see it in conservative comment threads everywhere. But the way to combat this is not to trot out the Reagan-aping sunniness about the innate goodness of America and Americans. No. Not only would that feel forced, but we really do need to bring our fellow citizens, especially the liberals, to face how fundamental the divisions have grown, how deeply the corruption has burrowed, and how shaky the constitutional structure has become. In contrast to what FDR said in a very different context, our fellow citizens need to feel more fear than they presently do.
This is no contradiction, for what I mean is fear of the right sort. What we need is a rhetoric and leadership that in the manner of Tocqueville—i.e., not in slavish repetition of him—can depict “salutary fears” about our long-term future, and which can then switch gears to speak with precision about which middle-term developments threaten the greatest danger, and about how enough Americans can act in ways that can keep these at bay. I grant that one would need to combine this with “salutary hopes,” that is, with a vision of what an America rescued, rejuvenated, and to some extent reunited, could look like; but that’s a subject for another day.