Is Democracy Stable?

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Empire of the United States

Mark this date, January 31, 2020. If the pundits are right, it will go down in history like the unknown date before the Ides of March, 44 B.C., when the ancient Roman Senate made Julius Caesar “dictator perpetuo.” It’s the date when the modern American Senate will have voted to prostrate itself before our modern American Emperor, Trump I. By the close of business today, we can all murmur shamefully to Ben Franklin, “Sorry, we lost the Republic you gave us. Our bad!” As in ancient Rome, losing our democracy has been a process, not a single event. Congress gave up its supposed constitutional power to declare war long ago. Trump’s recent credible threat to veto its feeble attempts to resurrect that power have given it the coup de grace. Now, in letting Trump dictate the result of his own trial by ordering key witnesses not to appear, our Senate will have emasculated Congress’ impeachment power. That was the last hope our Founders gave us of curbing a rogue president. So let’s take stock. Congress has given up its power to declare war. By the end of today, it will have abandoned its power of impeachment. Our Attorney General has opined, in effect, that the President’s power is limitless. All those in the Cabinet and in our investigatory and law-enforcement apparatus who sought to limit Trump’s power have been fired or have resigned. The Constitution says that any president is Commander in Chief of our armed forces, the most advanced and lethal, if not the largest, in the world. No one disputes that. So by the end of today, the man, not the Constitution, will have become the law. Trump will have neutered Congress. Our Constitution will have become a museum piece, a bit of paper with no special relevance to our day-to-day governance. Everyone from our own Attorney General, through the Cabinet that Trump appointed, to the Senate that was supposed to be the final bulwark of democracy will have recognized his overweening power, if not quite yet as literally absolute. A minority of ancient Roman Senators later assassinated Caesar, but that didn’t make a difference. The precedent had been set; the die had been cast. Rome decayed into empire just the same; it just took a while. The fate of the greatest democracy then in human history had been sealed by the whole Senate’s earlier having made Caesar dictator for life. Just so, the precedents made today, along with Trump’s threatened veto of the attempt to repeal the AUMF, will outlive Trump the man and every Senator who bows before him today. So lower your heads in subjection. Tell your kids in grave voice. The United States of America is no more. You are no longer citizens of a democracy but subjects of the Empire of the United States. Long live Emperor Trump I! And God help us for having such a man in charge of the nuclear codes, with no effective restraint.

Is democracy a stable form of government? Collectively, we humans are entering a critical phase in studying this question. You can call it “observation,” as in astronomy, or you can call it “experiment,” as in laboratory chemistry or physics. But one way or another, we are going to have some kind of answer, probably no later than the middle of our new century. For the United States, most of the answer may come by the end of this year, if not this week.

We already have a partial answer, based on observation of our species’ recorded history, at least in the West. Evey well-educated high-school graduate knows about ancient Greece and ancient Rome.

The ancient Greeks had direct democracies, in which all male citizens elected leaders of relatively small city-states. The ancient Romans refined that into a form of representative democracy, in which Roman senators represented the people of Rome at large. They gave the name “res publica” (“public thing” or “republic”) to their form of government, and our US Founders deliberately adopted it in our Constitution.

But every educated high-school graduate also knows what happened next. Larger empires, including Rome’s, absorbed the democratic ancient Greeks’ small city-states, and Roman democracy eventually decayed into an empire of its own. The Roman senators who were supposed to represent the people lapsed into representing their own debt-ridden commercial interests, and the top leaders intimidated and manipulated them and the Roman people to become absolute rulers.

The next millennium of human history came to be known as the “Dark Ages,” or, in our recent, more euphemistic era, the “Middle Ages.” According to official history, Rome “fell” when sacked by Alaric the Visigoth in 410 A.D. Human democracy did not get its next jump start until the Western “Enlightenment” began in the 1600s and 1700s, although it had precursors in Magna Carta in England as early as 1215.

In the half-millennial resurgence of democracy that has followed, the United States of America is neither the biggest democracy (India’s) nor the oldest (England’s). But, like ancient Rome, it’s certainly the most powerful and culturally influential. Now it appears to be decaying into empire, infected by much the same disease that doomed ancient Rome.

Unlike ancient Rome’s, America’s senators are not the direct proprietors of the commercial interests that would-be emperors manipulate and pander to. Instead, our Senators are their lackeys. But much the same process is occurring nevertheless.

The leading commercial interests, which today we call “oligarchs,” have co-opted the Senators and now dictate what they do, from lowering taxes and cutting “burdensome” regulations to fighting or supporting foreign wars to maintain American dominance of (or global influence over) oil. Clear majorities of the people want such things as universal health care and health insurance, family leave, wages sufficient to support a family, an infrastructure program that repairs potholed streets, collapsing bridges, poisonous water systems, and outmoded railways, while providing good, non-outsourceable jobs, and (increasingly) a real effort to slow climate change. Yet all these things take second or third priority, if they matter at all.

Donald J. Trump is just the current avatar of this trend, which started as early as Ronald Regan declaring selfishness the national moral norm with the slogan “It’s your money!” Appeals to selfishness always seem so right, until you begin to notice that they have undermined not just your society’s moral norms, but also your own livelihood and your form of government. Somehow, the oligarchs and the powerful always seem to be more skillful at being selfish than the average Joe or Mary, and Joe and Mary never seem to catch on.

Born about 100 B.C., Julius Caesar began ancient Rome’s slide from democracy into empire with his “bread and circuses.” Today we have much more subtle but more powerful organs of propaganda, including Fox and freelancers like Rush. We also have Russian and Chinese spooks and thousands, maybe millions, of Internet trolls, who all exploit Zuckerberg’s desire to remake society and make billions without regard to consequences.

When will we know how far this process has gone in our own age? Probably by this Friday. If our Senators vote to have no witnesses or documents in their “trial” of our impeached president, they will have signalled their complete subordination to our modern emperor, whom we anachronistically still call a “president.”

Like the rest of Congress and our courts, our Senate has no army, no police and no huge bureaucracy. It can help make laws, which this president can and does ignore, as he did in stealing money to build his Wall and holding up duly appropriated money for Ukraine’s defense against Russia. When that happens, the only real power the Senate has is to expose the president and encourage the people to understand and resist. If our Senate refuses to do that, and instead acquits our impeached president, it will, in effect, be licking his boots, just as the ancient Roman senators did Caesar’s.

Yes, a few senators conspired to kill Caesar, but the die was cast. The majority had forfeited their senate’s democratic power. That forfeiture allowed Rome to vacillate between a semblance of democracy and a real empire for a time, before it ultimately decayed into a durable empire and vanished from world history.

Is this the inevitable fate of our democracy? Are our individual senators and Donald Trump himself just pawns in the play of vast historical forces that derive, ultimately, from our evolutionary heritage as clans of apes each ruled by an alpha male?

The big picture seems to suggest affirmative answers. In the five-to-ten thousand years of our species’ recorded history, real democracies have been rare enough to garner special attention. But for a few ancient Greek city-states, ancient Rome, England and its progeny (the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand), and the few other modern democracies that have arisen after the Age of Monarchy and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial wars, virtually all our species’ history has been variations on the themes of monarchy and empire. A recitation of the names of today’s supreme leaders suggests that that’s precisely where our entire species is now headed: Bolsonaro, the Castros, Duterte, Erdoğan, Kim, Maduro, Morawiecki, Orban, Putin, bin Salman, el-Sisi, Trump and Xi.

And yet, and yet . . . Communism was a complete artifact of human imagination, specifically Marx’, Engels’, Lenin’s and Stalin’s. In fair and enthusiastic trials in Russia and China, it didn’t last long: 74 years in Russia and about 29 years in China. In contrast, democracy’s near-millennial durability in ancient Rome, and again in modern England and its progeny, suggests that there’s something more to democracy than a made-up system. People seem to be happier and more productive under democracy, however much their evolutionary heritage and the deliberate manipulation of tyrants and oligarchs work against it.

But make no mistake about it. Human democracy, worldwide, is now undergoing a more difficult trial than ever under the Caesars in ancient Rome. Modern media have made possible manipulation from the top by confusion, distraction and delusion that even Julius Caesar’s bread and circuses could not match.

How do we know? The US Senate appears ready to relinquish its power to a man who has insulted, vilified, bullied, dominated and humiliated most of its members. Those members, who have every reason to hate him, and many of whom opposed him in the past, now appear eager to invite his boot to stomp upon their faces. If they send that invitation, American democracy will be finished; Trump’s acquittal will be mere bitter icing on a poisonous cake.

But don’t despair. Take the long view. Democracy died, beginning with Caesar, in ancient Rome, only to rise again from the rubble of the Age of Empire over a millennium later. There appears to be something in human nature—besides our evolutionary heritage of alpha-male leadership in small clans—that values equality and every individual’s worth, especially in a society of ever-increasing individual education and specialization.

Maybe that something will rise again, centuries or millennia in the future. Maybe, in the interim, our imperial species will somehow survive climate change and nuclear proliferation and their mutually reinforcing crises. We can all hope.

Permalink to this post