Will America Go the Way of the Roman Republic?

History can teach us many lessons.  Of course, to truly learn from history, one has to look at accurate history, not some re-written version that leaves out inconvenient facts and is more focused on reinforcing predetermined agendas.  Stated another way, one cannot rely on a Fox News or David Barton version of historical fact without courting long term disaster.  Yet the far right, focused on short term agendas and ideological purity doesn't grasp this reality.  A piece in Politico looks at the parallel's between the behavior of today's GOP and forces in the last days of the Roman Republic which ultimately caused the governance of ancient Rome to cease to work.  The result?  Civil wars and ultimately the beginning of the imperial period and the end of democracy.  And, as is occurring now, it was the self-styled conservatives who pushed the republican form of government to break down and opened the door to dictatorship.  Here are some article highlights:

What does decline sound like? I imagine equal parts self-pity and self-flagellation, moral outrage and exhaustion. Once we could have heard it from the original Capitol Hill, the seat of the failing Roman Republic. As Caesar told Rome’s Senate, “Certainly there was greater merit and wisdom in those who raised so mighty an empire from humble means, than in us, who can scarcely preserve what they so honorably acquired.” His enemy Cato responded, “There were other things that made them great, which we lack: industriousness at home; fair government abroad; minds impartial in council.” They lived in an era of decline, and they both knew it.

Do we? That exchange resonates as we look again over last year’s bruising budget battles—which, thankfully, appear to have reached their wearying apotheosis. In unsteady times, we’re compelled to look back: Tea Partiers imagine themselves as revolutionary Americans; revolutionary Americans (churning out pamphlets under names like “Publius,” “Brutus,” and “Cato”) imagined themselves as republican Romans; and those Romans measured themselves against the generations that bequeathed them an empire. We live in a nation modeled on Rome, founded by men who modeled themselves on Romans—and having traced Rome’s history in outline, from backwater republic to imperial power, it’s natural to wonder if the next step is ours as well.

It’s a fair worry. Across time and place, the breakdowns of republican governments share eerie similarities, as political conflicts spill beyond the bounds of the norms designed to hold them in check. Rome’s example warns us that a cycle of crisis politics, once entered into, grows increasingly difficult to escape. There is reason to believe that we’ve entered into just such a cycle.

Brinksmanship, “nuclear options” and shutdowns are not unique to American politics. The Roman Republic’s final years were increasingly prone to political conflicts so intractable that they left the government paralyzed. In 60 bce, Cato, the leader of Rome’s traditionalist optimas faction, ground the Senate to a halt for months through unprecedented use of the filibuster.

Three years later, the optimates went on legislative strike again, in renewed protest against Caesar’s political faction. Rome’s hardline senators shut down the chamber, dressed in black mourning clothes, and, in the words of the ancient historian Cassius Dio, “spent the rest of the year as if they were in bondage and possessed no authority to choose officials or carry on any other public business.” Most significantly, they refused to schedule elections. The Republic faced the prospect of a new year with no elected government at all, until the senators backed down and allowed a vote on the calendar’s final day. By this point, stalemated government and manipulation of elections had become routine: Over the Republic’s last decade, elections were postponed in five consecutive years. And in the midst of the squabbling, the Forum heard louder and louder cries for a strongman to save Rome from the muck of self-government.

 

[O]ne truth that does seem to translate is this: In republican government, norms matter profoundly.   Political elites aren’t simply bound by written rules; they’re bound as well by unwritten rules that are developed and refined in practice.

The Roman Republic was nearly five centuries old when it collapsed. In that time, it had developed norms against permanent filibuster campaigns, boycotts of government, bypassing the Senate to enact policy and postponement of elections. All of the steps I’ve described were legal. They were also disastrous. Collectively, layered one on the other, they normalized a state of crisis politics.

Obviously, I hope that America escapes the fate of the Roman Republic.  But to do so, the far right and today's GOP need to stop acting in the same manner as their predecessors in ancient Rome did.  Given the insanity and extremism of the GOP base, it is worrisome as to whether the GOP can return to long established norms of governance.