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.

America's Growing Ignorance: Welcome to the Age of Denial

Once upon a time the Republican Party valued science, intellect and knowledge.  Indeed, Democrats were at times looked down upon as being ignorant and the unwashed rabble.  Now, the picture has been totally reversed and the GOP actively campaigns against scientific knowledge whether it be on climate change or sexual orientation and a host of issues in between and party leaders wear ignorance and idiocy on their sleeves as a badge of honor.  What caused this reversal?  In my mind, the rise of the Christofascists in the GOP for whom modernity and knowledge are a growing threat because they destroy the infantile house of cards faith system that these individuals need to find a distorted sense of self-identification and security.   A column in the New York Times by a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester looks at America's increasing ignorance which is fueled by snake oil merchants in the pulpit and the Republican Party base.  Here are excerpts:

ROCHESTER — IN 1982, polls showed that 44 percent of Americans believed God had created human beings in their present form. Thirty years later, the fraction of the population who are creationists is 46 percent. 

In 1989, when “climate change” had just entered the public lexicon, 63 percent of Americans understood it was a problem. Almost 25 years later, that proportion is actually a bit lower, at 58 percent. 

This is not a world the scientists I trained with would recognize. Many of them served on the Manhattan Project. Afterward, they helped create the technologies that drove America’s postwar prosperity. In that era of the mid-20th century, politicians were expected to support science financially but otherwise leave it alone.

Today, however, it is politically effective, and socially acceptable, to deny scientific fact. Narrowly defined, “creationism” was a minor current in American thinking for much of the 20th century. But in the years since I was a student, a well-funded effort has skillfully rebranded that ideology as “creation science” and pushed it into classrooms across the country. Though transparently unscientific, denying evolution has become a litmus test for some conservative politicians, even at the highest levels. 

Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination. 

What do I tell my students? From one end of their educational trajectory to the other, our society told these kids science was important. How confusing is it for them now, when scientists receive death threats for simply doing honest research on our planet’s climate history? 

Americans always expected their children to face a brighter economic future, and we scientists expected our students to inherit a world where science was embraced by an ever-larger fraction of the population.

My professors’ generation could respond to silliness like creationism with head-scratching bemusement. My students cannot afford that luxury. Instead they must become fierce champions of science in the marketplace of ideas.  

[A]s we know from history’s darkest moments, even the most enlightened traditions can be broken and lost. Perhaps that is the most important lesson all lifelong students of science must learn now. 

The irony is that the Christofascists are obsessed with America's declining influence in the world, yet they are the ones that will lead to further decline.  As noted before on this blog, many historians blame the rise of Christianity for the fall of Ancient Rome.  Now, the "godly Christians" are working to destroy America and bring back ignorance and a new Dark Ages.

New Book: The Most Controversial Claims About Jesus

The Internet has been inundated with coverage of the idiocy of a Fox News religion correspondent who attacked the author of a new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth because the author is Muslim and, according to the dim witted Lauren Green, therefore incapable of a balanced scholarly work on the Christ story.   As this blog has repeatedly addressed, the truth is that we know little or nothing about the real Christ - if he even actually existed - and that the leaders of the early Church re-wrote and revised and edited what became the New Testament to fit their agenda and the quest for power and control.   A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the new book and some of the assertions that will drive the Christofascists bonkers - not that they aren't already insane.  Here are some highlights:

The clip became an Internet sensation over the weekend, with BuzzFeed among the first to link to the segment on Saturday with the headline: “Is This The Most Embarrassing Interview Fox News Has Ever Done?” New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum tweeted that, indeed, the interview was “absolutely demented,” while The American Conservative called it “cringe-worthy,” “ignorant” and “breathtakingly incurious,” pointing out that Green showed “zero interest in the book’s argument or content.”

What is Aslan saying about Jesus? How different is the historical Jesus of Nazareth from Christ the religious figure? What were the precise events that led to his crucifixion? And what about those three kings who traveled to Bethlehem to meet the son of God?

Here are the most controversial claims from Zealot:

JESUS WASN'T BORN IN BETHLEHEM  - Few argue that The Nativity is not a lovely story, especially when it’s acted out in church Christmas pageants, complete with Mary and Joseph, and three gift-bearing kings, all in Bethlehem to coo over the newborn son of God. But Aslan writes that this story is simply a magical tale. It appears in the gospels of Matthew and Luke but it’s not mentioned by any of the other apostles. (“The name Bethlehem does not appear anywhere else in the entire New Testament, save for a single verse in the gospel of John.”)

Jesus the historical figure was more likely born and raised in Nazareth—an off-the-map village in Galilee, according to Aslan. “That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus’s childhood about which we can be fairly confident,”

JOHN THE BAPTIST WAS ONCE BIGGER THAN JESUS - The apostles reinterpreted John the Baptist’s (in)significance in the gospels to make Jesus seem like the one and only messiah, according to Aslan. The scholar Josephus, who witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem, writes in Antiquities that John was put to death by Antipas, a 1st-century ruler of Galilee and Perea, because he was becoming too popular due to his promises of a new world order—the Kingdom of God. “Many assumed he was the messiah,” writes Aslan, though you would never know it from reading the gospel.

According to Aslan: “The problem for the early Christians was that any acceptance of the basic facts of John’s interaction with Jesus would have been a tacit admission that John was, at least at first, a superior figure...After all, who baptized whom?”

JESUS WAS A ZEALOT REVOLUTIONARY - The real Jesus was more like Che Guevara and history’s other famous rabble rousers than the passive, love-thy-neighbor Christ figure in the bible. It’s not clear why Jesus left Nazareth for Judea and John the Baptist, but when he returned, his transformation from craftsman to self-declared prophet was not entirely well-received. So he established his ministry in Capernaum, a nearby fishing village, which - like Nazareth - was divided between the haves and the have-nots. The Capernaum have-nots did not know about Jesus’s past life as a craftsman and they were desperate for a better life.

Aslan writes that Jesus targeted “those who found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.”

HE WAS CRUCIFIED FOR EFFECTIVELY COMMITTING A CAPITAL OFFENSE  -  When Jesus marched into Jerusalem around 30 C.E., flanked by a chorus of followers singing, “Blessed be the coming kingdom of our father David!” he was announcing himself to the city as the messiah and ancestor of David, King of Judah. Then, like a true revolutionary, he forced the city’s vendors out of the temple’s public courtyard--a “blatantly criminal act,” Asman writes. “After all, an attack on the business of the temple is akin to an attack on the priesty nobility, which, considering the temple’s tangled relationship with Rome, is tantamount to attack on Rome itself.”

With that sweeping gesture, Jesus’s message was simple: the land didn’t belong to Rome but to God, and it was time for Caesar to concede power to Hossana, the real King of Jews. This was sedition and the punishment was crucifixion. The New Testament says Jesus’s crucifixion was a cruelly special punishment for a man who sacrificed himself for humanity’s sins, but history tells us that he was no different from “any other criminal who hangs on a cross.”

JESUS DIDN'T CONDONE VIOLENCE, BUT HE DID NOT AVOID IT AT ALL COSTS EITHER -  Jesus’s aggressive “cleansing” of Jerusalem’s temple is unlike the peacemaking Christ we know from the Bible--the one who invariably loved his neighbors and “turned the other cheek” in the face of violence. For starters, there is no evidence that these references are symbolic to all of mankind, but rather that he was speaking only about his Jewish neighbors and enemies.

Add to this that his entire ministry was constructed around the promise--specifically his promise—of God’s sovereignty on earth, and we can only assume that Jesus expected bloodshed before this foundation for a new world order was laid, Aslan writes. Why else would he have warned his disciples that they, too, would “take up his cross” if they chose to follow him? As Aslan points out, his attempt to hide his “messianic secret” about the Kingdom of God from everyone but his disciples indicates that he knew what was to come--that what he envisioned was “so radical, so dangerous, so revolutionary, that Rome’s only conceivable response would be to arrest and execute them all for sedition.”

What's remarkable is that the book underscores how little is really known about Christ.  Yet wars have been fought and countless individuals have died because of a religion based on someone we know almost nothing about historically.  It's all based on the much forged and re-edited Bible.   Recognizing this truth, of course, would cause the Christofascists' house of cards faith to utterly collapse.  We can expect more attacks on Aslan and others who rock their sinking boat.

FRC: We Are In The Age Of Pagan Sexuality

Typically, the folks at Family Research Council are railing against modernity and seeking society backward in time.  Now, one of their dubiously titled "scholars" is whining that the nation and society have gone too far back in time to the age of pagan sexuality. Apparently, FRC only wants to go back to the days of slavery - or at least segregation - women not having the vote and being treated as chattel, gays being invisible if not executed, and Christian theocracy.   BuzzFeed looks at this latest hate group batshitery.  Here are  some highlights:

[T]he Family Research Council said Wednesday that America has entered the age of pagan sexuality.  Dr. Patrick F. Fagan, director at the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute, made the comparison a policy lecture titled “Porn in the Dorm.”

“Basically porn is now everywhere,” Fagan said.

“Particular for Christians, Catholic, evangelicals, and for Jews and Muslims too, the same thing holds. This is almost like our times are a time a bit analogous to pagan Rome, where Christianity first grew up,” Fagan continued. “The sexuality of pagan Rome was pretty similar to what we restored here. So, what we really have outside is a pagan sexuality which is totally different from a Christian sexuality. And I don’t think enough Christians have yet put that way starkly enough to themselves. What you’re really being invited with all this is entry into pagan sexuality.”

Fagan continued, linking homosexuality, abortion, infidelity, pornography, euthanasia to ancient Rome.

“There’s a pagan sexuality which is a pan-sexuality which is the erotic. Abortion, homosexuality, infidelity, pornography, euthanasia, infanticide all of those things were just the common sexual practice of pagan Rome and Christians were not for being very different. Monogamous, faithful, struggling, etc…you know the chastity, purity.”

No one is more obsessed with sex than the "godly Christian" folk - e.g, online porn sites receive high traffic from evangelical Christians in the Bible Belt ; evangelical Christian have the highest divorce rate.  Perhaps rather than trying to police the sex lives of everyone else, this nut cases ought to worry about their own psychoses and, of course, hypocrisy.