By Jeremy Wayne Tate
Sunday, September 01, 2024
Our country faces some of the same crises that beset
ancient civilizations, but our system is better built to withstand them.
America is now facing turmoil common in the
classical world: an assassination attempt, the use of legal assaults to
delegitimize or even remove political opponents, the overthrow of a sitting
leader by his own supporters, wars raging or threatened at nearly every edge of
our sphere of influence. All the while, words like “civil war” are creeping
into political discourse.
Yet while comparisons of America to the ancient world —
particularly the Roman Empire — abound, what’s most shocking is how differently
ancient and modern systems and people have responded to the same types of
crises.
In the classical world, violence and betrayal were
politics by other means. After the Roman people rejected and exiled their
brilliant military leader Coriolanus, he joined forces with the hated Volscians
and marched a foreign army to besiege the Eternal City. Coriolanus was only
stopped from slaughtering his own people after being shamed by his mother.
Julius Caesar’s assassination led to a civil war lasting over 13 years that
killed the Roman Republic, along with untold numbers of lives.
Meanwhile, Roman emperors serve as an encyclopedia of the
ways competition for power lead to murder and chaos: Caligula, Commodus,
Pertinax, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and many others were assassinated by the
Praetorian Guard, the ancient equivalent of the Secret Service. Constantius
Gallus was tried, removed from power, and executed by his rival and cousin
Constantius II. Maximus Thrax was deposed by his own troops. Countless other
would-be assassins, rivals, or even suspects were summarily executed by emperors
as a regular course of order.
Yet Rome isn’t an outlier. Read any history, from Chinese
dynasties to the Mongolian empire to medieval Islamic caliphates to
Mesoamerican civilizations. More often than not, power is purchased, held, and
enlarged with the price of blood.
In such a world, the most a common man could hope for was
stability, much less freedom and prosperity.
Yet not so in America and the modern West.
After former president Donald Trump was shot, his
supporters responded by waving the flag and vowing to win in November, not
launching a campaign take down the government.
When Joe Biden was forced to step aside, left-wing groups
like Black Lives Matter decried the move as a “subversion of democracy,” and
some Democratic-primary voters bristled at being deprived of a voice. But they
fought that subversion with words, not torches.
Many Americans find activities like the FBI surveillance
of then-candidate Trump in 2016 and the more contemporary legal assaults on the
Trump campaign illegitimate and undemocratic. But few want to burn the system
down. The vast majority instead seeks fairness, reform, and electoral victory.
Those few who do want to burn the system down have for the most part been
shunned and sidelined.
Commentators screech about impending coups and the
rapidly coming death of democracy. But their rhetoric doesn’t fit reality.
None of this is a sign that Americans and those in the
modern West are superior humans. We can still be cruel, callous, and in
desperate need of mercy and grace. And we do well to remember that modernity
gave us the killing fields of World War I, the gas chambers of World War II,
and the slave empire of the Soviet Union. Modern man is not immune to evil.
But over these past few weeks and years, America’s
response to chaos and pressure unprecedented for this generation give cause for
hope. Whereas our predecessors regularly chose their future with swords, we
still resolve to choose by debates and votes. Even Kamala Harris’s
unprecedented accession as the nominee of the Democratic Party is not an
incurable affront to democracy because, ultimately, the people will still have
the final say come November.
The persistence of our political system despite these
challenges reveals the progress of our civilization and the glory of the West.
It took millennia of trial, error, theorizing, development, education, and
striving to create a small space in this world where choices are determined by
elections, battles are settled at the ballot box, and leaders — Donald Trump
and Joe Biden alike — still cede power when called to do so, no matter how
unwillingly they do it.
Nothing guarantees that we won’t return to the barbaric
turmoil form which our civilization came and to which our civilization has
fallen back so many times before. But that we have not yet — that our
institutions, though strained, still stand — should inspire us to continually
defend the great republican experiment we enjoy.
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