Democracies / Republics: the long story

Paul Monk, author of “The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures”, talks the long view of the Triumph of The Trump.

“The original models for modern constitutional democracies were the republics of Athens and Rome. They failed to keep their constitutions viable and fell to dictatorships: Athens to Alexander the Great; Rome to the Caesars. For many centuries after that the conventional wisdom was that democratic republics did not work. The American founding fathers thought they could prove this wrong. Their design is now being seriously tested.
“Each of the classical republics had plenty of warning of the danger of weakening republican institutions being trumped by demagogues and men on horseback [or, more accurately in Rome’s case, magnates with legions]. They were unable to remedy their defects and they fell. The victory of Donald Trump in yesterday’s presidential election is one of a series of signs, over the past couple of decades, that the American system [I almost always prefer ‘arrangement/s’ over “system”] of government is in trouble. The question is: can it haul itself back from the brink?
“The decay of the Roman republic is still our most instructive case study in how representative institutions can become gridlocked, corrupted and dysfunctional. The rot set in after the defeat and destruction of Carthage, in 146BC. [Others would say with the Gracchi crises in the next decades.] For America, the problems seem to date from the end of the Cold War. In Rome’s case, a century of growing political crisis — without significant external enemies — culminated in the fall of the republic and the creation of the principate [from ‘Princeps’ – First Citizen], the rule of Augustus Caesar.
“The crisis in US institutions is not yet as grave as that in Rome, even a century before Augustus. But it is serious. And the US does have external enemies who view it with malign intent. We also live in an age in which things can move with extraordinary speed. [Which Rome did not have.] It is, therefore, vital that the election of this rank demagogue by a disgruntled and largely ignorant^ mass of American voters concentrate minds about where the great republic in America is heading [^ “ignorant”, if lacking PC and unscholarly credentials is meant, but not if what counts is the lived experience of what tens of millions of uncredentialed ‘deplorables’ have endured from these credentialed ignoramuses].
. . . .
“Rather than indulge in fevered speculation about the immediate future, we badly need to put Trump into historical perspective. The fate of the classical republics should be a key reference point. A second is the debates by the American founding fathers about how to set up a modern republic that would do better than Greece or Rome. A third is the reflections by Alexis de Tocqueville in his 1830s classic, Democracy in America. A fourth is that all modern “democracies” have gone through crises and generally have emerged stronger from them.
“Listening to Trump campaign kept making me think of the figures who fought over the declining Roman republic; especially Lucius Cornelius Sulla, who seized power as a dictator, rammed through constitutional reforms that he claimed would buttress the old order but that in fact helped to undermine it, then retired and watched the crisis begin to deepen. Sulla was not a populist, as Trump is, but Trump brings Sulla to mind because in the name of reforming a decadent constitutional order he threatens to bring it down.

[Another important factor is that Rome’s republican nobility failed to see the developing crisis, or rather crises, of ‘their’ republic, which (ironically) had begun by their own pre-emptive murders of the populist Gracchi brothers in 133 and 122; this blindness continued for the next 100 years right through Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon which began the last round of these civil wars, and finally and fatally to Octavian Caesar’s naval victory at Actium in 31 which ended them. Octavian, now Augustus, claimed in his propaganda masterpiece Res Gestae Divi Augustus that his new order had ‘restored the republic when it was threatened by the tyranny of a faction’. ]
“The exchanges, in 1787-88, between Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison that became known as the Federalist Papers, also come to mind in these circumstances. Those letters to the American people were written by three highly educated founders under the name Publius, signifying their consciousness of Roman history and their concern to address a free public. Their central preoccupation was to define the nature of “popular government” such that freedom could be exercised without descending into anarchy. They saw themselves as conducting an experiment, as Hamilton expressed it, on behalf of all mankind.

[Once upon a time, in a curriculum far far away, Victorian Yr 11 students could study ‘American History’ as one of the Leaving Certificate’s subjects, and it became one of the most popular of subjects. ‘Naturally’, as happens, such a useful subject was given the arse during the 1970s / 80s.]
“They sought to devise what they called ‘republican remedies’ for ‘the diseases most incident to republican government’, so free men could govern themselves well and not require an authoritarian sovereign of the kind prescribed by Thomas Hobbes in his classic 17th-century treatise “Leviathan”.
“Tocqueville, a French observer writing a half-century later, in the age of that controversial populist president Andrew Jackson, admired the vigour of American democracy. But he was concerned about . . the dangers of a tyranny of the majority . . . On all these points and many others, this is a good time to read or — re-read Tocqueville — as a spur to thinking deeply about American democracy.
“As for other democracies, it might be good to reflect on the checkered history of democracy in France since 1789. Hannah Arendt memorably wrote, in ‘On Revolution’ (1963), that the French Revolution, which ended in dictatorship, had become the very model for modern revolutionaries; whereas the American Revolution, which was triumphantly successful, had been largely ignored.

[Modern academic theoreticians of revolution would be reluctant to even call 1775-1783 a ‘revolution’ – for one there, where’s the excitement of storming the barricades, or the ghoulish delight in hundreds of thousands killed as unreconstructible ‘deplorables’, and why are there still states called ‘Georgia’ & ‘Carolina’, and WTF are some Virginia counties named Kings William & George and princes Edward & William, FFS? What sort of wussy ‘revolution’ is that!!!???]
“Between 1789 and 1958, France swung between republic and monarchy, democracy and dictatorship several times. Hence its current Fifth Republic. Crises need not be terminal.
“Alexander Hamilton began his first Federalist letter:
‘After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America. The subject speaks its own importance; comprehending in its consequences nothing less than the existence of the Union, the safety and welfare of the parts of which it is composed, the fate of an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world’.
“We might all ponder these words, as we rub our eyes in astonishment that Donald Trump has become the embodiment of Uncle Sam in our time. For the American Constitution does need some rethinking. As perhaps does our own, too’.”
Paul Monk is author of The West in a Nutshell: Foundations, Fragilities, Futures

Link – http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/01/fighting-back/
[The other four Western pre-modern republics which exercised power outside their borders:

~ Athens in classical antiquity (broadly 508 – 338, including the Glorious Fifty Years 479-431 when Athens was an eastern Mediterranean ‘Great Power’; the democracy lost credibility under gung-ho populists whose military policies turned the disastrous Peloponnesian War (431-404) into a catastrophic one, including an Athenian ‘Stalingrad’; it was the Hellenic world’s World War II; democracy was snuffed out with the hegemony of Alexander the Macedonian);

~ the Venetian Republic (697-1797, and ironically snuffed out by French revolutionaries), which had a major trading empire in the central and eastern Mediterranean – visit Rhodes & Crete for its legacies and watch or read ‘Othello, the Moor of Venice’;

~ the Dutch Republic (1581-1795, also ironically snuffed out by French revolutionaries), which developed a seaborne global empire including the Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia;

~ the English Commonwealth (1649-1660, which OD’d on a 17th C Puritan strain of political correctness, banning Xmas, dancing, the theatre and most other ways The Deplorables might enjoy themselves – much the same miserable wowserism so prevalent among today’s PC ‘worthies’).]

For other pre-modern republics –

http://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/challenge-democracy-appears-outside-the-western-world.71353/