Rome and the US

7/8/05

“When we reflect that time is infinite and Fortune for ever changing her course, it need hardly surprise us that certain events should often repeat themselves quite spontaneously. For if the number of those elements which combine to produce a historical event is unlimited, then Fortune possesses an ample store of coincidences in the very abundance of her material: if, on the other hand, their number is fixed, then the same pattern of events seem bound to recur, since the same forces continue to operate on them.”


So wrote the first century historian Plutarch in his biography of Sertorius, who lived in the final decades of the Roman Republic. Sertorius is one of my favorite Romans. He was dismayed by the decline and corruption of the Republic under the rule of a decadent political class and wished to sail to a group of small islands in the Atlantic, where he could enjoy the pleasures of agrarian life. When the dictator Sulla, for the first time in the four centuries republic's history, marched his troops on Rome to gain power, Plutarch writes, “There was no reason for Sertorius to stay in Rome and watch affairs go from bad to worse because of the incompetence of his superiors.”

Instead of sailing to the Atlantic, Sertorius marched to Spain, a Roman province since the Romans victory over the Carthaginians. He thought it best to divide Spain from decrepit Rome, keeping Rome's legions at bay for almost a decade, until he was treacherously assassinated. Two decades later, Caesar would use his consolidation of power in Gaul not to separate but to march on Rome. The rest as they say is history.

Plutarch wrote his biographies with the idea it might be possible for posterity to learn from these lessons. Today, the similarities between the fall of the Roman Republic and the present United States are astounding: a small republic by force of arms becomes a major empire; a constitution increasingly ignored or used and abused for nothing but the ambitions of personal power; previously respected institutions disregarded and co-opted; a massive growth in the disparity of wealth amongst the citizenry; and finally the weight of the empire crushes the republic's institutions, with the help of an increasingly corrupt political class and an effete and apathetic citizenry.

Our body politic is infested with same diseases of democracy that destroyed the Roman Republic. Yet, we have an advantage over the Romans, we have their lessons. The Romans never understood the system they created needed serious reform and restructuring. Instead, the last decades of the republic were divided between those who wished for a miraculous reconstitution of the past, and those reactionary forces who eventually succeeded in dispensing with the republic and its democratic institutions.

Today, we citizens of the United States live in an era of imperative. We must either reform our system of self-government or watch it fall. We must build a movement of reform not around the unlimited failings and infinite limitations of any presidential candidate, but around the basic hope and promise our republic was founded on two-centuries ago. The simple belief that each and every person has the right to liberty ensured by each of us shouldering the burdens and responsibilities of self-government. Only a mass movement of the American people will restore the health of our politics and initiate the necessary reform of our institutions.

The first step is for each of us to take a pledge to be citizens. We must vow to ourselves, family, neighbors, and co-workers that public life is necessary and important. We will take time to educate ourselves, take time to participate in a national dialog, and take time to act in bringing about a reform of our politics. We need to begin to build the associations, groups, and communication networks necessary for each of us to be informed active citizens.

Secondly, we must dismantle our empire. In an 1819 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson mused on how the Roman republic could have been reformed. He stated the first step would be to “restore independence to all your(Rome's) foreign conquests.” So it must be with us. The United States needs to bring our troops home from around the globe and at home we must castrate our military-industrial complex. We must support the building of true international democratic institutions, first by helping to remake the United Nations for the purpose it was established “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.”

Next, we must reform our government institutions and use our established representative institutions to bring about the evolution of participatory self-government for the 21st century. We must devolve the power of the presidency that has become simultaneously inept as it is dangerously powerful. We must take power away from the bureaucracies and lobbyists of DC and horizontally network our state and local governments into a new union.

Finally, we must reform our economy, moving from a culture of conspicuous mass consumption to one of participatory qualitative design. We must create a new energy economy, breakup the concentrated power of leviathan corporations, and base our economy on the understanding we live on a small planet and each of our actions impact the health of the entire system.

When true reform became necessary to save their Republic, the Romans failed. In his letter to Adams, Jefferson lamented on the great degradation of the Roman citizenry's character. Telling stories on the universal importance of character in shaping history was another reason why Plutarch wrote his biographies. He espoused few character traits were more important to events than courage, it may very well still reside in us.