- by New Deal democrat
On America’s 250th anniversary, the state of the Republic is not good.
Ten years ago, after the 2016 election, I embarked upon a reading journey, to seek an answer to the questions: are Republics fragile? Are they doomed to fail, or fall into tyranny? And so I began reading books about every Republic, ancient, medieval, and modern that I could find, covering the time period from the emergence of civilization to the present, including the city-states of ancient Greece, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Geneva, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the emerging modern UK (and others I’ve forgotten at the moment).
And I came to a surprising answer: despite the notoriety of the fall of the Roman Republic, the fact is that republics are probably more stable than despotic or monarchic forms of government. The reason is that despotic rulers fear those around them who are *too* competent, and thus threats, and so succession falls away very quickly to incompetent and relatively easily overthrown rulers, while the competent contenders are frequently assassinated by the ruler. Similarly, monarchies seldom last more than a century without a dynastic war breaking out, in part for the same reason that by the time you get to the great-grandchildren of the founder, the competence of the monarch is very much in doubt.
So while the *form* of despotism or monarchy might last for centuries, the direct line of succession without violent dynastic war is usually much shorter. For example, the line of succession that began with Julius Caesar only lasted until the assassination of Nero in A.D. 68, and internal to that line was the assassination of Caligula and the choice of his successor, Claudius, by the praetorian guard.
By contrast, rulers in a republic do not have to fear the competence of their likely successors; and so competent leadership tends to continue. Even the Roman Republic itself lasted 500 years, hardly a transient state. And there are other examples of long-lived republics, such as Venice (over 1000 years), the Swiss confederation (800 years and counting) and the post-Glorious Revolution UK, in which Parliament is supreme (335 years and counting). And the form of succession in most republics is by some sort of “democratic” vote. In the Roman Republic, for example, each tribe got one vote, and that vote was determined by an internal majority of each tribe. In many other republics, voting was restricted to an oligarchy or aristocracy, but leadership was chosen by that vote. Hence, in the Venetian Republic, only once in its long history was there ever an attempt at an autogolpe.
Republics have historically engendered great loyalty by their citizens, because those citizens see that their own security and chances of success are bound up in the security and success of the republic itself.
But it is only because wide groups of citizens see the chance of success that they continue to be loyal to the republic.
David Frum remarked about 20 years ago, about reactionary conservatives, that if they do not see the possibility of success in achieving their goals in the democratic process, they will not change their values, but rather jettison democracy. That observation should not be limited just to right-wingers. If any large group of citizens does not see the possibility of ever being able to enact their goals into law, they will not abandon those values or goals, but rather abandon a commitment to the process of selecting a government.
Which brings me to the crux of this piece: the enemy of Republics is entrenched power, that cannot be displaced by the voting process of that republic, even if that entrenched power has only minority support. To go back to ancient Rome again, it was the inability by the ordinary plebeians to ever displace patrician power that led them to abandon the norms and forms of that Republic’s government.
In the US today, we see two wellsprings of entrenched power. On the one hand, we see the old evangelical WASP majority, especially in areas like the Old South that until recent decades never saw a big influx of immigration, determined not to let go of power by any means. On the other hand, we see increasingly entrenched wealth that receives ever more tax cuts every time the GOP is in power, to the point where one man now is worth 1/32nd of the entire nation’s GDP. That entrenched wealth is never going to give up its power voluntarily. If that power cannot be displaced by a majority of the citizens of the country, if it uses every lever of power to hold on to its control, eventually the forms of the Republic will give way.
Just this past week, we saw a corrupt Supreme Court relegate Congress to the sidelines, holding that once Congress creates an agency, it no longer has any control over it. And only a few days later, we saw that 4 of the 9 justices were ready to torture even the clearest of phrases, that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States ….” into an interpretation that is nearly the opposite of what has been believed for well over 100 years. If there is no way to overcome the fiat of the Supreme Court, if even legislation and Constitutional Amendments are not sufficient to negate such sophistry, where indeed is the “rule of law” which is the defining feature of republic, at all? If there is no President too is above the law, then what exactly is worth of the “law” itself?
Have we, to mix metaphors in this essay, already crossed the Rubicon in to an era of entrenched power that cannot be displaced by the tools available in this Republic? I have an opinion, but I leave the answer to this question to each reader.
