It’s a convenient intellectual starting place. An imminent political apocalypse naturally requires extreme solutions. The pressures on America, Mr. Anton has suggested, may necessitate the rise of a Caesar, whose “authoritarian one-man rule” would be “partially legitimized by necessity.” Mr. Anton is careful to specify that this is not a future he hopes for, but some in his orbit seem to dream of Caesarism as a coming golden age. A new Caesar, according to Mr. Yarvin, is the guarantee of “cultural peace.” Maybe, Mr. Musk has proposed, what America needs is a Sulla — the military commander who, in the early first century B.C., marched his troops on Rome, became dictator through force and imposed his vision of old-school decency on Rome by slaughtering his political opponents en masse.
The Roman analogies the right uses to justify these conclusions are flawed. Quite apart from the problem of comparing modern America with a Mediterranean empire that flourished before the advent of Christianity, capitalism and mass media, advances in archaeology have now undermined the idea that there was a consistent pattern of population decline in the late republic or the late empire. In addition, decades of scholarship have demonstrated that even if moral malaise existed, it paled in comparison to the complex pressures Rome faced at those moments of crisis. In the first century B.C., for example, years of unbounded territorial expansion brought elite competition to new and violent heights; in the fifth century A.D., plague and grave economic mismanagement made themselves felt just as competitor states strengthened at the borders.
What the right has captured is a tradition established by the Romans themselves, creating an uncanny hall of populist mirrors that reflects millenniums-old contortions into our present. Even as Rome grew into a lush hegemony, the Romans spoke constantly of decline, danger and crisis. The historian Sallust attributed the political convulsions of the late republic to the vices he believed had spread through Rome like a “deadly plague.” A few decades later, Livy complained that the Romans of his day could “endure neither our vices nor their cures.” Toward the end of the second century B.C., the Gracchi brothers claimed to have seen Italian fields empty of Italian peasants — the good stock who had built Rome’s success were dying out because they could no longer afford to raise families. Nearly 250 years later, the satirist Juvenal complained that rich, vain, selfish women were having abortions to avoid carrying children.
Why were these anxieties so persistent when, as far as historians can tell, they were not rooted in fact? Because they reflected instead the ethos of Roman culture and politics. Ancient thought had a tendency to view history as a story of decay rather than of progress. And more significantly still, those stories were useful.
The narrative of decline allowed politicians throughout Rome’s history to claim at one and the same time that Rome was the greatest civilization on Earth and that it was in the sort of existential political crisis that required extraordinary and often unconstitutional political intervention. It suggested there was something special, something intrinsically superior, about the Roman national character that was doubly under threat, the argument ran — from a decline in the number of Romans and a vanishing culture of singular Roman virtue — and that the only hope of its restoration rested on the emergence of a strong leader to reset Rome’s course.
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