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Remember the Roman Republic
“A republic, if you can keep it” – Benjamin Franklin
“Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.” – Robert Heinlein
The Roman Republic began to come to an end when time honored government traditions and boundaries were discarded in the service of a worthy objective.
About four hundred years after the founding of the Roman Republic, in 133 BC, Tiberius Graccus was elected to the office of tribune. He saw that large numbers of Roman citizens had no land and no place to live. Slaves and money flooded into the Republic following the victory over Carthage. The slaves displaced free men, who could no longer find work, and the money drove up the price of land and increased taxes. These poor people were forced off their land and had to work as sharecroppers for the rich. They had no way to improve their status. This was also a problem for the state because only landed citizens could be drafted to serve in the legions.
A group of Senators sympathetic to the plight of these poor citizens proposed splitting up public lands and giving workable plots to worthy people. The citizens so gifted would be required to work the land and would be prohibited from selling it. The Senators wrote a bill, the Lex Agrera, to enact this idea, and they chose Tiberius Graccus to present it directly to the Assembly thereby doing an end run around the Senate. This bill was strongly opposed by the rich patricians of the Senate because many of them were leasing big plots of the public land and would be required by the proposed law to give those lands back to the state for redistribution.
Tiberius tried to have the proposed law read to the plebian Assembly in preparation for a vote, but another tribune, Marcus Octavius, vetoed the reading of the bill, as was his right as a tribune. Traditionally, a tribune would rescind his veto after making a speech explaining his opposition to the measure, but Octavius did not. He made it clear that he’d make the veto permanent and prevent the bill from ever becoming law, openly flouting the clear will of the people of the Assembly. Thus, one of the oldest traditions of Rome was violated.
Tiberius responded by putting a bill before the Assembly to have Octavius deposed as tribune. There was no law against doing this, but it had never been done before and crossed another traditional boundary. With this move, Tiberius alienated even his supporters in the Senate, the ones who had proposed the Lex Agrera in the first place.
After Marcus Octavius was removed from office the Lex Agrera became law, but then the Senate, which was in charge of Rome’s budget, refused to fund the effort to re-distribute the land.
Tiberius was again stymied, but he came up with a new strategy. It so happened that a large area of land in what is now Western Turkey fell into the hands of the Roman people at the death of the king there, who was a client of Rome. Following Tiberius’ lead, the Assembly seized control of the land and the king’s treasury for the purpose of funding the redistribution of Roman land. This again flouted tradition since the Senate was supposed to control the money and foreign affairs.
Then Tiberius, nearing the end of his one year term as tribune, proposed that he be re-elected as tribune so as to continue the land re-distribution plan. This was yet another audacious and unprecedented move, and it alarmed the Senate, who thought that Tiberius was trying to make himself king. Indeed, he had usurped much, egging the plebian Assembly on to take more and more of the Senate’s prerogatives. The Assembly now controlled foreign policy and the money, and Tiberius seemingly controlled the Assembly. With repeated re-election, he would be king in every way but name.
The vote to enable Tiberius’ re-election was to be put before the Assembly, but a mob of patricians and their clients lead by one of the Senators pounced on Tiberius’s supporters just as the vote to re-elect was to take place and beat them down with clubs, killing 300 of the plebians along with Tiberius.
So, things escalated in a contest of brinksmanship, smashing one unspoken traditional rule after another, until the issue was settled with violence. From that point on the Republic was often ruled by violence since people had learned that violence settles disputes in a way that civil discourse and proceedings no longer could. Partisan politics of the conservative Senators trying to keep power with the elite class, while the tactics of the Populares, who looked to the lower classes for support, divided the people and classes into warring factions. For nearly 100 years things were unpredictable at best and brutally bloody at worst. Finally, the stage was set for a tyrant to take power.
Published in General
To keep a Republic, the parties have to be willing to lose an election or issue, knowing that they would be able to try again later and that their opponents would be willing to lose in turn if it should turn out that way.
I fear we may be beyond this point.
To avoid coming to violence like that, I suggest that the other side just surrender its assets and power and live peacefully with us.
We’ll cross that Rubicon when we come to it.
There seem to be so may parallels between current times, and almost any period of history, the left is hung up on comparing today with the interwar Europe. While the right seems to go through bouts with the fall of the Roman Republic or Empire, I remember a lot of the Reaganites where big on that comparison, and a lot of preachers where out calling the 80’s the end of days. As we’re all going to get nuked, and sent to hell for our decadence.
It’ll be ok, the 80s ended, the 90s happened.
Heres a gloomy thought for you, in a couple of years – the oldy stations will be playing 90s music.
It all starts with inflation from monetary inflows from conquests and slave labor that replaced Roman labor. So the landed aristocracy borrowed expensive money to sow their crops and expand their holdings and paid back with debased money. Wealth flowed to them and away from everybody else, including artisan fabrication which was also done by slaves owned by those connected to the government leaders. One got more land, seed and slaves by access to credit which meant access to government. Rome wasn’t the first nor the last just the greatest that went through this same process of decay and decline as politics and access to government, financed by easy money replaced production and trade by free citizens. This process of accumulation of power centrally is self reinforcing and ultimately drains the strength of the economy that sustains it and will grow unless we see it as the existential threat it is.
I don’t see how it ends because for most it’s comfortable and ever improving until it isn’t, then it’s too late to change. Change isn’t easy either. There are unintended consequences from undoing central power just as there were unintended consequences from accumulating such power. Since the foundation of it all is the banking system and easy money, we probably must begin there.
What is needed is stability of the value of the currency. We tried tying our currency to metals but that just led to deflation. Then we gave the power to regulate the currency to the consortium of Fed Banks and they first inflated and then deflated the currency contributing to the Great Depression. So then the question for us now is how to either reform or produce a new system with sufficient incentives for those in control of our currency that they will work to establish and maintain a stable currency. And of course we’d also have to overcome the entrenched interests that profit from the current system.
Any ideas of how to accomplish this?
We blame recessions and depressions on deflation, I think wrongly. Draining gold from Germany and then Europe in the interwar period certainly gave rise to inflation here and deflation there but that was not trade related adjustments caused by the gold standard, it was a bad peace treaty and a series of mistaken policies. I don’t know how you get back to a metal based currency at this point. Gold target rule I suppose.
Econ talk with financial economist Admati, last month about her book on the financial crisis is worth listening to. She recommends one crucial change, high capital requirements, 15 to 20% so that owners have skin in every loan. Total bank lending would shrink because leverage would shrink as would the size of most banks. Owners would also pay attention to what management is doing and create accountability. Democrats might like the idea of imposing such costs on the financial sector. Conservatives who understand the crucial role intermediation must play have to control it however. The Democrats would nationalize the banks which would be a disaster.
We must agree on the goal to reduce the power of central government however we can. Deregulate, and where necessary replace extensive policing regulation with clear law.
We can send some programs to the states where they will be more accountable and will be spending their own money. States can figure out how to make them work or kill them. In other words we don’t attack liberal programs we send them “closer to the people”. Privatize where possible. Social Security could be privatized as we privatized Federal employee retirement. This would raise savings, reduce government, and importantly shrink the current account deficit.
We just to have our goals clear, our language well designed. Stop treating the centralizers as just a different perspective that will swing back with time. It doesn’t swing back. It always moves toward centralization, accumulation of special interests, and decline.
Many times I have dealt with this very bit of fluffy-headed nonsense: “Violence never solves anything!” Oh, really? Go tell a Mede. Or a Spartan. Or any given American Indian. Violence solved their respect disputes with their enemies rather permanently. That’s the whole problem with it. Humans have been and are too quick to resort to it to solve “problems” that have faces and souls.
An even gloomier one: They already are! At least in Bavaria.
scary, and too close for comfort. I daresay, we are at the beginning of this violent cycle.
Is there a way out for us?
I think @richardfinlay is correct. Had Tiberius Graccus been willing to wait a year until passions had cooled to bring the Lex Agrera up for a vote things might have been different.
Of course, he wouldn’t have been tribune a year later.
History doesn’t repeat; it spirals. We may be on a parallel part of the curve to the 80’s, but we’re farther down the spiral. What’s different now is the decline of national character and civic virtue (brought on by centralization and people looking to government as savior).
I think Andrew Klavan is super smart and wise (which is more important), but I disagree with him when he says things were way worse in the late 60’s, early 70’s. Yes, street violence and radicalism were worse in a more overt way. But, the Democrat party has normalized leftism, and leftism has power over all the organs which transmit ideas — the education establishment, the news and entertainment media, the courts (Trump may have his greatest success here) and the culture at large. And the people (individually and at the local and state level) have lost much of their sovereignty to the administrative state.
We had an interesting discussion with our kids (16 and 20) about this a couple nights ago. The Elder said, “It doesn’t matter so much what’s happening at the universities. It matters what’s going on on the internet.” She may be right to an extent, but history shows it doesn’t take a majority to bring down a society. It only takes a small number of people with noxious ideas and lots of power (at the height of the Soviet Union, only 10% of the people belonged to the Communist Party).
I think our (near — less than 20 years) future looks a lot like France the past many weekends. People rioting to raise taxes on the rich so that government can keep providing the level of service they demand, with little to no awareness that, eventually, the government runs out of other people’s money and, ultimately, is incapable of keeping its promises (especially the promise to save the planet! Talk about arrogance!).