Post-election blues

Whether by coincidence or by some subconscious craving for understanding, at the same time that Trump has been doing whatever it is he's doing -- does he really know? -- I've been reading a highly readable history of the Roman republic.¹  

The world has changed mightily from the first century B.C. to the 21st century A.D.  But the urges that often motivate humans -- avarice, fear, ambition -- have changed little.  I see more parallels between the final year of the Roman republic and today's America than I find comfortable.

Forty-two years ago, my graduation from law school coincided with another event involving avarice, fear, and ambition -- Watergate and the ultimate resignation of Richard M. Nixon from the presidency.  I wrote an "epilogue" to the year's final issue of my school's law review, finding another parallel between America and Rome, this time Imperial Rome.  I at least professed optimism, in this excerpt from the epilogue:

[O]ur civilization happily retains a measure of vitality.  It was said of Rome that, even while the state remained militarily potent:

The greatest political events passed over the heads of the people like black or golden clouds.  Later it was to watch even the ruin of the Empire and the coming of the barbarians with indifference.  it was a worn-out body whose fibres no longer reacted to any stimulus.²

That Americans still are capable of outrage, still avidly debate the issues of the day, demonstrates that the fibers of our civilization remain healthy.  But the shocks which have buffeted us in the decade since President Kennedy's assassination undoubtedly have exerted a dulling impact on our ability to recognize and respond to moral problems.

49 Wash.L.Rev. 1199 (1974).

The epilogue was dated August 9, 1974 -- a red-letter date in American history. 

I believed, guardedly, with the hopeful optimism of youth, that Watergate was a shock that would knock some sense into America, that politicians of both parties would lean over backward to avoid another convulsion that might further weaken Americans' confidence in their leaders, in themselves, and, indeed, in their nation itself.  And for a while, my optimism seemed justified.

Then -- just as in the days of the Roman republic, about which I'm now reading -- politicians belonging to one of the political parties apparently felt that America was drifting away from their own rigid ideology.  They apparently saw no way to persuade the voters -- in the long run, at least -- to return to their fold.  And thus began a couple of decades of political tactics that would have been unthinkable during, say, the Eisenhower years -- impeachment without constitutional basis, use of the Supreme Court to halt recounts of votes, dark claims that a sitting president was not eligible by birth for his position, that he was a secret Muslim, that he was not "one of us."  We heard a Congressman shouting "liar" during the president's State of the Union address.  And more.  We all know the sad history of the past eight years.

And then Trump comes along.  He has suggested some odd policy promises, but that's normal politics.  More troubling has been his apparent lack of serious interest in the less spectacular but more critical demands of the office.  His language has been crude and uncivil. He has threatened to jail his opponent.  He has insulted -- not criticized but insulted -- the sitting president.  He has appeared intellectually lazy and ignorant, and he seems to trust that the voters would find laziness and ignorance attractive. Proof that he was "one of us."

But he won the election, having mobilized a winning 49 percent of the voters by promises he knew were impossible to keep, and that he had no intention of keeping.  By lying without batting an eye, while calling his opponent a liar.  By -- in other words -- sheer demagoguery, by playing on emotions and deflecting attention from facts.

We've had demagogues before.  I suppose William Jennings Bryan qualified.  But we have not had true demagogues run for president since the United States became a superpower, a nation whose every move is watched worldwide, whose every move may make the difference between nuclear war and peace.

Are we still capable of outrage?  Obviously, the losing Democrats are outraged.  But approximately one half of the country voted for a demagogue, with full knowledge of every point I've made above.  Unlike Nixon and Watergate, Mr. Trump has not hidden behind masked men working in the dead of night.  His outrages have been right out in the open, for all to see.  But the voters saw, and they weren't outraged.

I don't know what the country will be like four years from now.  But the history of the Roman republic suggests that you can strain the bounds of decency and custom only so many times before those bounds no longer bind.  We may be reaching that point.  We may have reached and passed that point.

I read again what I wrote in 1974, and I'm touched by my optimism.  I wish could still share it.
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¹ T. Holland, Rubicon, The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic (2003)

² F. Lot, The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages (Harper paperback ed. 1961) at p. 181.