The Fall of the Republic
I’ve started and stopped writing about this many times. My main reason for stopping is that it’s not something I typically want to think about when I have time in front of the computer. Generally speaking when I’m writing I lean towards escapism. A lot of that escapism may share things topically with real world events or at least metaphorically work through my thoughts on those topics, but typically I like writing about my RPG settings or music or games or thinking about what makes a television show I like tick.
What got me started today isn’t the recent events around the impeachment hearings themselves, so much as a realization I had listening to one of Adam Schiff’s speeches imploring the Senate to at the very least have witnesses and examen evidence. Schiff’s speech was stellar. It got me thinking, that Adam Schiff is what people think of when they think of Cicero. Cicero, to most people who have heard the name, was a brilliant orator and staunch defender of the doomed Roman Republic. And unlike Cicero, I think that’s actually true of Schiff.
During my university years, my main focus was ancient-medieval history, and the subject of my thesis was the fall of the Roman Republic. As such I’ve spent the last decade wondering if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing or just experiencing the world’s worst case of confirmation bias.
Having read so much Roman history, I see a significant difference between who Cicero was and who people think he was. The actual Cicero I think, if we were looking for a modern parallel, would be more of an amalgam of the John McCain, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins types. He was a conservative who expressed his dismay when his fellow Optimates violated the Mos Maiorum (non codified norms of behavior), but would always vote with his party when push came to shove, and he definitely wouldn’t ever stray to vote with the Populares especially when it came to changing some of the things like entrenched political power, wealth inequality, citizenship issues, etc, that were the reasons the Republic was in such trouble in the first place. If Cicero or the supposed moderate conservatives of today spent half as much time trying to fix things as they spend hand wringing… maybe the Roman Republic wouldn’t have been so doomed and maybe ours might still have a chance.
The reason I think Cicero is so revered is largely he wrote so much that survived. He painted a pretty positive picture of himself. And after the Republic fell and became a Republic in name only under the Julio Claudians it made political sense for the emperors to claim to want to reinstate the Republic, and as such they’d want to say good things about Cicero, he wasn’t after all trying to change the power dynamic, he was desperate to make sure that the plebs could never benefit from the power dynamic. So their historians, Livy in particular, wrote positively about Cicero, and when later historians came along they had these sources to work with.
I could go on about reading for bias in interpreting historical documents, but that’s not meant to be the point of this piece and is part of the piece I keep starting and stopping about the importance of education and why I think we need free or at least affordably available education for everyone whether it has to do with job training or not.
Back to the Impeachment. If there were a shred of hope or logic remaining in this timeline, Schiff’s speech would have at least succeeded in getting the Senate to agree to listen to witnesses. But this Republic is well and truly doomed. They will hear no evidence. Some of them have even admitted the President is guilty, but they have zero plans to act upon that judgement.
The Presidents lawyers and several senators have all said that it doesn’t matter what the President does so long as he thinks it is in the national interest. Making this argument precedent would be frightening enough, but of course this doesn’t take place in a vacuum. The organization tasked with overseeing our elections has also been neutered so that if there is a problem, there will essentially be no recourse to refute a result. This same Senate has refused to vote on election protections.
What we have is a representational Republic, that doesn’t represent the will of the people. Some of this is a feature, the Founding Fathers were so afraid of the “tyranny of the majority” that we now live under the tyranny of the minority of voters from massively disproportionally overrepresented states. And so there are numerous things that 60 and even 70 percent of the population would like to have happen and the Senate won’t even vote on them, because the Senate leader, Mitch McConnell realizes that the record of the unpopular vote might hurt their election chances.
This takes me back to something I’d long ago thought about Mitch McConnell. Pundits often say “so and so is playing checkers while his opposite is playing chess.” I believe Mitch McConnell has been playing Avalon Hill’s Republic of Rome.
For those who haven’t played it, Republic of Rome is a tabletop game in which each of the players are familial factions in the Roman Senate. For much of the game, the players must work together for the survival of the state. The end goal though, is to control so much power in the Republic, that you cannot be challenged. And that is what I believe Mitch McConnell has been doing. Stopping Obama’s judicial nominations created a backlog that he has rushed to fill. These lifetime appointments are being rushed through for one purpose: to ensure that voting rights are never certain. For McConnell it’s not enough to run the Senate with a six member majority despite representing fifteen million fewer people. For McConnell it’s not enough to be in control now. He wants to change the rules so that his party will be in control for perpetuity. He wants to make it so elections will not matter.
I’m not sure I have a true conclusion from all of this. Like most of the recent events I’m left worn out. My take aways are these: 1) Adam Schiff deserves a whole lot of credit, even if it turns out to be all for naught. 2) Vote. And more than that do whatever you can to get others to vote. Help organizations like Stacey Abrams’ Fair Fight https://fairfight.com/. Be wary of bots and trolls and encourage others to think before reacting to some perceived dustup that may have been started by trolls. Do whatever you can to try and fight the shenanigans in 2020. It might not work, but it might also be the last chance.
