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Historian Mike Duncan makes a compelling case that a breakdown of the political rules of the game–mos maiorum–drove the downfall of the Roman Republic. How much is America’s breakdown of political norms and cohesion like that of the Roman Republic? How do we avoid our own Civil Wars and Rubicon?

“But as he stood watching Carthage burn, Scipio reflected on the fate of this once great power. Overcome with emotion, he cried. His friend and mentor Polybius approached and asked why Scipio was crying.

“A glorious moment, Polybiius; but I have a dread foreboding that some day the same doom will be pronounced on my own country.” Scipio then quoted a line from Homer: “A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish, And Priam and his people shall be slain.”

Scipio knew that no power endures indefinitely, that all empires must fall.”

Show Notes in Depth + Sources

    1. The US has a thousand thousand times been compared to Rome – often like the teetering and decadent empire at the end, ready to be taken out by some pissed off (and also frightened for their own lives) Goths
    2. This is a poor and lazy historical comparison. But comparing us to the Roman Republic is getting a little more apt than we’re comfortable with.
    3. What’s the difference? The end of the Empire in the 5th century AD was, in some ways, the end of Rome itself (at least of the western empire. The eastern empire persisted but its character changed materially over the proceeding decades). The fall of the Republic happened in the 1st century BC, and it was right after Julius Caesar came to power. 
      1. A major, important difference to note for the sake of historical comparisons: Rome persisted as THE mediterranean superpower for centuries after the Republic fell. Whereas the fall of the Roman empire led to power vacuums in different parts of Europe that eventually drove feudal warlords to begin to build their own duchies and fiefdoms, both due to lack fo pressure from a central government, and from necessity (since there was no longer a major, distant authority that could protect the nobles’ properties). Not to mention how the fall of Rome paved the way for the Muslim conquests of the 7th-11th centuries. 
      2. This distinction is important not just due to the different character and social zeitgeists of the late Republic and late Empire, but also how the end of each had an impacted on the time periods that followed. And the consequences of the fall of the Republic are entirely distinct from those of the fall of the Empire.
    4. We’re going to lean heavily on Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm. If you haven’t read it, read it. It’s amazing, it’s going to help you with this episode, and it’s key to understanding where we are right now
    5. His thesis: the Roman Republic fell due to a breakdown of mos maiorum – literally, “the way of the ancestors.” The unwritten rules that everyone plays the game by. 
      1. In his own series on the fall of the Roman Republic, Dan Carlin talks about this as a system to “keep ambition in check.”
      2. These rules were limitations on what you could do to get political power, and by respecting them, people had to make agreements and compromises in order to get things done, rather than just use raw power
      3. The breakdown of mos maiorum was kicked off by a series of structural, economic, and social crises in Rome that all seemed to 
      4. An important distinction between Rome and contemporary America is: we have a constitution in a way that Rome didn’t (the Roman Republic did write laws down, but they didn’t have a bedrock document like we do. In fact, familiarity with the breakdown of mos maiorum was one of the main reasons that many founding fathers believed in the necessity of having a document that was more concrete than traditions and “rules of play”)
    6. But we’re safe, right? Trump’s devoted challenge to overturn the election and remain president failed; the Electoral College voted without a hitch. Mitch McConnell congratulated Biden on his victory and told Republican senators to keep a lid on and not challenge the results on Jan 6th
    7. And we’re a nation of laws, not agreements… right?
    8. Well, as we’re seeing more prominently than ever–but not for the first time:
      1. Laws are enforced by people. Law enforcement officers can ultimately decide on the street whether or not they are going to enforce certain rules and ignore others (see our episodes on sheriffs for more on this → links in show notes).
        1. Other laws, as we’ve seen, are enforced by Congress… or  not (see: Impeachment)
      2. They leave a lot of room for people to try to exploit them when they don’t want to work with them
      3. They’re really the last resort in terms of society being able to get along
      4. In the end, they’re only paper–they require a very large critical mass of people choosing to follow them and not trying to play games with them: that is our modern mos maiorum, and it is starting to fray
  1. Background
    1. In Rome, Mos Maiorum kept ambition in check (good for everyone, tragedy of commons) – when it was violated repeatedly, all options were on the table / only power mattered → Pompey the Great: “do not quote laws to we who carry swords.” Even laws are just paper and need to be enforced by force. Everything short of violence is a form of agreement to do things a certain way.
    2. Of course, we all basically agree to give up certain rights to the government, which has a monopoly on violence (that is, citizens are not allowed to use violence unless in self defense, but the government can to enforce laws). This is the idea of a social contract. But, again, what if the people in charge of enforcing the laws start to be more selective about how they interpret those laws?
    3. In Rome, it all began to break down as the Brothers Gracci, frustrated at the (very important) lex agraria being totally ignored by Senate, used an old law to just bypass the senate entirely because Graccus believed it was important enough
      1. Important to fix massive loss of land by farmer-soldiers from the long Punic wars
      2. (Elaborate on the history here)
      3. Gracchus used a law that had been in place for over a century, the lex Hortensia of 287 BC, which allowed the assembly of plebs to bypass the Senate.[29] However, another tribune, Marcus Octavius, used his veto to scuttle the plan.
        1. Using very old laws to justify a contemporary actions…sound familiar? Remember the Insurrection Act of 1807 that we talked about on [whatever episode it was]?
    4. This started a very long cycle of escalation between two groups – the optimates and the populares in order to keep the other side from taking too much power and totally dominating
      1. Wikipedia tells the story fairly succinctly:
        Gracchus pushed the assembly to impeach and remove Octavius [not the famoous Octavius that would become Augustus – this is about 100 years earlier than that]; the Senate denied funds to the commission needed for land reform; Gracchus then tried to use money out of a trust fund left by Attalus III of Pergamum; and the Senate blocked that, too.[30] At one point, Gracchus had “one of his freedmen… drag Octavius from the speaker’s platform.”[31] This assault violated the Lex sacrata, which prohibited people of lower status from violating the person of a person of higher class.[31] Rome’s unwritten constitution hampered reform.[29] So Gracchus sought re-election to his one-year term, which was unprecedented in an era of strict term limits.[32] The oligarchic nobles responded by murdering Gracchus.[33][34] Because Gracchus had been highly popular with the poor, and he had been murdered while working on their behalf, mass riots broke out in the city in reaction to the assassination.
    5. In the US, the same mos maiorum keeps the powerful in check from using all of  their power at all times to get whatever they want–meant to be used in extraordinary circumstances or not at all. Examples:
      1. Presidential/Gubernatorial veto
      2. Executive order
      3. Declaring emergency
      4. Filibuster
      5. Forcing cloture / “nuclear option”
      6. Busting out some very old, unused law to do what you want now
      7. Court-packing
      8. Even certain “low” or dirty campaign tactics
    6. NO SYSTEM CONTINUES WITHOUT A LARGE CRITICAL MASS AGREEING TO ITS LEGITIMACY AND RULES/STANDARDS
  2. Partisan / “conventional” positioning
    1. Right now we’re hearing a lot about the Republicans upending these traditions and using raw power to try to do what they want to do
    2. There are plenty of new things about politics in 2020. But this momentum created by political incentive to break with tradition is not by any means new in American politics. 

“Velleius Paterculus later observed: “Precedents do not stop where they begin, but, however narrow the path upon which they enter, they create for themselves a highway whereon they may wander with the utmost latitude… no one thinks a course is base for himself which has proven profitable to others.”

  1. Deep analysis and challenging
    1. It’s happened in the past (and somehow we’ve come back)…
      1. FDR tried to pack the court because the Supreme Court kept declaring his executive actions unconstitutionall, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
      2. There was literally a civil war in 1860 because an abolitionist won the presidency without winning any southern states
      3. (other examples)
    2. Gerrymandering
  1. Delegitimizing elections
    1. 2000
      1. Recount was stopped by 5-4 supreme court decision
      2. Later studies show that depending on what standard you have for the ridiculous chad/punchcard problems, either Bush or Gore won by hundreds or dozens of votes
      3. The difference between 2000 and 2020? Well, for one, the margin of the win was slim in 2000, whereas in 2020 Biden won by a landslide in both the popular vote and electoral college. But, an important distinction is how the presidential candidates handled themselves while the process worked its way out in 2000: Gore emailed to staffers: ““PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT NO ONE TRASHES THE SUPREME COURT.” – Mos Maiorum prevailed
      4. Democrats groaned; Bush losing the popular vote hurt, started to have people question the electoral college
    2. 2008
      1. Senate Republicans made it a top priority to just oppose whatever Obama wanted to do (example of just raw power, no interest in compromise)
        1. McConnell: ““The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
        2. Boehner, on Obama’s agenda: ““We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
        3. Since then Senate Republicans have really held to their promise. 
    3. 2016
      1. This is where people seriously questioned the legitimacy of the outcome
      2. In the 2020 election, we’re hearing about Congressional Republicans who will try to, on Jan 6th, challenge the results of the Electoral College in Congress–last chance to try to overturn the election. Seems new, right? Wrong
      3. There were Democrats in 2016 who attempted the same thing. Elected representatives in the House who were unwilling to (without a fight) allow the duly elected President to take office
        1. It didn’t go far because a challenge of the EC results requires first both a House Rep and a Senator to challenge a state’s results, and then a discussion/vote on the House/Senate floor…
        2. …and no senators bit
        3. But 2020 isn’t the first time this is happening, just an escalation
      4. Obviously at this point you have a lot of people have lost hope in the electoral college and say it needs to be replaced or that it’s a fundamentally illegitimate way to represent the people’s will
        1. Had a huge number of faithless electors
        2. A lot of democrats at the time were CHEERING for faithless electors to give it to Clinton rather than Trump! Because they either decided his win (and he did win) was illegitimate or too terrible to consider. (Opinion articles showing up in mainstream media advocating for this, such as Huffington Post)
        3. So at this point you had some people–fewer–trying to undermine the election, but in ways that were a little less aggressive than in 2020
      5. Democrats also made it a priority to make sure Trump was a one-term president. Impeachment, etc. 
    4. 2018 Georgia Gubernatorial
      1. Abrams never conceded
        1. “I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election.”

However, she declared, this was “not a speech of concession.”

She accused Kemp, the SecState at the time, of suppressing the vote by doing things such as purging voter registration rolls. Kemp points to policies where he made it easier to register (such as online registration).

SIDE NOTE: there’s always some hanky-panky in an election, typically by the party that has power in the state in question. (See: 1 ballot drop box per county in TX in 2o20) How much do we put up with? How much is “within the rules?”

  1. “Reflecting on the recurrent civil wars of the Late Republic, Sallust said, “It is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations, when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty.”
  1. “But this was an age when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.”
  1. 2020 President – escalation
    1. Trump declaring before the election there would be mass fraud but he would win
    2. Then he lost, declared that there was mass fraud and that he won
    3. Lots of lawsuits obviously – almost all quickly thrown out by judges (many of whom appointed by trump). 
      1. This is unsurprising, since all claims of mass voter fraud in the past have been overblown if not outright lies – we’ve done in-depth investigations into voter fraud in prior elections in the US which you can find in our show notes. The short of it is: many mass media organizations cite less-than reputable organizations for their figures. When you pull up the primary source report, this becomes apparent pretty quickly (and you’ll see what we mean by not quite reputable if you watch our video on the PILF), but most people don’t pull up the primary source report! Always take the 5 minutes to pull up whatever source a news agency is citing. 
    4. As well as attacking the people who ran the election (secretaries of state, governors, who “betrayed” trump by running the election clean rather than given it to him)
    5. In early December, only ¼ of Republicans believe Biden actually won, and this risks leading to further chaos if a large part of the country actually stops trusting the election system at all–they’ll feel it’s legitimate to undermine a system that has been corrupted. So, while challenging the results of an election are not new in American politics, 2020 represents a major escalation in the degree to which elected representatives (and, of course, the people they represent) are willing to openly attack the legitimacy of the electoral process…. Especially since it’s really baseleless. Trump clearly decided he didn’t want to leave office, and so he’d try to make up what he could to see if he could stick around, and spread an unsupportable claim of mass fraud. 
      1. Think about living in a post-soviet state or somewhere else there are sham elections 
      2. They also believe their ongoing resistance isn’t the first time this happened – interviewed Republicans feel like the Democrats tried to undermine Trump in every conceivable way, and now that’s fair game! So they feel free to do the same. Again, be careful of the precedents you set when your team is in power, because they’ll just be used against you next time. Another example of escalation
        1. We’ve been saying this for years
      3. …and of course many Democrats feel like the Republicans used all their power to undermine Obama in every way they could as well

        Nat Greene calls this “a state of endless total war.” Of course, right now it’s metaphorical war. But could we find ourselves again at the point of actual violent conflict with our neighbors?
  1. Cloture and the “nuclear option” becoming regularized
    1. Cloture is a rule that ends debate and forces a vote, thus ending filibusters
    2. Since the 1970s, the Senate has also used a “two-track” procedure whereby Senate business may continue on other topics while one item is filibustered. Since filibusters no longer required the minority to actually hold the floor and bring all other business to a halt, the mere threat of a filibuster has gradually become normalized. In the modern Senate, this means that any controversial item now typically requires 60 votes to advance, unless a specific exception limiting the time for debate applies.
    3. The “nuclear option” is a trick of the rules by which you can temporarily make Cloture a majority (51) rather than 60. It’s complicated but basically if you have a majority you can choose to do it.
    4. In November 2013, Senate Democrats led by Harry Reid used the nuclear option to eliminate the 60-vote rule on executive branch nominations and federal judicial appointments.[1] In April 2017, Senate Republicans led by Mitch McConnell extended the nuclear option to Supreme Court nominations in order to end debate on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch
    5. WHY IS IT CALLED THE NUCLEAR OPTION? BECAUSE THERE’S NO GOING BACK IF YOU DO IT. There were strong shared reasons not to do the nuclear option (mos maiorum) because you don’t want to “break hearts” and make it a regular practice, because it means that small majorities are now uber-powerful and you have much more of a war. Much less negotiation and deal-making. But it was launched in 2013! (By Democrats, so it’s not just the Republicans)
  1. Delegitimizing/dehumanizing opponents / political polarization and antipathy
    1. This is old, old hat–from the beginnings of ReConsider and Wedged. Remember: we’ve been covering political polarization since before it was cool. Not that it’s cool now, but you know what we mean.
    2. We won’t repeat at length what’s going on in the US, but it’s a big part of the Roman story…
    3. …the mutual dehumanization between the populares and the optimates led them to be willing to use violence against each other… and eventually go to war. The enemy within had become more bitter than the enemy without. It almost destroyed Rome for good. 
      1. Many died in the ruinous (two) civil wars that followed
      2. Sulla 
    4. Today we have “Fake News” for what we don’t like or don’t agree with. Increasingly tight and divergent bubbles of information. Makes it very easy to just say that everyone who doesn’t say what you like is lying. This has been escalating for some time; Trump is a mega-escalation of it. 
      1. Xander: A LOT of this problem would be solved if people took the time to look up primary sources rather than just take their favorite pundit’s word for it. But, of course, there’s no reason to wish for a state of affairs that denies human nature, and we all know that the majority of people will never do this. You Considerates, though, are different, and have a major and important role to play in pushing back against disinformation among your own tribes.
  1. Escalating violence
    1. In Rome, the Gracci brothers introduced the mob to roman politics – mobs literally ran around making sure the plebs voted certain ways, and when they were really, really mad, they just killed people
    2. We are just starting to see that now. This is a very hard genie to put back in the bottle. See: Charlottesville, Kenosha, Oregon killing of a Trump supporter by an Antifa person. 
    3. Once people start to be killed, a cycle of retribution begins that has an incredible amount of inertia. It doesn’t matter what someone’s policies are if they’ve killed your brother – you’re going to want revenge. 
  1. ReConsider Moment
    1. TBD if Biden will attempt some form of unilateral disarmament and return to mos maiorum, but he’s signaling it that way. But can you put the genie back in the bottle?
    2. HOW DO STORIES LIKE THIS END?
      1. Rome – Graccus, Civil War, Caesar, The Rubicon, death of the Republic
      2. France – Reign of Terror, Napoleon
      3. Germany – literally Hitler
    3. Honestly I don’t know what the fuck to do other than say “we told you so back in 2014” as it all falls apart
    4. Can you unilaterally disarm? Can you find a way to bilaterally disarm? “Go back to the way it was?” Can you put the genie back in the bottle?
    5. Other Republics, when they fall, things get bloody. Sometimes for the Republic (Rome, China, France) and sometimes for everyone (Germany, France)
    6. Escalation only begets more escalation
    7. All of these stupid violent fantasies people have about picking up arms to “defend their nation” aren’t going to intimidate ANYONE into backing down–only rile them up more. Picking up guns with the intent to join any sort of civil conflict is far more likely to get you and the people you love killed or gravely wounded rather than accomplish anything noble. History tends to remember instigators of violence as perpetrators of evil, and not patriots. Keep that in mind – – the lens of history – as you think about what actions you want to be ethically responsible for in the coming years.

Good news: we’ve (actually) been through worse (a literal civil war–ultimate “power wins”) and managed to pick back up and keep going. Other power plays we’ve backed down from. 

So it is possible. It will require very principled and selfless leaders who see that the Republic is even more important than policy–even of a Lex Agraria magnitude (think healthcare or similar)

Structural problems in society were a big driver of the problems in Rome. Made the stakes high. Economic inequality, people losing their farms, becoming poor urban plebs, influx of slaves so no jobs, fight for (and over) citizenship and voting rights. US may need to solve some of its underlying societal problems. We’ll talk more about those in another episode.

  1. Call to Action 
    1. Share this with a friend who wants to pick up arms

The mos maiorum was collectively the time-honoured principles, behavioural models, and social practices that affected private, political, and military life in ancient Rome.[3]

https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/935734198/trump-hasnt-conceded-georgia-neither-did-stacey-abrams-what-changed

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/15/mcconnell-gop-election-results-445524

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/09/944385798/poll-just-a-quarter-of-republicans-accept-election-outcome

https://www.startribune.com/trump-voters-accept-biden-victory-with-reservations/600001975/

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/11/bush-v-gore-and-the-2000-election-never-ended.html

https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.htmlm

https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-america/antifa-protester-implicated-killing-trump-supporter-oregon

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-way-out-of-trumpland-hail-mary-pass-to-save-the_b_582b2f65e4b0852d9ec21d4e

https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromise-pledge-044311 
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/10/27/texas-voting-elections-mail-in-drop-off/

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