Our country faces some of the same crises that beset ancient civilizations, but our system is better built to withstand them.
Our country faces some of the same crises that beset ancient civilizations, but our system is better built to withstand them.
A merica is now facing turmoil common in the classical world: an assassination attempt, the use of legal assaults to delegitimize or even remove political opponents, the overthrow of a sitting leader by his own supporters, wars raging or threatened at nearly every edge of our sphere of influence. All the while, words like “civil war” are creeping into political discourse.
Yet while comparisons of America to the ancient world — particularly the Roman Empire — abound, what’s most shocking is how differently ancient and modern systems and people have responded to the same types of crises.
In the classical world, violence and betrayal were politics by other means. After the Roman people rejected and exiled their brilliant military leader Coriolanus, he joined forces with the hated Volscians and marched a foreign army to besiege the Eternal City. Coriolanus was only stopped from slaughtering his own people after being shamed by his mother. Julius Caesar’s assassination led to a civil war lasting over 13 years that killed the Roman Republic, along with untold numbers of lives.
Meanwhile, Roman emperors serve as an encyclopedia of the ways competition for power lead to murder and chaos: Caligula, Commodus, Pertinax, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and many others were assassinated by the Praetorian Guard, the ancient equivalent of the Secret Service. Constantius Gallus was tried, removed from power, and executed by his rival and cousin Constantius II. Maximus Thrax was deposed by his own troops. Countless other would-be assassins, rivals, or even suspects were summarily executed by emperors as a regular course of order.
Yet Rome isn’t an outlier. Read any history, from Chinese dynasties to the Mongolian empire to medieval Islamic caliphates to Mesoamerican civilizations. More often than not, power is purchased, held, and enlarged with the price of blood.
In such a world, the most a common man could hope for was stability, much less freedom and prosperity.
Yet not so in America and the modern West.
After former president Donald Trump was shot, his supporters responded by waving the flag and vowing to win in November, not launching a campaign take down the government.
When Joe Biden was forced to step aside, left-wing groups like Black Lives Matter decried the move as a “subversion of democracy,” and some Democratic-primary voters bristled at being deprived of a voice. But they fought that subversion with words, not torches.
Many Americans find activities like the FBI surveillance of then-candidate Trump in 2016 and the more contemporary legal assaults on the Trump campaign illegitimate and undemocratic. But few want to burn the system down. The vast majority instead seeks fairness, reform, and electoral victory. Those few who do want to burn the system down have for the most part been shunned and sidelined.
Commentators screech about impending coups and the rapidly coming death of democracy. But their rhetoric doesn’t fit reality.
None of this is a sign that Americans and those in the modern West are superior humans. We can still be cruel, callous, and in desperate need of mercy and grace. And we do well to remember that modernity gave us the killing fields of World War I, the gas chambers of World War II, and the slave empire of the Soviet Union. Modern man is not immune to evil.
But over these past few weeks and years, America’s response to chaos and pressure unprecedented for this generation give cause for hope. Whereas our predecessors regularly chose their future with swords, we still resolve to choose by debates and votes. Even Kamala Harris’s unprecedented accession as the nominee of the Democratic Party is not an incurable affront to democracy because, ultimately, the people will still have the final say come November.
The persistence of our political system despite these challenges reveals the progress of our civilization and the glory of the West. It took millennia of trial, error, theorizing, development, education, and striving to create a small space in this world where choices are determined by elections, battles are settled at the ballot box, and leaders — Donald Trump and Joe Biden alike — still cede power when called to do so, no matter how unwillingly they do it.
Nothing guarantees that we won’t return to the barbaric turmoil form which our civilization came and to which our civilization has fallen back so many times before. But that we have not yet — that our institutions, though strained, still stand — should inspire us to continually defend the great republican experiment we enjoy.