A Monarchy or a Republic

In the 18th Century the British Isles were in the process of becoming the greatest power since the fall of Rome, and the image of that earlier empire was always on the minds of its subjects.

Educated men learned Latin in school and read the poetry and history of that period. Sculpture, architecture, and statecraft took their cues from the classical. American colonists were equally aware of the parallels.

But since the Enlightenment was also the period of new thinking about the rights of man and the purpose of government, the colonists were not just reading Caesar’s Gallic Wars, Horace and Virgil, but Locke, Montesquieu and Hume.

Britain imagined itself to be the Rome of the Caesars with its far-flung outposts. The American revolutionaries chafed at being treated like conquered Gauls rather than equal citizens of the fatherland, and they imagined themselves to be enacting the rebirth of the Roman Republic before it was subverted by imperial autocracy.

When the Revolution was won, King George III asked an American in London what George Washington would do next, assuming he would become King of America. He was told Washington would put down his sword and return to his farm. The astonished King said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

His model, obvious to all educated onlookers, was not Caesar but Cincinnatus, the patrician former consul who was made dictator when Rome was in peril, defeated the enemy tribes, and resigned two weeks after victory and returned to his farm.

The framers had this contrast in mind when they set out to contrive a system that would employ all those checks and balances and separations of power we learned about in school. Why? To prevent the dangerous twin poles of Caesarism or of mob rule, dictatorship or anarchy.

We have been remarkably safe from the specter of military leaders, our Caesars, seizing power and not letting loose, no doubt thanks to the example of Washington. Generals Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower all found themselves circumscribed by the limits of the office of the presidency and the competing powers of legislative and judicial branches. Ike even warned against accumulation of too much power in the hands of his natural constituency, the military-industrial complex.

No dynasties took root to make succession hereditary. The stories of a couple of presidents each from the Adams, Harrison, Roosevelt and Bush families look less the road to entrenched power than a warning about the dangers of hubris. A second Clinton is no more likely to have any luck creating a dynasty than the Kennedys were. That’s not the way we roll.

If there’s any cautionary tale with a Roman precedent to worry about it may be in regard to an oligarchy, a patrician class. The average senator in 2011 had a net worth pf $14 million, the average representative of $6.5 million. Not exactly humble, log cabin, rail-splitters. And donors who help put them in office, and expect a government friendly to their interests in return, are many times wealthier.

It is probably no surprise they a candidate like Mitt Romney, to the manor born, private schools, net worth $250 million or more, lacked the common touch. Of course, the domination of American democracy by men of wealth or those beholden to the money power is hardly new. Washington may have been the wealthiest man in America with a worth of $525 million in today’s dollars.

The Gilded Age was dominated by rich men wielding political power to their own ends behind the scenes. Jay Gould, Mark Hanna and various bosses were the Koch brothers and Art Pope of that era.

Bernie Sanders based his campaign on the notion that concentrated wealth leads to concentrated power in a few hands with government doing the bidding of those who hold the purse strings. As the movie mogul Harry Cohn was fond of saying when uppity actors, directors and writers tried to have it their way – “He who eats my bread sings my tune.”

Congress often seems to be intent on demonstrating the truth of this maxim. The majority of the people may want gun control, curbs on pollution or higher taxes on the rich, but if the donor class has a different agenda that’s what gets enacted.

Trump has better acted the populist than previous moguls who ran for office and has argued that his billions mean that he can’t be bought, but his billions also mean that his interests hardly align with those who live from paycheck to paycheck.

A populist facade has often masked an autocrat or oligarch at heart whose rule will be inimical to the average man. And Trump’s willingness to cast aside Constitutional rights, his promises to discriminate based on religion or ethnicity, to bend courts to his will are a warning.

Of course when people feel under threat, those in power are apt to over reach. Lincoln ignored several constitutional strictures during the Civil War, Roosevelt’s interning of Japanese –Americans is a stain on the country’s honor, a trumped up invasion and regime of torture after 9/11 are another. And Trump is doing all he can to exploit the country’s fears today.

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 finished its work, a woman in the street asked Ben Franklin, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” Franklin, wise and succinct as usual, said, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” This election, citizens will need to act with caution once again, lest we entrust power to those itching to abuse it.

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