Thoughts on "Caesar: Life of a Colussus" by Adrian Goldsworthy

Some things that stand out immediately are the difference between the societies of Ancient Rome and the states of the modern world. So much of the life of Ancient Rome evolved around ritual, religion, and precedent. The fall of the Roman Republic and the ultimate collapse of the Roman Empire are often seen as warnings from the past about the arrogance of great powers. But society and life was so different that I find this hard to swallow. The Roman Republic and its political and legal system do not much resemble any functioning (or dysfunctional) democracy that exists today. Individuals, families, and tribes, plus a rigid class system, defined the political workings of the Roman Republic. There were no political parties and every individual who was a member of the Senate was in it solely for themselves, therefore there was no party ideology to keep everybody in line, just individual stances. Law was administered by those who had the right of imperiumgranted to them by the Senate.

Some additional thoughts from reading the history:

The man granted imperiumwas followed by servants called lictorswho carried with them the fasces the axe inside a bundle of sticks representing Roman law and cohesiveness. There are fasces on the wall of the Senate chamber in the United States and, of course, the world fascism is derived from the fasces.

Warfare, as practiced by the Ancient Romans, was horrific in its brutality. ISIS has nothing on a Roman army. They would enslave entire populations, kill everyone they found in a resisting city, starve a population by destroying their crops or cutting off their access to water.

A funny thing that occurred to me while reading the book is that the character of Gary in the HBO show “Veep” is the modern equivalent of a nomenclator. A nomenclator was a Roman slave that walked behind a candidate for office in the Roman Republic and whispered the names of the individuals the candidate met so that he could personally greet each one of them.

The New American Politics of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have harnessed something greater than demagoguery or populism and are truly our first millennial, tech-savvy presidential candidates. Obama’s campaign was renowned for its ground-game and use of data, but that allowed for targeted messaging to voters, and Bush’s team was known for using wedge-issues and ruthless branding to get out the vote and swing public opinion. Trump and Sanders have done something different, they have harnessed the splintered-media and the social virality of the internet.

Trump has dominated the attention of the media and has used the ubiquity of his presence to generate support and interest, not unlike, say, the Kardashians.

Sanders on the other hand has gotten millions of young people to act as his surrogates, by re-tweeting and posting about him on Facebook and other social media platforms. Sanders has made himself into a kind of social fad. If you are a millennial and you don’t support Sanders, than there is a good chance the wrath of social exclusion will fall on you.

This is a truly modern election cycle where the forces shaping our popular culture have come together to finally effect politics.

Slavery and Congressional Gridlock

There is a direct link between slavery and congressional gridlock. Looking back at the arc of American history, its original sin has shaped its curve. Embedded in the constitution and eventually splitting the country apart in a bloody war, slavery gave way to institutionalized and social and cultural racism. And racism became more exclusive to one party.

Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and Voting Rights initiatives moved conservatives out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. Before this, as noted in the Economist article, conservatives and liberals has existed in both parties and had allowed members to find common ground more easily, reducing gridlock. This partisanship has been a major factor in increasing polarization and gridlock in Congress.

Race is still a great dividing factor in America and talking about race is difficult, especially for white people, who can become defensive very quickly when discussing white privilege or institutional racism. So how can we heal this divide, and therefore remove a host of divisive social issues from party politics?

Without certain social divisions people could once again move among parties to find common ground on individual policy issues. Support Black Lives Matter and reducing the corporate tax rate? Vote for Republicans. Want to end affirmative action but support a single-payer option for health care? Vote for Democrats. If this were the case so many regular problems tied to the actual smooth running of the nation, which is the chief victim of polarized gridlock, could and would be addressed.

The salient fact in engaging in this sort of thought experiment is to note how many divisive issues surround race and America’s attempts to reconcile with its (more) racist past. Affirmative action, our view of police and policing, welfare and tax redistribution, the war on drugs. Race has gotten in the way of making policy decisions solely on the facts, and on Utilitarian principles of governing for the greatest good for the greatest number. The practice of dividing people on a granular level, especially with the rise of big data and analysis, has the effect of dividing people even further into a Republican/Conservative camp and a Democratic/Liberal camp where policy and social and cultural views are all linked, where they do not necessarily need to be. It is a dangerous path that risks dividing people from one another where even if they share some similar, broad principles, they are utterly separated.

Obama vs. Eisenhower

President Truman had many difficult tasks that faced him at the end of World War II, and he handled them ably, for the most part. The most intractable problem he dealt with in foreign policy was the worsening relations and oppositional stance that he faced in the Soviet Union. In order to stop Communist expansion he was willing to go to war. In Korea the United States engaged in a tremendous blood bath.

When Eisenhower became president he was concerned about the death of American soldiers in a war that they could not win without massive escalation. He ended the Korean War and throughout his two terms he refused to get the United States entangled and military conflicts. Eisenhower had a dilemma: he had to confront and actively oppose Communism and he desperately wanted to avoid direct armed conflict. So he turned to technology and covert activity. The CIA was given free reign during his tenure and the value of having a distinct technological advantage was realized. An unintended effect of the prolonged arms race was to institutionalize the military programs that were put in place during the Korean War.

Now to Obama, if there are circumstances that could be said to provide a direct analogy from one presidency to another, Eisenhower’s could not be more fitting. The Bush Doctrine necessitated military intervention with combat troops invading countries and overthrowing regimes. This costly and largely failed approach informed much of the Obama administration’s foreign policy.

If there is one thing that truly separates their views on foreign policy it is that Obama has wielded the fear of terrorism less effectively than Eisenhower wielded the fear of Communism. Eisenhower used that fear as a bludgeon to bolster his domestic agenda. It may be dishonest but it was effective in building infrastructure for the American economy, advancing education, and balancing the budget. Obama has not used the fear of terrorism in an effective manner on the domestic front. It is possible that he could have better used American’s fears to advance infrastructure projects or other worthy domestic projects.

The salient features of Obama’s policy toward confronting terrorism are a heavy reliance on drone strikes, which are shrouded in a veil of national security secrecy, and the institutionalization of legal justifications for attacking terrorists and the maintanace of NSA dragnets, covert military operations, and domestic security measures. These are the largely negative consequences of Obama’s policy of confrontation without war. A permanent Cold War-style apparatus has been called into existence to oppose an intractable political, economic, and religious problem. In the new world of crumbling borders and technology it remains to be seen whether or not this will be an effective strategy for defeating terrorism, but it certainly is an oppressive weight on the American government and military and it diminishes the dominance of the law in restraining the impulse to tamp down rights and use force.

Bowe Bergdahl and Mercy

How horrified are we by canniballism? One of the most profound taboos in our society is eating another person. So can that act be forgiven? There is a famous court case in the mid-1880’s in Britain dealing with the survivors of a shipwreck. In this case some surviving members of the crew, adrift on a lifeboat killed a terminally ill member of the crew to eat him and drink his blood. They were convicted of murder, but there sentences were commuted from execution to a short term of imprisonment. The idea was that in unusual and extreme circumstances the survivors had to do something generally considered horrible, but that in any case they had already been punished by their horrific ordeal.

Bowe Bergdahl did something incredibly stupid when he ran away from his base and was captured by the Taliban. I understand the anger of his comrades who were exposed to increased danger but it seems clear that he should not be punished further. While not a perfect analogy, Bowe Bergdahl did something terrible but he also suffered terribly at the hands of his captors. It would be proper in his case to say, “He has already suffered enough.”