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Since the beginning of the Rise of Trump, I've maintained that Trump is not a cause, but a symptom. His initial seeking of political office was a reaction to what many Americans see as the rise of a political elite in the United States; politicians serve as though they were the Roman Senate, appointed for life, and many of them grow monstrously rich while in office. There are those on the left now who are comparing Trump to Caesar, but that's a canard; Trump has no military background, and he has not sought to make himself a dictator no matter what pearl-clutching claims are made by his opponents. In his first term, Trump worked within the Constitution. There is no reason to think that he would not do the same in a second term.
Trump may well be our Gracchi. The Gracchi were among the first voices calling out the corruption of the wealthy and powerful in the late Roman Republic. They called for populist reforms, and they worked to put themselves in a position to implement those reforms and, if you will allow the term, Make Rome Great Again - and the establishment of the time, those same wealthy and powerful men, destroyed them for it. (Sound familiar?) But it was that reaction to the Gracchi that led to the Sulla/Marius conflict and then to the rise of Caesar.
Whether Trump wins a second term or not, the die has been cast. The wealthy and powerful have been called out. Trump may be leading the populist movement, but he is not the populist movement, and that movement is not going away. Trump himself has proven to be notoriously resistant to any attempts to brush him aside. Will history continue to rhyme? Will there, in another generation or two, be another American civil war? An American Caesar? There may well be - but that's a story for another column. //
RSB
10 hours ago
This is where you have to be a bit more nuanced. Yes Rome lost its Republic and a LOT of that went back to corruption and a degradation of society to where the first loyalty of the troops was to their generals not the state. And yes the moral rot of Rome itself was a causal factor in this because people turned to the strong generals to give them some actual peace and security.
In one respect Rome got lucky. Caesar was not some tyrannical monster and Octavian (in one of the big surprises of history) was possibly the greatest statesman in history. He built the Empire on the notion of lowered taxes, respect for individual rights and security for trade, commerce and everyday life within that framework. And the result was the Pax Romana. True the moral issues remained (albeit lessened due the laws against theft, murder et al being enforced), it fell to later rulers such as Vespasian who threw a lot of the decadent people out of the Senate and government and promoted Italians who were more closely tied to the common folk and had more rural morals - then Roman morals improved.
So. Is America on the road to having its "Caesar"? Probably. Will we get lucky like Rome did? No way to know.