A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump

Now that we are in possession of an honest-to-God demagogue on the classical model, old portents of doom seem pertinent.Photograph by Stefano Dal Pozzolo/contrasto/Redux

The Roman Forum is—along with the Parthenon and the Egyptian pyramids—one of the mandatory sites for reflection on the passing of great powers, the impotence of architectural grandeur, and, these days, on the windfall profiteering of cold soda in places that attract mass tourism. Having come to spend a few days in Rome—for a book festival, the modern author’s equivalent of those pilgrimages that set ancient authors travelling from one marvel to the next—I found myself wandering through the nicely cleaned-up archeological site and brooding. It remains one of the most powerfully empathetic activities a New Yorker can engage in. It’s so exactly like walking through the future ruins of the corner of Fiftieth and Fifth: instead of the Basilica of Maxentius, the Temple of Saturn, and the three imposing columns that are all that remains of the Temple of Jupiter, there would be, facing what the guidebooks explain was once called “uptown,” the ruins of Rockefeller Center on your left, all office buildings and public plazas and sculptural reliefs as grand as can be; then, on your right, what remains of Saint Patrick’s, a religious-civic cathedral as big as imaginable; and then a few evocative fragments of Saks, once a department store as commodious as any. And not far away, a stadium in which tens of thousands of people would watch gladiators put their lives at risk in order to win the indulgence of a local oligarch. (Well, _that _could never happen now.) One member of my expedition, as our great-grandfathers would have written, does insist that Rome is best understood not as old New York but as an ancient Los Angeles—what with its relative proximity to the ocean, its ascent up into the hills, the long view down on its spread-out evening glitter. Either way, it’s weirdly familiar.

The subject for this Roman meditation—as with Edward Gibbon, who began his plan to write “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” right there, having heard the monks sing vespers in the ruins—is why great towns and empires do decline and fall, though our own special American (and centuries-old) preoccupation is less the empire that fell than the republic that fell before it to make way for empire. Roman virtue, Roman rules, and Roman decline have always been an American obsession. There’s the famous statue of Washington as a Roman general, and the countless Romanizing reference among the “Founding Fathers”—the very name has a Roman patrician flavor—and then there’s the artist Thomas Cole worrying his way through the stages of empire as a warning to his countrymen, from bright rural beginnings to frantic decadence.

Two forces eerily contemporary have traditionally been thought to bring down ancient republics: the oligarch and the demagogue. What makes republics fragile are compacts of the very rich confiscating wealth in ways that makes injustice too palpable, and the demagogue who, usually rising as an opportunist among the oligarchs, can manipulate the incoherent discontent of the plebeians. Contemporary historians of the Roman Republic now engage in a lively argument, held between those who think that ancient Republican politics were actually mere squabbles among clans and dynasties, with at most opportunistic, occasional, and absent-minded attachments to ideologies, and those who think that the Roman arguments about who had the right to rule were real and that their politics in this sense were meaningful. (Readers of eighteenth-century history will recall, not irrelevantly, that one dominant historian of much of the last century, Lewis Namier, thought the same of eighteenth-century Anglo-American politics—that they, too, were mere family conflicts—until corrected by Conor Cruise O’Brien’s view that Edmund Burke really believed in the American Revolution because he thought it right, and for reasons still relevant today.)

All thoughts on this walk twist round eventually to what’s called decadence. The oligarchic class has a class interest, one might think mordantly, in the idea of decadence, since decadence is an oligarch’s name for plebeians getting pushy and enjoying themselves too much. Nonetheless, the word has its savor, evoking a time when civic virtue seems to have given way to civic spectacle, and dubious types come forward. One recalls that F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly insisted on giving “The Great Gatsby” the title “Trimalchio in West Egg,” thereby referencing—over-referencing perhaps—a character in “Satyricon,” the great first-century Roman novel of decadence, and making him one with a romantic hosting summer parties on Long Island. (Every age looks decadent, until you see what’s coming next.)

The fall of the Roman Republic, in any case, left a bad thousand-year savor, a certainty that democracy, even constrained republican democracy, was doomed by demagoguery. This was so much the standard view that when Shakespeare, never having known any democratic institutions at all—aside from a few local, limited Stratford ones—tried to imagine them in “Coriolanus” and his other Roman plays, he could only picture a setup that was divisive, factional, and pitifully easy to manipulate by a demagogue or two. The superiority of an authoritarian arrangement seemed, well, self-evident. So much so that one of the most touching things in the Federalist Papers are Madison and Hamilton’s attempts to reconcile the project they have in mind with the unsavory memories kept alive in the classical education they shared with the other founders. On the whole, this gloom seemed to have been proven false by modern history, even wonderfully false.

Today, though, we find ourselves in the midst of the ascent of a figure right out of Petronius: an orange-colored vulgarian of meretricious display, right down to the trophy wives from Far Elsewhere—with an ambition to dominate, a cunning out of proportion to his wisdom, a contempt for truth coupled with a readiness to manipulate, and a personal arrogance combined with, and indifferent to, a universal understanding that he is utterly unfit to govern. Now that we are in possession of an honest-to-God demagogue of the classical model, old portents of doom seem pertinent. As David Remnick remarked recently, though demagogues have long had their place in America, this is the first time one has come this close to Presidential power. The paralyzed, passive self-persuasion that overcomes ordinary politicians in extraordinary times is proof of this. With Paul Ryan and the rest of the collapsing Republican “leadership” we see the expected response: this will pass, it’s an oddity—and anyway it’s more important to be positioned after the demagogue’s fall than to take the costly action necessary to oppose him. Turn on that same Internet to the conservative press, and one reads frantic denunciations of Trump vying with equally frantic denunciations of Hilary Clinton, the habit of hatred still intact even in extremis. Reporters who know that the demagogue lies as he breathes are too depressed or discouraged or demoralized to say so loudly and repeatedly. And then among the pro-plebeian party there is an unworthy glee at the discomfiture of the patrician “establishment.” Well, they may deserve the demagogue. The rest of us don’t.

The walk ends, and the parallels pass. Our civilization bears little relation to the Roman one. A slave-based, pre-technological society—aqueducts are cool, but they are not jet travel nor the Internet nor neutrino nets—bears no relation to one built on the double Enlightenment gift of secure scientific knowledge and ever-increasing tolerance. But all republics and democracies in history do have something in common. They’re fragile. That’s why Lincoln could speak so solemnly at Gettysburg of government of the people, by the people, for the people perishing from the earth. For him, it wasn’t rhetoric; not at all. Mostly, they had. So themes persist, and the Forum walk instructs. Whether moved by rich men’s recklessness or poor people’s fearfulness—or a little of both—strong social arrangements do fall too easily apart. We hope that it’s our demagogue who’s doomed. But democracy remains more delicate than we imagine. The lesson of the Roman Forum is that everything is more delicate than we can imagine.