For a thousand years from roughly 500 BC to 500 AD the most dynamic civilization on the planet was the Greco-Roman world. This consisted of a number of Indo-European speaking pastoral tribes who had earlier invaded southeastern Europe and disrupting the existing Mediterranean civilization there, borrowed heavily from their predecessors and founded city states in Italy, Asia Minor and the Balkans while competing with the more civilized Phoenicians and struggling to resist even less civilized Indo-European tribes like the Celts who periodically invaded from the north. Two of these cities; first Athens in Hellas and then Rome in Italy, stumbled upon the dynamism that comes when some measure of freedom from oppression is codified into a government.
In both cases the limited form of democracy unleashed a power that dominated its neighbors for an appreciable time. Eventually in both cases this freedom decayed and was replaced by autocracy.
A little more than a thousand years after the remnants of the Greco-Roman civilization collapsed the English resurrected a different but similar form of government. And the English colonies around the world have continued and adapted this form of government including the former colonies that became the United States of America. A case can be made that the last four hundred years have represented the practical extent of this experiment in democracy. And like the Athenians before them the American and the British have tried to force their vassal states to emulate their form of government, so that today the number of democracies in the world is impressive, unless you look too closely.
But four hundred years is a long time. Athens maintained democracy for most of one hundred and eighty years and theoretically the Roman republic hadn’t devolved into a dictatorship for almost five hundred years. But truly the last century of the Roman republic was a series of dictators vying to stay in power and unleashing endless wars on the state.
So, four hundred years is a pretty good run. But the current Anglo-American project is showing many of the warning signs of an exhausted civilization. And probably the most damning is the plutocrats trying to eliminate the middle-class and replace them with serfs. Even back in 4th century Athens, Aristotle knew that only with a numerous middle-class can a free state maintain itself. Well, we are quickly devolving into the condition that the Roman plebians found themselves in the first century BC. Their farms were bought up by the rich who used slave labor to outcompete the small farmers and left them forced to enlist in the army just to keep from starving.
Our predicament is even worse. The plutocrats don’t need us at all, not even as cannon fodder. All they want us to do is disappear. So that leaves us with Donald Trump. He says he wants to make us great again. He’ll have to answer two questions:
- Is it too late to get an honest election?
- Is it too late to restore the middle class?
Of course, if the first answer is no then the second answer is no by default. I am hoping he can pull it off. Getting a fair election is a long shot. But there’s no reason to hope against it. Restoring prosperity is a larger and more complicated story. And finally, if he manages to get some things done, the next question is can he recruit honest men to succeed him and keep the effort going. Because, let’s face it, there is a generation of work to even begin to fix our problems. It’ll take a whole pocket full of miracles.
One thing that the Athenians had over us is honest comic poets. Aristophanes openly mocked the failures and foibles of the leaders of his country. All we have is Saturday Night Live and the late-night show hosts. And they’re all in the bag for the Democrats. And on top of everything else they’re not even funny. Well, we have this guy.
