In the first part of this essay, I stated that the Greeks and Romans utterly failed in their attempt at democratic or even representative government.\u00a0 And that is demonstrably true.\u00a0 Athens lasted less than a lifetime as a democracy and Rome was never anything but an oligarchy masquerading as a popular government.\u00a0 Even when the emperor was the supreme power in the state somehow the plutocrats still got all the laws they needed to bleed the poor dry and prevent any least benefit for the people who made up the bulk of the empire.\u00a0 So, yeah, Rome was a slave camp for everyone but the rich.<\/p>\n
But how about us?\u00a0 Have we improved on what the ancients had?\u00a0 Well, we at least have eliminated slavery.\u00a0 That is one absolute advantage.\u00a0 And theoretically we have representative government.\u00a0 In some sense I have a chance of someone who thinks the way I do writing the laws and enforcing them.\u00a0 Okay, there\u2019s something like that going on.\u00a0 After all, look, Donald Trump is president for the second time.\u00a0 He\u2019s even been able to eject large numbers of Deep State ringers out of the federal government.\u00a0 And he\u2019s even been able to primary Republicans who vote against the reforms he\u2019s pushing.\u00a0 He has made some headway toward populist outcomes to some of the worst situations we live under.\u00a0 He has been attempting to reverse unconstitutional laws and rulings like anti-white and anti-male discrimination.<\/p>\n
But what we\u2019re seeing is only the first steps.\u00a0 And this is Trump\u2019s last term.\u00a0 Will more progress be made.\u00a0 After all, even under the Roman Republic there were attempted reforms.\u00a0 Tiberius Gracchus was a famous example.\u00a0 He attempted to stop the patricians from robbing poor farmers of their land every time they were forced to fight in a war.\u00a0 While they were in the army their families got into debt just to feed themselves and when they got home the government refused to forgive these debts in gratitude for their military service and these families ended up losing their farms to the greedy moneylenders who added these acres to their already obscenely large landholdings.\u00a0 Gracchus attempted to bring these protections to a vote and was murdered by a mob for his trouble.\u00a0 Interestingly Trump has already dodged two assassins already.\u00a0 When J. D. Vance and the other republicans run for president in 2028, I hope their secret service protection is a lot better than what candidate Trump had in 2024.<\/p>\n
So, yes, we have improved somewhat on the fairness of the government we have over the ancients.\u00a0 But many of the same problems haunt us.\u00a0 Graft, influence peddling, complete indifference for the working and middle classes and a bloated bureaucracy that swallows up enormous resources that should go to useful government projects like infrastructure and industrial planning that make it possible for businesses to expand and hire more people.<\/p>\n
In the next part I want to look at whether the current method we use for selecting leaders which at least nominally is supposed to be based on Greek and Roman models is really the best method or whether some other structure would be better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the first part of this essay, I stated that the Greeks and Romans utterly failed in their attempt at democratic or even representative government.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1263],"tags":[1645,912,5111],"class_list":["post-35681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","tag-dysfunctional-government","tag-roman-empire","tag-tiberius-gracchus"],"yoast_head":"\n