Berthold Werner/Wikimedia Commons
The Temple of Juno in Sicily’s Valley of the Temples, Agrigento, Italy
AGRIGENTO, SICILY – In writing about this political season, I’ve tried to hold onto a kind of defiant optimism. If things break right in the final two weeks, Democrats may still be able to hold both houses of Congress. Defeatism only leads to defeat.
But today, I want to take a longer view. A 2,500-year view.
I am writing this essay from Sicily, where my wife and I are just concluding 12 days of our first real vacation in years. I’ve always wanted to visit Sicily for its natural beauty and heritage, and I’ve had a wonderful time relishing the magnificent vistas, the blend of several cultures, and the cuisine. But I hadn’t quite appreciated how the entire history of Western civilization is encapsulated on this small island.
That history is one of bursts of culture, decency, and human accomplishment, invariably cut short by corruption, tyranny, and war. Durable democracy is even rarer, and even more vulnerable.
Americans like to believe our country is exceptional. Do we think we are immune to history?
Sicily, I learned, has been inhabited for millennia. As an island in the middle of the Mediterranean between Europe and Africa, it was a prime candidate for invasion. The Phoenicians began colonizing the island in the 11th century BCE. The Greeks invaded four centuries later. The city of Siracusa on the east coast was the most important Greek city of antiquity.
Then the Romans took over following the Punic Wars with Carthage, and for six centuries, Sicily was a Roman province. Some of the astonishing places we were fortunate to visit included an ancient, mosaic-filled 30-room Roman villa from the sixth century, which survived 11 centuries being covered in mud.
Sicily also has more well-preserved Greek temples than anywhere outside Greece; as well as ancient, still-inhabited fortified towns, such as Erice or Castelmola, built on the top of thousand-foot cliffs, which must be seen to believed.
After Rome fell, Sicily was run by Goths, then Byzantines, then Arabs. The Normans invaded in the 11th century, the same Normans who took over Britain in 1066. As sponsors of the Second Crusade, the Normans hoped to take over much of the Near East. After 1194, Sicily was successively invaded by various European monarchies, including Bourbons and Habsburgs. Unified Italy finally took over in 1861, eventually giving Sicily a fair amount of autonomy.
Each culture left its temples, its cathedrals, its palaces, and traces of language. Sicilian, enriched by other linguistic influences, is its own Romance language, as different from Italian as Catalan is from Spanish.
In seeing the history of Sicily as a cameo history of the West, what stands out is stunning human achievements punctuated by regular collapses of entire civilizations.
The Athenian democratic city-state lasted for a little more than two centuries, and its golden age a lot less than that. Greek democracy, like our own, was incomplete; slaves, women, and foreigners were excluded. The aristocracy never trusted democratic rule, and acted to undermine it. Democracy was destroyed by wars, both victories that led to overreach and defeats that discredited the governing system.
What stands out is stunning human achievements punctuated by regular collapses of entire civilizations.
Roman democracy gave way to Caesarism. This all-too-apt term refers to the masses turning away from corrupted nominal democracy in favor of a dictator who purports to act on behalf of the people. After Julius Caesar was assassinated, democracy never returned. Rome became an empire and eventually succumbed to imperial excess, corruption, invasion, and collapse.
This history seems awfully contemporary.
The monumental Greek temples and Norman cathedrals on this island and elsewhere were of course religious edifices. In antiquity, whether the religion was Greek or Roman deities or incipient Christian teachings, church and state were simply fused.
After Rome fell as a democracy and then as an empire, the Roman Catholic Church filled much of the political vacuum. As James Carroll’s splendid book Constantine’s Sword documents, the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth were a force for decency and humanity, but not so the deeply corrupted institutional Church that governed in his name.
Cathedrals, magnificent and ornate, typically took over a century to build. Italy has 368 of them. I have not been able to find a good estimate of the share of GDP consumed by the church in the medieval and early modern era, but it must have been immense—at a time when peasants were starving.
Marx famously termed religion the opiate of the masses. But judging by the ferocity of the Inquisition and the Crusades, which slaughtered millions, it was also the cocaine of the masses. Historically, the fusion of religion and monarchic rule doubly repressed the common people, and led them to internalize their own oppression or to die for the dreams of autocrats.
Religious fundamentalism papers over grotesque contradictions. In the U.S., a cynical ruler with no religious convictions was elected president as the champion of the religious right, as long as he backed their causes politically. Fundamentalist preachers, often hypocritical in their own sinful behavior, ally themselves with politicians who have tawdry personal lives as long as they oppose abortion. The Catholic Church’s contempt for women and fear of sexuality is at the heart of the anti-abortion movement, which has now become a coalition—of Protestant fundamentalists and Catholics—for suppressing other rights and condoning autocracy, a pattern all too familiar in the 2,000-year tradition of the Church.
The founders wanted to keep church far away from state to protect both religious freedom and democratic process. Today, that liberty is being lost to incipient theocracy.
AS CIVILIZATIONS GO, THE UNITED STATES has had a pretty good run as a democracy: not quite 250 years. What is most alarming about the current era is that large numbers of Americans—maybe 40 percent—have given up on the premise that democracy is worth defending. They have given up on the idea that truth and verifiable reality even matter.
There was a time when we worried that Trumpism and the right-wing capture of the courts would destroy the New Deal. The more ominous concern is that they will destroy the Enlightenment, the victory of science over superstition, free inquiry over religious or royal decree, and popular sovereignty over arbitrary rule.
There is now a three-way alliance among corporate plutocrats, Caesarists who look to dictatorship in the name of the people, and a justifiably angry working class. This doesn’t sound like American exceptionalism. It’s a variation on the fall of other civilizations throughout Western history.
Today, more nations than at any time since the 1930s are either explicit dictatorships—Russia, China, Saudi Arabia—or weakened democracies that are on the ropes, including much of Europe. In Italy, neofascists are running the government; in Sweden, they are the largest party; in France, the far right will be a finalist in the next presidential election; and in Britain, the ruling political class has committed suicide.
Democracy in one Western nation after another has lost the confidence of the demos, the people in whose name it governs. This has occurred because oligarchies corrupted the state in multiple ways, a theme with resonances throughout Western history.
In the 1930s, when democracy was under challenge from both fascism and communism, there was deep pessimism about whether democracy could survive. After weak, corrupt, and failed parliamentary governance in Italy, Mussolini’s prime theorist, Giovanni Gentile, contended that democracy was doomed on three grounds: It could not solve the problem of economic instability; the question of who was a member of the political community; or the defense of the state.
That critique seemed all too plausible. Democracies destroyed their economies in the 1920s, and Nazi Germany was the first country to recover from the depression.
Amid the deep economic collapse, Caesarism had broad appeal. There were calls to give FDR dictatorial powers. “Dictator” in many quarters was a good word. Beginning in 1927, Studebaker produced a car model called the Dictator. It was phased out only in 1937.
Democracy in one Western nation after another has lost the confidence of the demos, the people in whose name it governs.
But the big difference between the brief reign of explicit fascism then and now is that in the 1930s and 1940s, democracy in the U.S. was strong and getting stronger. Today, American democracy is weak and under assault from multiple quarters. So is democracy throughout the West.
As a palpable threat to democracy, the deliberate undermining of elections gets plenty of attention. But the deeper threats to democracy are pervasive corruption and militarism.
The Federalist Papers expressed two deep concerns of the Founders. One was the risk that autocratic rule, either of minorities or of temporary majorities, would overpower republicanism. But the other prime concern was corruption, whether by money or foreign governments or the seductions of power.
Today, corruption is so ubiquitous that we almost take it for granted. Money crowds out democratic participation. Campaign spending routinely tips elections. It is assumed that most politicians, when they leave office, will take lucrative jobs and trade on their contacts for their own private enrichment. That’s just the way it is.
In ancient times, Cincinnatus was revered as exceptional. After great success as a military leader, he shunned office and “went back to the plow.” In voluntarily retiring, George Washington invoked Cincinnatus. Who is Cincinnatus today? Maybe Michael Dukakis, who became a college professor, or possibly Jimmy Carter. They are the exceptions. The Clintons and the Obamas became millionaires many times over. The Clinton Foundation has been a corporate laundry.
The corruption may be taken for granted, but it debases the system, and people notice. The premise that affirmative government can actually serve ordinary Americans keeps losing credibility, with good reason. Hence Trump.
The other source of debasement that doesn’t get enough attention is military. Ancient civilizations were mainly destroyed by wars. The entire fabric of urban design in ancient Sicily was devised to resist, or to launch, invasions.
We visited an exhibition about the work of Archimedes, a celebrated Greek resident of third-century BCE Siracusa and the world’s first mechanical engineer. Archimedes is best known for such inventions as levers and pulleys, but in fact much of what he invented was military.
In our own time, the blowback from two centuries of imperialist overreach is undermining democracy everywhere. Europe can’t handle the flow of immigrants and refugees from its former colonies. Slavery was an aspect of imperialism. Deep divisions over slavery undermined American democracy in 1789, in 1861, and continue to assault it today.
Likewise militarism. The U.S. was well on the way toward a sequel to the New Deal until the Vietnam debacle divided Democrats, and ushered in half a century of mostly Republican rule. The attacks of 9/11, itself the violent reaction to the West’s attempt to install puppet regimes in the Mideast, salvaged a feckless Bush administration and stimulated a new round of militarist misadventure, just as the Iranian Revolution against the U.S.-backed Shah destroyed Carter.
The entire Cold War era led to recurrent violations of personal liberties and the relentless expansion of a nondemocratic national security. Money that could be spent on human beings, enhancing the credibility of democratic government, instead goes to the military. Democrats don’t even debate this anymore.
In ancient times, democratic Athens was rivaled by militarist and autocratic Sparta. Today, the United States is no Athens. It is more like Sparta.
ONE CAN TELL A STORY about how each of these anti-democratic elements can yet be reversed, and America enjoys a new birth of democratic freedom. But even as the house optimist, I have to admit that the hopeful story is pretty far-fetched.
Democrats would have to win the 2022 midterm and the 2024 presidential election by large enough margins that they could deliver more tangible economic benefits to working-class voters, who have given up on both democracy and the Democratic Party in favor of Trumpism. Election deniers and would-be election thieves would need to be defeated soundly at the polls, and maybe in the criminal courts. At least two Supreme Court justices would need to die of natural causes, sooner rather than later. Somehow, the power of an activated citizenry would need to overcome the corrupting power of big money.
Could this happen? Conceivably. It is likely? No.
History displays instances where democracy came back from the dead, but they are precious few. One is the American experience during and after the Civil War, a woefully incomplete victory. It was a miracle that Lincoln became president and saved the Union. But he was murdered before he could complete the business of binding up the nation’s wounds and enhancing democracy. What followed was an era of corrupt bargains, weak presidencies, and a reversion to quasi-slavery with Jim Crow.
History displays instances where democracy came back from the dead, but they are precious few.
Another is Germany after World War II. Ironically, of all the European democracies, Germany today is best bolstered against neofascism. That didn’t just happen accidentally. It took a national commitment to revisiting the past, to reflection and reparation. But it also took a catastrophic defeat in a war. Nothing comparable is on the horizon for the U.S.
Climate change poses its own perils to democracy. The costs of dealing with climate change will reduce money available to spend on other needs. The consequences of climate change will raise the costs of food and water. They will be experienced as one more failure of democratic government. Dictators, actual and aspiring, who are heedless of science, will promise magical solutions. There will be more climate refugees, more xenophobic responses, more conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, and more extreme nationalism.
This also has precedent in antiquity. There was an immense burst of volcanic activity around 530-540 CE. This sequence of eruptions triggered what scientists call the “Little Ice Age,” when much colder temperatures lasted for more than a century. Those climate changes in turn disrupted agriculture and caused plagues and starvation, triggering migrations and invasions from Central Asia, directed against Rome.
I PLANNED THIS TRIP TO SICILY as a brief escape and a personal indulgence. It became a reminder that there is no escape from history.
I opened this essay with a caution against defeatism and despair. One thing does give me a little cause for optimism: The walls are finally closing in on Donald Trump. The remnants of American democracy are proving stronger than the pessimists have feared. Though corrupted courts are determined to destroy the administrative state and to subordinate personal liberties to theocratic conceptions of freedom, even Trump-appointed judges have had a bellyful of Trump.
History, both ancient and modern, is filled with examples of Caesarists. It is hard to think of one who is more of a discredit to his own cause than Donald Trump. His shabbiness must give pause even to his defenders, and he is finally being called to account. Even so, in ancient times one autocrat gave way to another, and Trump might be succeeded by a more competent neofascist.
But Trump’s long-deferred crack-up will damage Trumpism, and the decline and fall of Trump may yet spare us the decline and fall of American democracy. If so, it will be a very long road back.
