Breaking History - How Republics Unravel: From Rome to…America? (From the Honestly Archives)

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

*This episode originally ran on September 26, 2024 on Honestly with Bari Weiss*  In September 2024, a man armed with an assault rifle was apprehended on a southern Florida golf course. He was planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second near miss in two months. It seems likely that the shooter, Ryan Routh, was acting alone. But he is not alone in the hatred he has for Trump. He shares that with millions of Americans. In many people’s eyes, the 45th president of the United States is an existential threat to our republic. And ever since Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, his opponents have treated him as such.   They were shocked because Trump broke many of the rules of modern politics. From the minor to the unprecedentedly major. This dynamic between Trump and his haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked the country when he led rallies where his adoring fans chanted, “Lock her up.” Eight years later, crowds chant “Lock him up” at Kamala Harris’s rallies. In this respect, Routh is part of a larger problem that is tearing our country apart. When the other side vying for power is considered so beyond the pale, the norms of political decorum and fairness are worth breaking to stop an opponent that threatens our very system. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an “extinction-level event.” If Kamala wins, our country will become “Venezuela on steroids.”  One escalation begets the next, as Eli Lake explains, until the old customs and rules of our politics have changed forever. We take it for granted today that we settle our elections with voting and not shooting. But republics don’t last forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows.   What leads a republic to choose the gun over the ballot? Because it doesn’t happen all at once, at least if history is any guide. In ancient Rome, the rule-breaking of one man—and the response of his enemies—created a crisis from which the Roman republic never really recovered. His name was Tiberius Gracchus. And while they were different in many ways, he was the Donald Trump of his day.  Tiberius, like Trump, was an elite who turned on the elites, a class traitor who channeled the resentments and anger of the common man against a system rigged against him. Both men disregarded the unwritten political rules of their era. And, in turn, those norm violations prompted their enemies to disregard the rules themselves. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed and eventually the death of the republic itself. In America, we remain a republic, for now, but the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents strains our foundations like no political crisis since the civil war. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Travel moves us. We are continuing our breaking news live coverage after the FBI says it is investigating what appears to be an attempted assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump. We are told the former president is saying... Last week, a man armed with an assault rifle was apprehended on a southern Florida golf course. He was planning to murder Donald Trump on the links. It was the second near miss in two months. Now, it seems very likely that the shooter, Ryan Ralph, was acting alone.

But he is not alone in the hatred he has for Trump. He shares that with millions of Americans. In many, many people's eyes, the 45th president of the United States is an existential threat to our republic. And ever since Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016, his opponents have treated him as such. They were shocked because Donald Trump broke many of the rules of modern politics. From the minor. He referred to my hands. If they're small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there's no problem.

I guarantee. To the unprecedentedly major. Are you now acknowledging that you lost in 2020? No, I don't acknowledge that at all. I said that sarcastically, you know that. We said, oh, we lost by a whisker. That was said sarcastically. Look, there's so much proof.

All you have to do is look at it. And they should have sent it back to the legislatures for approval. I got almost 75 million votes. The most votes any sitting president has ever gotten. This dynamic between Trump and his haters has changed the chemistry of American politics. In 2016, Trump shocked the country when he led rallies where his adoring fans chanted, lock her up. Eight years later,

crowds chant, lock him up at Kamala Harris rallies. When the other side vying for power is considered so beyond the pale, the norms of political decorum and fairness are worth breaking to stop an opponent that threatens our very system. You hear it from both parties. Trump is an extinction-level event. He's a Russian asset. If Kamala wins, our country will become Venezuela on steroids. So one escalation begets the next until the old

customs and rules of our politics have changed forever. We take it for granted today that we settle our elections with voting and not shooting. But republics don't last forever. And when they fall, violence almost always follows. And that's what today's episode is about. What leads a republic to choose the gun over the ballot? Because it doesn't happen all at once, at least if history is any guide. In ancient Rome, the rule-breaking of one man and the response of his enemies created a crisis from which the Roman Republic never really recovered. His name was Tiberius Gracchus, and while they were different in many ways, he was the Donald Trump of his day.

Tiberius, like Trump, was an elite who turned on the elites, a class traitor who channeled the resentments and anger of the common man against the system rigged against him. Both men disregarded the unwritten political rules of their era, and in turn, those norm violations prompted their enemies to disregard the rules themselves. In Rome, this cycle led to bloodshed and eventually the death of the Republic itself. You see this escalation very quickly. With Tiberius Gracchus, he crosses some lines, sets some precedents, and then they suppress him in a way that sets an even worse precedent.

This is historian of ancient Rome, Adrian Goldsworthy. Once you break those conventions, it's just, it's very, very hard to go back. Tiberius Gracchus' career certainly marks a major moment because they don't recover. In America, we remain a republic for now. But the cycle of escalations between Trump and his opponents strains our foundations like no other political crisis

since the Civil War. From the Free Press, this is Honestly. I'm Eli Lake. And today, what the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic tells us about the fate of our own republic, after the break. You've reached your 5 to 50 B-5. The Capitol Police 1 advisor trying to breach chaos of January 6th. The culmination of Donald Trump's efforts to steal back an election he claimed was stolen from him, from the same forces that had smeared and defamed him during his presidency. It was Trump's most serious norm violation. He attempted to send slates of fake electors to Congress

to delay the certification of the election. He would not recognize he lost. The ballot is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you, we're going to walk down, we're going to walk down, anyone you want, but I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol. After Trump's speech, a mob of supporters broke into the Capitol. We have a breach of the Capitol! Breach of the Capitol!

Menaced and mobbed the legislators, in some cases wielding crude weapons. Now I want you to imagine January 6th in reverse. This time, a mob of angry senators are the ones rioting after an election, breaking the legs off their chairs to fashion clubs. This time, the people being attacked are supporting a populist leader who had just won an election. That is where the story of Tiberius Gracchus ends. His enemies believed he wanted

to be a king because he broke the unwritten rules of the Roman Republic. He used his power to remove a rival from office. He ran for an unprecedented second consecutive term and flagrantly usurped the power of Rome's Senate to set foreign and fiscal policy. This is how the BBC series Rome, the Rise and Fall of an Empire, portrayed the scene. This election is illegal. Tiberius Gracchus is starting a revolution. We must break up this election. We don't have the right.

We can't interfere. No right? What right does he to overthrow us? The rules Tiberius broke and the rules his rivals broke in response would change Rome forever. Is this the blueprint for America's future? So the problem that the Republicans are having right now is very similar to what was going on in Rome. They have a choice to make. This is historian Victor Davis Hanson.

To restore deterrence, they have to stop that. But if they were to stop it using the same mechanisms, then you go into a doom loop where each side is going to be doing this, and you unwind the constitution. So somebody has to play the adult, kind of the Mitt Romney idea of politics, where I'd rather lose nobly than win ugly. And they have to say, if Trump wins, we're not going to have a special prosecutor to go after all the Biden family. We're not going to try to, in the next election, get them off the ballot. I'm sure you've heard last year's trend of American men confessing on TikTok. Heard about this new trend going around on social media and especially TikTok.

Okay, it's polling men on whether or not they think about the Roman Empire, and if they do, how often? Hey babe, do you ever think about the Roman Empire? I mean, at least twice a day. Really? Sure. How often they think about the Roman Empire. Well, I'm slightly different.

I'm not obsessed with Rome's empire. I'm obsessed with what preceded the empire, the Roman Republic. Empires are a dime a dozen in human history. They rise and fall, from Babylon to the Soviet Union. But republics, a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the people, these are orchids, rare, precious, and fleeting. If you take the long view of human history, tyranny is the norm. A system that checks the power of its leaders and legislators

and makes them accountable to citizens but protects minorities from mob rule? That's special. Requires a lot of tinkering. And I guess I'm biased. I'm an American alive in 2024. And we still have a republic. And our republic is based on Rome's. Now, it's not a perfect comparison. After all, the Romans were quite strange to us. They believed their great city was founded by a guy called Romulus who sucked on the teat of a lactating wolf as an infant. They worshipped a pantheon of vengeful gods and believed the entrails of beasts and the patterns of birds could tell the future. So their republic in some ways is quite alien to our experience. For example, the Roman Republic had the equivalent of two presidents

known as councils who would serve one-year terms together. The powerful Senate, comprised of the elites known as the patricians, and later what the Romans would call new men, were also the Republic's military leaders. And the Roman Republic in its military policy, well, it was unconscionably cruel most of the time. I mean, they were genocidal. When Rome went to war with its enemies, in many cases, it wiped them off the map entirely. Also, strangely, the Roman Republic had no actual constitution, and many of its rules were gentlemanly handshake agreements, understood as part of the long-standing traditions of the ruling class. We can look at any political system almost from a legal standpoint, but it's as true of the most modern and We can look at any political system almost from a legal standpoint,

but it's as true of the most modern and formal constitution as of a more informal state like the Romans with a collection of law. This is Adrian Goldsworthy again. There are the laws, there are the rules, but then there are the conventions that everybody sort of plays the game and does things in a certain way, and there are lines they don't cross. There are things they don't do. But the similarities are nonetheless striking. Both the Roman and American republics emerged initially out of revolutions against kings. We have a house and a senate. The Romans had a senate and three different popular assemblies. Both republics also were stained by

slavery. The Romans didn't have political parties the way we do, but they did have politics. There were great debates in the Roman Senate over how powers and privileges were divided across society. And in both the Roman and American republics, the rights of regular citizens expanded over time. Between 494 and 287 BCE, the Roman Republic endured a period of reform known as the Conflict of Orders. For more than 200 years, the have-nots pressured the haves to expand liberty to all men, not though notably women. The plebeians, the largest community in Roman society, wanted political representation. You've had this fundamental division between the really old aristocracy, the patricians, you know, we still use that word now today to refer to

somebody who's of, you know, blue-blooded with all the wealth and connections, and then the plebeians, it was everybody else that's 95% of Roman society. Over time, a lot of plebeians get wealthier and wealthier, and many of the others are sufficiently established that they want more rights. So the conflict of the orders is really between these two. You're very old aristocracy, and then a whole range of people, some of them wealthy, some of them poor, some of them even wealthier than the old aristocrats by this time, but who feel they ought to be represented. Now, eventually the plebeians prevailed. A new position was created, and their political representative was known as the Tribune of the Plebs. The Romans usually had ten of them.

The tribunes could veto legislation and introduce laws as well. They could make citizen arrests. They were the common man's voice inside the Republic. And most important, it was strictly forbidden to do any violence to a tribune if he was inside the city of Rome. After the conflict of orders, Rome was still a regional power, the most powerful state in Italy, but over the next 150 years, it would become the most powerful state in the known world. To get there, Rome had to become a brutal military machine, and its history is littered by momentous bloody battles. One of the most significant was in 146 BCE,

when Roman legions erased the once mighty Carthaginians from history. From now on, nothing can challenge the power of Rome. But we're not finished. I want this damn city taken apart. Reduce it to dust. And we'll plow the dust with salt so not even weeds will grow in memory of Carthage. The city was burned to the ground. One of the junior officers present at that historic moment was Tiberius Gracchus, the man who changed everything. Tiberius was a blue blood. His father, Tiberius the Elder, was a military hero who twice served

as consul. He was a two-term Roman president, basically. His mother, Cornelia, was the daughter of a great decorated general. After Tiberius the Elder died, Cornelia remained unmarried at one point, declining a marriage offer from the king of Egypt. She instead chose to focus on her two surviving sons, Tiberius and his younger brother Gaius, who she would call her two jewels. They wanted for nothing. They were tutored by the best Greek philosophers and molded to become future leaders of Rome. By the time Tiberius was a young man, he seemed destined for greatness. The Rome Tiberius was born into had a peculiar problem, not unlike the one America faces today. It was a victim of its own success. Taking over the entire Mediterranean world had made Rome so rich that by 146 BCE, when Carthage falls,

Rome stopped taxing its citizens. There was no need. Every few months, wagons filled with silver, ivory, and gold would come into the city, a portion of which would go to the Republic. And this was glorious for the patrician elite. But just as globalization has enriched America's coastal elites, leaving factory workers, truck drivers, and middle Americans behind, the wealth flowing into Rome did little for the plebeians. Give us the men, we'll go out, take the land, we'll send

back slaves, we'll spend back gold, and then we will confiscate land overseas and make military colonies. This is Victor Davis Hanson again. And that gave them enormous power. And so the republic was not equipped to handle a global empire. This endless flow of treasure relied on endless warfare. A massive military was needed to invade, hold, and milk foreign lands. So the republic relied on conscription. Citizen farmers would be drafted into the army for years at a time. Often, when they returned home, their neglected farms were

in disrepair. At this point, the wealthy patrician elites would swoop in and offer a below-market price for the land. The desperate farmers would have no choice but to accept these terrible terms. Once they owned the farms, the patricians would not employ the farmer to work his old land. It was far more profitable to use slave labor. It was sort of like $9 trillion in market capitalization that came into Silicon Valley the last 30 years. A person like Mark Zuckerberg or the Google people, they have more clout, political influence, and money. And the same token is when we went into globalization, it was very similar like Rome. There were other people who were muscular in nature, assembly, construction, oil, gas, farming, just physical labor, that their jobs were either outsourced or offshored.

And we kind of hollowed out the middle. And that created this tension that we see in the United States. And it's very similar to Rome, that the middle classes felt the empire really hadn't helped them, that all it did was dump slaves in that took their jobs. And then if they did have a job, it was in the army, and they had to go out 16 years and fight somewhere. So a farmer is forced to go to war to make money for the elite rulers. In his absence, his farm collapses. So the same is forced to go to war to make money for the elite rulers. In his absence, his farm collapses. So the same elites take this farm for next to nothing. Then they staff all farms with slaves, effectively eliminating the job of farmer,

profitable as hell for the patricians, but an incredibly raw deal for that farmer. And this was a political problem for the Republic because Rome relied on the plebeians and small landowners, such as farmers, to fight their forever wars. They needed them invested, not rebellious. And so, just like our politicians today, the patrician senate sat around and argued on what to do about it. One faction didn't want to do anything. It wasn't as if the farmers weren't paid in booty from Roman conquest abroad, they were. So what's the problem? But another group disagreed, and they wanted reform. Rome needed war to make money, wars needed soldiers, and these soldiers would not fight if it meant losing their farms. The reformers favored measures such as appointing public lands to the plebes. You might say it was

the socialism of antiquity. Before Tiberius was a politician, like most Roman elites, he was a soldier. His second campaign was against a tribe known as the Numantine in what is today Spain. He served under the command of an incompetent Roman consul, Mancius. Under Mancius' disastrous command, the legions fell into a trap and 20,000 Roman soldiers were surrounded, certain to die, and would have, had Tiberius not interceded. He went over the head of the commander to negotiate a truce with the Numantines, and here it is portrayed in the BBC series Ancient Rome, The Rise and Fall of an Empire. My terms are... Your terms? My terms are that you free our men and allow them to return in safety.

And what do we get? Equality with Rome and a lasting peace. Rome will agree to that. I speak for Rome as my father did. The tribe ransacked the Roman camp, as you would expect, but allowed the legion to depart for Rome unscathed, a triumph of military pragmatism for the young Tiberius, one might think. Well, no.

None of this played well back in Rome, as the ancient Greek historian Plutarch wrote in his splendid volume of biographies, Lives, quote, on his return to Rome, the whole transaction was greatly blamed as dishonorable and disgraceful, end quote. The Senate then voted to strip Manchus of his consulship, put him in chains, and sent him back to the Numantines. If you want to know why the Romans were so successful in warfare, this story is instructive. Generals who lost battles were punished severely, not given cushy jobs on the boards of defense firms. The Senate did not officially censure Tiberius, but they

heaped abuse on him nonetheless. For an ambitious young Roman on the make, this was a major setback, and yet there was a significant silver lining that would inform Tiberius' future as a populist. Here I want to read from Plutarch again, quote, The kinsfolk and friends of the soldiers, who were a large part of the people, crowded about Tiberius, charging the general with a disgraceful part of what had happened, and declaring that Tiberius had been the savior of so many citizens, end quote. In other words, the families of the soldiers whose lives Tiberius saved rushed to his defense. He was their hero. Tiberius earned contempt from the conservatives in the Senate, but bolstered his reputation with the plebes, this would become a pattern. Tiberius was clever and ambitious. He knew how to play his hand. If he was loved by the people, he would build his political power through them. And so he decided to run for tribune of the plebs. He would represent the common man,

and in turn, they would elevate him to office. This is the beginning of his comeback. Theoretically, the Tribune of the Plebs was a powerful position. In reality, though, the Tribunes rarely made waves as the patricians bought most of them off. Tiberius would be different. He may have been a blue blood, related to the oldest families of the Senate, but Tiberius was genuinely distressed by the treatment of Rome's dispossessed farmers and their terrible living conditions. On a journey through Tuscany, Tiberius noted political graffiti scrawled on signposts in the countryside, raging that the farms they once owned were purchased on the cheap. These were the victims of the globalization of antiquity. Tiberius thought this was an outrage. This conviction would lead him to challenge the establishment of Rome like no other reformer before him. It started with a piece of

legislation known as the Lex Agraria, or the Land Bill. It proposed that public lands be apportioned to small Roman farmers. The complication was that much of the public land that technically belonged to the Republic had been in effect swallowed up by the elite patrician megafarmers. So the law also allowed compensation to the Roman families that had effectively taken over these public lands. It was, in many ways, a compromise. Tiberius introduced the legislation in the People's Assembly. The speech Tiberius gave to argue for the lexigraria is a stemwinder for the ages. Here is the version recorded by Plutarch. The wild beasts of Italy had their dens and holes and hiding places,

while the men who fought and died in defense of Italy enjoyed indeed the air and the light, but nothing else. Houseless and without a spot of ground to rest upon, they wander about with their wives and children, while their commanders, with a lie in their mouth, exhort the soldiers in battle to defend their tombs and temples against the enemy. For out of so many Romans, not one has a family altar or ancestral tomb. But they fight to maintain the luxury and wealth of others, and they die with the title of Lords of the Earth,

without possessing a single patch of earth to call their own. Now, Donald Trump probably could never dream of hitting that level of eloquence. I mean, no offense to him, that is one of the great speeches of all time. But if you go back to his inaugural address... January 20th, 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. Well, you can see the similarities. American citizens are being deprived of their birthright

by the moneyed elites. You could say Tiberius wanted to make Rome great again in the way that Donald Trump wanted to make America great again. And this high-octane populism from Tiberius Gracchus was just the kind of thing that scared the togas off the conservatives in the Senate. The rise and fall of Tiberius Gracchus and the Roman Republic, after the break. The Roman system, like our own, relied on unwritten customs or norms in addition to formal law to keep the delicate republic in balance. This was known as Maus Majorum, or the Way of the Elders,

and Tiberius Gracchus was about to steamroll these norms in order to pass the land bill. He was about to violate Roman norms, and there would be consequences. The Senate's response to the bill, well, it was sneaky. They found a more pliant tribute, Marcus Octavius, to be their proxy inside the People's Assembly, and Octavius vetoed the their proxy inside the People's Assembly, and Octavius vetoed the introduction of the bill time and again. Tiberius at first tried to reason with Octavius in debate. He even offered to compensate him for any loss of property he might incur

personally. But none of it worked. He took a drastic step. He argued that a tribune that defied the will of the people was no tribune at all, and called for a vote to strip Octavius of his office. That had never been done before. The way of the elders be damned. After the plebs voted to give Octavius the boot, Tiberius dispatched one of his bodyguards to physically remove him from the rostra, a humiliating spectacle, and then to add insult to injury. The plebs then chased Octavius away. In the fracas, one of his slaves had his eyes gouged out. Yikes. So imagine if you're a blue blood senator at this point and you're watching

all of this. You're horrified. Never in Rome's history had a tribune used his power like this. Nevertheless, we have to say the gambit worked. With Octavius gone, the land bill passed easily and became Roman law. Tiberius then created a three-person land commission to assess the republic's public lands and begin distributing them to the dispossessed farmers. The commission he created was conveniently composed of himself, his father-in-law, and his little brother, Gaius Gracchus. The Senate conservatives seethed. Their next move was one that any contemporary politician would find familiar.

They couldn't stop the land reform bill from becoming law, so they did the next best thing and starved the land commission of funding. And that may have been the end of the lexigraria land bill. But Tiberius and the reformers got lucky. Attalus, the king of Pergamum, a wealthy territory on the western coast of modern-day Turkey, well, he died. And in his will, he bequeathed his entire kingdom to the people of Rome. Tiberius wanted this new wealth to fund his land reform.

So he stood in front of the People's Assembly and in his impressive way argued that this money should go to the Land Commission because Attalus left his fortune to the Roman people, not to Rome. And here he committed another norm violation. By Roman custom, at least, it was the Senate, not the People's Assembly, that voted on Rome's finances and foreign policy. The status of what was to become of the kingdom of Pergamum was by custom for the Senate to decide, and when Tiberius put the matter to the People's Assembly, the Senate was understandably furious. As Michael Duncan writes in his history of this period, The Storm Before the Storm,

quote, the Senate met in a furious session to denounce Tiberius as a reckless demagogue aiming to make himself a tyrannical despot, end quote. Sound familiar? Recall Donald Trump has openly vowed if re-elected to be a dictator on day one. He'd be a dictator on day one. A campaign release, it said, quote, Donald Trump isn't just echoing the words of Hitler and Mussolini by saying he will root out vermin from within. He's planning real action to follow in their footsteps, unquote. At this point, we have to introduce another character in the drama. He's a senator who was also a high religious official known as the Pontificus Maximus.

His name was Nasica, and he hated the land reform bill. He hated how Tiberius ran roughshod over the ways of the elders. Who was this young tribune who thinks he can ignore tradition and strip authority from the Senate? The next move from Tiberius would confirm all of Nasica's suspicions. He would run for an unprecedented second consecutive term as Tribune of the Plebs. Again, if there was a rule against it, it was an unwritten rule. But nonetheless, it was unprecedented. Now, the people had to vote for him, Tiberius said, because if he wasn't re-elected as Tribune, the Senate would prosecute him and the lexigraria would be a dead letter. So Tiberius, with a flair for the dramatic, campaigned in black mourning clothes as if to

suggest he may even be killed if he lost the election. As the voting got started, Tiberius' supporters flooded the hill near the Temple of Jupiter, where the assembly met, and controlled the area where the votes were to be tallied. Across the plain in the Senate, Nasica boiled. He employed the council at the time to stop this affront to Roman tradition. Tiberius Gracchus was becoming a king, a tyrant, he warned. If he is not stopped, then we will lose the republic forever. But those pleas fell on deaf ears. The council at the time only promised to stop Tiberius if he violated a law, but he would not condone violence against a Roman citizen, let alone another tribune, without a trial. Nausicaa then says, according to Plutarch,

quote, well then, as the council betrays the state, to those who wish to maintain the laws, follow me. At this point, Nausicaa pulled his toga over his head and led a mob of like-minded senators to the hill outside the temple where the voting was taking place. They broke the legs off of tables and chairs and began filing through the crowd, swinging their crude clubs at the plebs as they approached Tiberius. Plutarch writes that Tiberius was attempting to escape the mob, but he was tripped to the ground. As he attempted to get up, a fellow tribune clubbed his head with the leg of a bench. Another senator struck him again. Tiberius was beaten to death, along with 300 of his plebeian supporters. After the bloodbath, the dead, Tiberius Gracchus included,

were denied a proper burial. Their bodies were thrown into the Tiber River. This riot was the first political violence in the Roman Republic since the Conflict of Orders. It would not be the last. Nausicaa broke the prohibition against political violence inside of Rome, and that prohibition would never be restored. The next century for Rome was soaked in blood.

The Republic was now stuck in a cycle of escalating violence. Nausicaa was never prosecuted for leading the lynch mob, normalizing violence inside the Republic in a cycle of escalating violence. Nazica was never prosecuted for leading the lynch mob, normalizing violence inside the Republic in a sense. So it's not surprising that a decade later, when Tiberius's brother Gaius Gracchus proposed even more sweeping reforms, the conservatives killed him too. Over time, because conscription was becoming more difficult, various warlords arose who commanded their own private militias. The old norm of Roman councils serving only a year at a time, well, that went out the window.

The old safeguards against putting too much power in the hands of one man were eroding. Rome would be ruled by dictator generals for stretches at a time. Eventually, three Roman leaders, Pompey, Crassus, and Julius Caesar emerged. They trampled on Rome's remaining political traditions and customs. After Caesar, Rome is a republic in name only. The Senate still met, but it no longer had the power over affairs of the Roman state. A century of norm violations had gelded this once mighty republic. Savor the irony.

Nacica and his allies in the Senate thought they were preventing a king from destroying the republic in 133 BCE when they murdered Tiberius Gracchus. And yet, it was that murder, that massive norm violation, that planted the seeds for Rome to be ruled by an emperor. Well, in both cases, in the Trump case and in both Gawkeye brothers, the establishment felt that these populist or revolutionary figures had agendas that transcended the usual political parameters. This is Victor Davis Hanson again. They were trying to create a movement of lower middle class people to gain more economic clout, more political clout, and which invariably would challenge the sobriety of the Senate or the existing mechanisms, and that they were very talented rhetoricians.

We know that the Grokha could speak better than almost anybody. And they had this constituency that they couldn't quite control, and people said at the time, if we don't intervene, these people have an ability to change the culture and social life of Rome. Our exalted ends are so valuable and so morally superior that almost any means necessary to achieve them will be justified. So what does this teach us about today? The lesson of Tiberius Gracchus is that republics are fragile. The laws as well as the unwritten rules of our politics,

only work when they are observed by all parties. When one side chooses to transgress the norms of our politics, it is an invitation for the other side to do the same, even if the rules were violated for the most noble of reasons. The American Senator Frank Church summed up this idea as follows. Crisis makes attempting to ignore the wise restraints that make men free. In Rome, the crisis posed by Tiberius tempted Nausicaa to lead a mob that murdered him. The result was that violence, which was miraculously absent from Roman Republican politics until this episode, became common. We're going to walk down to the Capitol. The crisis posed by Donald Trump tempted Democrats

to warp the justice system into a partisan weapon. It tempted the elite media to lash itself to the Democratic Party. It tempted the FBI to pursue a meritless investigation into the sitting president long after the flimsy theory of Russian collusion was debunked by the FBI's own investigators. It tempted state legislatures to try to remove Trump's name from the presidential ballot.

Every one of these norm violations were justified in their minds to stop a dictator, a traitor, an orange monster. When you look at the Trump odyssey, there were so many firsts. He was the first person, really, that when you look at the whole history of Russian collusion and the Mueller and then the Russian disinformation laptop farce, and then the first person to be impeached twice, the first person to be tried as a private citizen, the first person to have, as a major candidate, states try to remove him from the ballot, the first person to have state, local, and federal prosecutors

synchronizing their indictments in the campaign year. And then you add into that the assassination attempt, and you get the impression that the modern political establishment just said that he's beyond the pale. They had a visceral dislike of the way he looked, the way he talked. The people who showed up at his rallies, they were sort of like in the amphitheaters at Rome. And they were unruly and crude. And they came to the conclusion that they were the self-appointed protectors of Roman traditions and customs and politics, and any means necessary were justified to get rid of Trump.

So consider this a warning. Nausicaa's lynch mob believed their actions were justified to prevent an ambitious tribune from becoming king. In an effort to save the Republic, Nausicaa paved the way to its ruin. The Romans went from the rule of law to the rule of the emperor in a century. In two years, our Republic turns 250. We've survived a civil war and a few lone gunmen. Compared to Rome, our January 6th really wasn't so bad. After the mob was dismissed, Congress finished certifying the 2020 election. We've been lucky. So were the Romans,

until Tiberius Gracchus. I'm Eli Lake of the Free Press. You've been listening to Honestly. If you like this content, please go to thefp.com.