gracchusdixit

Three hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Roman Republic fought three life-and-death wars against a nation of merchant adventurers called the Carthaginians, who had migrated from the Levant to establish a fabulously rich trading city on the coast of North Africa.  As the Romans were extending their influence up and down the Italian peninsula, the enterprising Carthaginians were planting colonies throughout the western Mediterranean.  It was inevitable that these two expansive empires would clash.  And so they did.

In their first confrontation, Rome eked out a victory—just barely.  But Carthage remained unbowed, and, before long, one of the most famous generals in history, Hannibal Barca, led a Carthaginian army over the Alps from his base in Spain, determined to make the Romans pay for his country’s humiliation.  For 20 years, he roamed up and down the long spine of Italy like a ravening wolf, defeating one Roman army after another.  The stubborn Romans finally realized that they were never going to get the better of Hannibal on the battlefield, so they adopted a strategy of evasion and delay.  It worked.  When Hannibal’s financial and political capital ran out, the Romans turned the tables by invading his homeland, and he was recalled to take charge of the defense.

In 202 BC, not far from the modern city of Tunis, the mighty Carthaginian general at last met his match in a cunning Roman commander known to history as Scipio Africanus.  Having studied the tactics of his foe, Scipio drilled his legions to counter Hannibal’s every move.  Which is precisely what happened.  Defeated at last, the great Hannibal was forced to flee, ending up in a small, obscure town on the southern shore of the Black Sea, where he hoped simply to disappear.  To no avail.  The relentless Romans hunted him down and took his head.  They also took what remained of Carthaginian wealth and military might.

By any rational standard, this should have ended the matter altogether.  But it wasn’t enough to satisfy a stubborn and irascible Roman senator named Marcus Porcius Cato.  In his eyes, the mere existence of Carthage, no matter how humbled, posed a mortal threat.  At the conclusion of every meeting of the Roman Senate, Cato stood up, wrapped himself in the folds of his blindingly white woolen toga, and declared:  “Carthago delenda est.”  “Carthage must be destroyed.” 

Many of Cato’s fellow senators loathed the man, but they were eventually pummeled into submission and declared a final war on Carthage.  The outcome was by then inevitable.  The citizens of Carthage were slaughtered or sold into slavery, its walls and temples were demolished, and the very soil that had once sustained its population was sown with salt.  This pitiless end to centuries of strife secured the safety of the Roman Republic and paved the way for the steady, relentless march of its empire.

Today, more than 2,000 years after the Roman Republic faced the Carthaginian threat, our own American republic is confronting a crisis no less dire.  If we hope to survive it, we might learn something from the steely—one might even say, cruel—resolve of the ancient Romans.

The threat to our republic doesn’t come from geopolitical foes; it doesn’t come from the foreign terrorists; and it doesn’t come from hordes of desperate and harmless immigrants gathering at the southern border.  It comes from within.  In fact, it comes from one of our two major political parties and from the members of that party who have embraced the traitorous delusions of Donald Trump.

A Democratic Congressman recently lamented that the financial future of the nation was being held hostage because one of our two major political parties is “crazy”.   If the Republican Party were crazy in a strictly clinical sense, there might be some hope of a cure.    The dispiriting reality is less tractable.  The Republican Party isn’t medically crazy;  it is morally crazy.  Having abandoned every pretense of being a legitimate political institution, it has become nothing less than a criminal and seditious enterprise, determined to gain and retain power at any cost.  

There was a time, no so very long ago, when Republicans would at least pretend to care about democracy and the constitution.  That time is gone.  The political agenda of the Republican Party now resides entirely in fueling discontent, no matter how delusional.  

The Republican minority leader of the Senate openly boasts that his sole purpose is to undermine the agenda of the elected President of the United States, thereby defying the will of the majority of the American people.  The Republican minority leader of the House of Representatives, after egging on those who sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election, now defends those who stormed the Capitol of the United States as guiltless patriots.  The Republican appointees who control the Supreme Court no longer bother to hide their ideological biases or blatant conflicts of interest; on the contrary, they make speeches justifying them and gladly accept lavish fees for doing so.  Republican-controlled state legislatures across the land make no apologies for committing the most flagrant acts of voter suppression since the days of Jim Crow.

All of this amounts to a barely concealed coup d’état by which a political, social, and religious minority of Americans intend to impose their so-called “values” on the rest of the nation.  Confronting this coup d’état, most liberals are either tongue-tied or twist themselves into intellectual knots when forced to grapple with the practical question of what is to be done.  The very qualities that make liberals “liberal” in the first place—tolerance, a regard for reason, a respect for the preservation of social and political “norms”—also make them ill-equipped to deal with political opponents who don’t give a damn for any of those things.  As a result, the political terrorists who run the Republican Party are able to run rings around their well-meaning but feckless opponents on the left.

We have seen this tragedy before.  In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the “moderate” Alexander Kerensky was quickly steamrolled by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.  In the 1920s, the enlightened patriots who had united Italy after centuries of division and conflict could not prevent Mussolini and his fascist thugs from hijacking their work.  Not long after, the liberals in charge of Germany’s Weimar Republic proved to be utterly feckless when Hitler and his stormtroopers bullied their way into power.

There are those on the left—including the current President of the United States—who still cling to the belief that right-wing thuggery can be defeated by reason, that Americans will opt for decency over demagoguery, that good will inevitably triumph over evil.  These beliefs would be laudable if they weren’t so hopelessly naive.  They are, in any event, profoundly dangerous.

The only way to quash this conflagration is to fight fire with fire.  If liberals hope to have any chance of saving our democracy from those who would destroy it, they must be no less relentless than their foes.  Right-wing members of the House and Senate who conspired in the assault on the Capitol should be expelled from Congress.  Federal and state officials who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election should be tried, and, if judged guilty, imprisoned.  Judges who have compromised themselves for partisan purposes, up to and including current members of the Supreme Court of the United States, should be impeached and removed.  Just as a Republican president named Dwight David Eisenhower once sent federal troops to the former slave-states of the south to enforce the right of black students to attend public schools and universities, the current president, Joe Biden, should dispatch federal troops to those same states to prevent any attempt to suppress voting rights.

There is no compromising with the existential enemies of democracy.  If we do not destroy them, make no mistake about it:  they will destroy us.