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The Reincarnation of Julius Caesar or: Why So Many People Give Trump a Pass for Corruption
This is partly in response to the post by TheAntipopulist below, but at the same time I'm about to go off on a tangent about Julius Caesar so I thought I'd make this top level.
Donald Trump is, undeniably, the most openly corrupt President in modern US history. What I mean is, no other President has been so corrupt and yet done so little to hide it. He isn't even pretending not to be crooked.
So why do so many people not seem to care?
Let's go back in time 2,000 years and talk about the assassination of Julius Caesar.
To set the stage: Caesar was a charismatic politician in ancient Rome who rose to be the leader of the Populaire faction. As a Populaire he favored redistribution from the rich to the poor, especially in the form of land reform. He also practiced what he preached, giving lavishly to the people of Rome. Notably, he left a huge amount of money to the people in his will, a cash sum to every citizen that was large enough to make a difference in the lives of the poor. And this clause in his will was a secret - people only found out about it after he was assassinated! That means it wasn't just performative or ambitious, he really meant it.
He was also one of the most shameless criminals in Roman history.
As his opponents never ceased to point out, Caesar's conquest of Gaul was built on a series of wars that he illegally started without consulting the Senate. He bragged about how he could get away with anything by bribing judges and politicians. When two of his opponents won both of the two Consular seats (essentially co-Presidents), Caesar bought one of them off with a king-sized bribe and used him to block the other's legislative agenda with his veto power.
I want you to imagine the scope of this with an analogy: A younger Donald Trump gets himself elected to Congress and marches an army into Mexico on a flimsy pretext (invasion of illegal immigrants!). He starts a blatantly illegal war using a combination of US troops and local Mexican auxiliaries, and becomes a trillionaire by enslaving millions of Mexicans and plundering their treasure. Then an unfriendly Democratic government under Bill Clinton tries to attack him by passing a bill condemning his actions. In response, Trump pays President Clinton off with a bribe of 100 billion dollars and Clinton uses his veto to block the bill that he himself just proposed, and, in fact, campaigned on.
That is how corrupt Julius Caesar was.
The thing is, everyone else was also corrupt. Corruption was a load-bearing element of Roman politics. In order to win office, a politician needed to pay out bribes, throw games, build temples, and so on. This usually involved borrowing money or owing favors. It was inevitable that when that politician came to power and those debts came due he would need to leverage his office to repay what he owed. In other words, everyone was corrupt. Literally everyone.
Enter the Optimates, Rome's other major political faction.
The Optimates were against corruption in theory, but in practice they were also all corrupt. What they really wanted was quieter, less disruptive corruption. To keep it at a manageable level. To them, the way Caesar went around flaunting his crimes was the real problem. It was one thing to pay off a few Senators, but buying a Consul was going too far.
The thing is, the Optimates also reflexively opposed all attempts at actual reform. Caesar was the one who passed sweeping anti-corruption legislation that put limits on how much politicians could squeeze out of their offices, and even his opponents couldn't deny that these reforms were necessary.
It was not really a dispute about whether corruption was acceptable or unacceptable. I would argue that the Optimates' desire to sweep it all under the rug was actually a step in the wrong direction. Caesar talked about corruption openly, and having a problem out in the open is the first step to solving it.
Later on, Caesar was serving as proconsular governor of three provinces. This office made him immune from criminal prosecution, so even when his opponents were able to take power he was safe. But the Optimates knew that Caesar would run for Consul again as soon as the mandatory ten-year gap between Consulships expired. They wanted to stop him from passing more reforms or wealth redistribution schemes, and they knew that there was no possible chance that Caesar wouldn't win his election in a landslide, so they decided to find a way to get rid of him.
They found a dubious legal ambiguity that they argued would allow them to take away Caesar's immunity and bring him back to Rome to face trial. After a lengthy debate, the pro-Optimate Senate suspended the law and the Constitution and declared their version of martial law (the Senatus Consultum Ultimum) to force Caesar to step down. Caesar surprised them by marching on Rome with his army, and the rest is history. After a civil war, which Caesar won, and an election, which he also won, his enemies stabbed him to death on the floor of the Senate house.
But when they paraded through the streets declaring that a tyrant had been killed and Rome was free, they were not greeted by the cheers they were expecting. Wasn't Caesar ambitious? Wasn't he corrupt? Wasn't he plotting to make himself a king? Why didn't the people of Rome hate him like the Optimates did? Why weren't they happy the tyrant was dead?
Because the people of Rome were not happy with the status quo. They didn't care about the Republic, because that was just a system for deciding which wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They didn't care about the law, because that was just a system for deciding how the wealthy aristocrats would get to oppress them. They only cared that Caesar had given them games, feasts, and victory over the Gauls, and now he was dead.
Even the Optimates didn't try to deny that Caesar's reforms were necessary. They damned his memory but did not repeal his anti-corruption legislation.
Caesar's assassins did not get to enjoy their victory for long. When Caesar's will was read in public and the people of Rome found out that every adult male citizen had been left a part of Caesar's vast fortune, it started a riot. Caesar's assassins, who had attended the funeral in a show of peace and unity, had to flee the city in fear for their lives.
In the end, the people of Rome would riot to demand that Caesar's adopted son, Caesar Augustus, be installed as king. That's how little they cared about the Republic.
Augustus himself put the rebellion down. He didn't want or need to be king. He had already rigged the vestigial Republic so that he could rule in everything but name. The Roman Empire would go on pretending it was still a Republic for several centuries.
What to take from this? I don't think you can just measure two sides against each other and say, "This side is more shameless and blatant in their corruption, so they should be criticized more harshly." On one hand you could say that defying anti-corruption norms will erode them and make our society more corrupt. But on the other hand, bringing it out into the open might be necessary to kill it.
Now that Donald Trump is openly messing with US tax policy for personal gain with his combination of tariffs and insider trading, maybe that will be the catalyst to finally pass laws against using secret government intelligence to make money trading stocks. Maybe if it stayed at the level of Nancy Pelosi doing it under the table it would have gone on forever, but now that it's so blatant and so offensive it can be eliminated in one chaotic decade.
My intuition is that public crimes are actually less bad than secret ones. I would rather have it all out in the open.
I think this is cope. You want to draw a line from Caesar to Trump, but the comparison doesn't make any sense (for a lot of reasons, not just the corruption angle). Leave aside the question of whether or not Caesar was good in the long run. Caesar, in your telling, leveraged his position to try and enact reforms. By your own comparison (and also reality) Trump is not doing that. Trump is not a guy playing the game better than anyone else while pushing for reform. He's pushing for more power and getting rid of guardrails holding him back from more corruption. Instead, the argument is, essentially, that Trump being overtly terrible is a good thing because it will inspire others to enact reforms so it can't happen again.
The problem is that Trump commands the unfaltering loyalty of a base of supporters who are, to be charitable, absolutely clueless. They categorically reject any suggestion that he's corrupt. None of this "at least he's public about." No, Trump is the most honest and upright politician we've ever had. After all, he's a billionaire already. This base in turn demands public devotion to Trump to be part of the team, and if you're not an idiot that means Olympic-level mental gymnastics to rationalize the extraordinary corruption of the Trump administration.
My intuition is that corruption is always an iceberg. For every act of shameless public corruption there are a dozen hidden ones. Worse, because Trump is so blatantly, shamelessly corrupt and uncritical devotion to Trump is the bare minimum to be a Republican, you end up with a situation where one of the parties is essentially pro-corruption and actively resists attempts to fix the systems that allow Trump's abuses. If there was broad consensus that we needed to fix things in the future, the argument might make sense, but there's not and can't be because serious criticism of Trump is inadmissible in conservative politics right now. Thus we get this borderline parody of Murc's Law where Democrats are somehow at fault for Republican corruption.
Cope ... about what? As I understand it, if this is cope then I must be coping with something, such as a tragedy or the receipt of bad news. Have I received any bad news lately that I would need to cope about? I don't think I have.
This is just a theory of public attitudes about corruption in politics. I'm not saying that corruption is definitely going to be fixed for all time as a result of Trump's actions. I'm just trying to explain why so many people care so little about Trump's corruption allegations, for the benefit of the many people who seem to have trouble wrapping their heads around it.
What if this isn't true? What if there are icebergs of corruption floating invisibly beneath the surface, and political loyalty has driven people to ignore the sinking ships and pretend that nothing is wrong? In that case, the addition of a few acts of corruption above the surface (which by your own analogy is dwarfed the vast bulk of hidden corruption beneath the water) is really not that big a deal.
I think it's fair to say that if your intuition isn't true then America's government has a serious problem. Sure it would be nice if an absence of corruption out in the open meant an absence of corruption in secret, but that is a heck of an assumption isn't it? What if you're wrong?
I think your position requires you to argue that corruption in the US government wasn't widespread or problematic until Trump got involved. Which certainly is ... something that someone could say, if they felt so inclined. I find it difficult to believe.
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Your categories are incorrect. The people you claim to be "conservatives" really aren't any more- there are elements of that in their policies since they're pushing in a pro-classical-liberal direction (which is itself a conservative idea just due to age), but the factions have realigned. Traditional conservatism, as you know it, is dead.
Right now, the Conservatives are in fact the Democrat-aligned faction [education-managerial complex, bureaucrats and white-collar workers, welfare state/make-work beneficiaries], and the Reformers are the Republican coalition [military-industrial complex, kulaks and blue-collar workers, welfare state/make-work maleficiaries].
There are suggestions that he's corrupt from Conservatives. Of course, because Conservatives are extremely butthurt because the Reformers got elected, they claim corruption at every turn and expect me to believe it because of some misplaced sense of social propriety (which is just a defense mechanism, and an especially womanly one, that Conservatives expect to work- but that only works on social credit, and their social credit card's been declined after they put their response to the uncommon cold on it).
Reformers have trouble criticizing Reformers. Conservatives have trouble criticizing Conservatives. That much is known. Reformers tend to form cults of personality a lot easier than Conservatives do; that's also because Conservatives are the faction with no ideas.
And I'd be perfectly happy to accept a Conservative claim that Reform is corrupt, if it had factual backing. But I'm still not seeing it; what I'm seeing is stuff like "the law's finally getting applied fairly for once" (laws that Conservatives fought long and hard for), "institutional human trafficking efforts by Conservatives are being addressed" (remember, it's "illegal immigration" when Conservatives approve of it and "human trafficking" when they don't), and "economic progress isn't getting unfairly impeded by regulators".
I've said this with regards to "the left are all pedophiles, look at all the groomer literature" before, so I'll say it again: if the strongest evidence opponents can muster is not actually what the word means, and they are incapable of coming up with a way to describe what's actually wrong beyond hand-waving and arguments from aesthetics, then their claims should be ignored by default.
So yeah, I have a hard time criticizing Reformers for ignoring "Trump is all corrupt, look at all the [aesthetically-repellent to Conservatives] things". Criticize his erratic governance, and the smarter ones will be happy to listen to you (because that is a factually-correct claim, and one that hurts his own faction), but that's also the best they can do because, again, the Conservatives are simply in the wrong here.
You are the one consistently advancing an idiosyncratic definition of conservatism. If you want to play word games, I can't stop you, but let's not pretend it represents typical use. Republicans call themselves conservatives. They are proudly defending traditional gender roles, social hierarchies, economic arrangements, etc... Now, there is a term for a radical-yet-reactionary populist movement, but it's not 'reformer'.
More importantly, word games don't actually fix the problem. Relabeling Trump's political affiliation does not change anything he does.
This seems like a spectacular failure to grasp the substance of Trump critiques.
(I don't know that anyone expects you to believe anything, since you're Canadian and thus not terribly relevant to American domestic politics)
No. There is a very distinctive cult of personality around Donald Trump that does not apply to any other politicians, Republican or Democrat. Biden caught enormous amounts of flak from both the center and left wings of his party, and the Democrats more broadly are notorious for squabbling. Republicans are a little less prone to infighting, but it is very normal to see intraparty criticism there as well (especially if you can frame it as the target not being conservative enough). Donald Trump is uniquely protected by the unwavering loyalty and epistemological deficiencies of his core supporters.
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According to this site, trade like Nancy, make 715% returns over ten years!
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I would argue that basis of the political system of Rome, the patron-client relationship, was already as corrupt as any mafia by our understanding. Basically, if a rich patron family sponsored a political campaign for the scion of a client family, the expectation certainly was that the scion would use his office to further the interests of his patron. Perhaps not always in the most blatant way possible, but a magistrate who one day decided to make decisions on their merits for the Roman people only would certainly be seen as a disgrace to his family.
This was forever the issue with land reforms: whoever gave land to the masses would by Roman convention become their patron, and thus gain enormous political power.
Now, there is obviously a difference between having a long-standing client family and just buying a consul with cash, but it is a difference in degree, not in kind. A platform to stomp out corruption (as we understand it) in Rome would go as well as a platform to abolish the navy in the British Empire.
American politics are generally much less corrupt than Roman ones were. Sure, companies will sponsor campaigns, but any voter who cares can find out what the sponsors of a politician are. My gut feeling is that 87% of the political decisions (weighted by impact) are made on either ideology or merit, perhaps 10% of the decisions are made to please campaign donors and perhaps 3% of the decisions are made to personally enrich the decision maker.
Trump II is different from this. Sure, all the anti-immigration stuff is purely ideological, and if you count the personal ego of Trump as part of the ideology, a lot more of his squabbles are also non-corrupt. But all this tariff back-and-forth seems like it was mostly for the purpose of ripping of the stock market, and the airliner thing was on a "we do not even bother to pretend otherwise any more" level.
Where patronage relationships not known in Rome? At least you could attack your opponents on it.
How would Rome compare? You dont conquer the mediterranean without making some good decisions.
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You could say the same about crucial issues in Rome at that time such as let's say land reform or distribution of wealth from kingdom of Pontus. On surface level it was a discussion of ideological conflict between optimates and populares, but in the end the conflict was about which faction will distribute wealth and maintain power.
For instance during latest elections 92% of votes of people in DC landed in favor of Democrats - these are all people staffing all the most powerful federal institutions. You can go one-by-one with other institutions depending on public money be it public schools, academia etc. It is by now basically captured by one of the parties. You may downplay it such as merit or ideology, but the fact is that people governed by bureoucracy have different views from those who rule them. This also means that members of one political party extract resources from general population and distribute them toward their own client network of sympathizers.
In a sense the system is already corrupted. When they saw Caesar giving them personal promise of benefits they saw it as more tangible and in a sense even less corrupt compared to some vague promise of of reward by the republic controlled by people they viewed as actually corrupt.
The gentrified bits of DC where the young childless feds live is about 70% Dem. The reason DC is 92% Dem is not the feds (most of whom commute in from the suburbs), it is the black vote turned out by the Marion Barry political machine.
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Very interesting post. I'm not entirely convinced, but let me turn it practical: where was the safest place to live when Rome turned from a Republic into an Empire, and where is the best place to live now? I've been worried that the Pax Americana is coming to an end, our Republic's core can no longer maintain its security, and that the international shipping lanes are seeing a lot more instability than before. But if Trump is to be our Caesar, then we will lose our Republic well before the point when our Pax Americana breaks down.
My focus right now is in settling and raising a large family, so where to settle in Roman times? I think "in Rome" proper is out: the city saw numerous riots and insurrections during the political chaos at the end of the Republic, and one does not want one's family caught in the chaos. However, the benefits of being a citizen of Rome were vast, with increased legal rights, commercial rights, and freedom of movement, so one probably wanted to raise one's children within the Empire (Saint Paul as a citizen of Rome was able to walk all around Modern Turkey unaccosted.) One also wants the benefits of industrial civilization (toilets!), so life outside the Empire is also not recommended.
What about the provinces? It depends a lot on the province. Some of them were subject to regular warfare and raids. The marker of these was that they were highly militarized and the risk of invasion was known. The provinces in the "middle ring" of the Empire were probably the safest place to be.
The other major dangers of industrial civilization are subfertility and industrial contaminants. The cities of Rome had poorer sanitation (more plague), high poverty, and greater rates of lead poisioning. Fertility among the elites was also much reduced in Rome due to later age at marriage and smaller family size. The provincial fertility rates were so much higher that the elite became more provincial toward the time of the Late Empire.
So, what would this mean in the modern day? Avoid the core cities due to low safety and low fertility: New York, London, DC, SF. Avoid the threatened periphery due to risk of invasion: Taiwain, Poland, Korea, and states with lots of military infrastructure like Nevada and the Great Plains states (Map of Nulear complexes 1 Maps of silos and predicted fallout patterns). It looks like the winning strategy is to settle the prosperous provinces: the eastern Midwest, Southern canada, Southern France, or Scandinavia.
I think you’re right about Pax Americana having ended. For most people it ended decades ago. It’s just now reaching the professional classes. But if you drive through the rural parts of the South, it’s already happened, probably 2 generations ago, and these places look like the ruins of a civilization rather than a thriving one. Rusty, dirty, shabby, abandoned buildings everywhere. The people themselves live in poverty for the most part. Urban cores have been war zones for decades and everybody knows it.
I see Trump as a manifestation of the problems of American Empire, rather than the cause. We are not the same steady, stalwart and practical people who built Pax Americana, we don’t have the ability or the willpower to keep it. All that’s left is to tear it up and hopefully squeeze out the few good years we have left.
The rural South has always looked like that. The economic and social structure of the South has not historically been conducive to prosperity. Arguably, many parts of the South are doing better than ever, thanks to weak labor laws, cheap labor, and permissive planning/environmental laws making it an appealing place to build factories (and houses).
The (rural) South has, if anything, done better than most of the rest of the country over the last few decades. The entire Sunbelt has no shortage of brand new construction suburbs and schools and infrastructure (even some factories!) while the Rust Belt, when I've visited, has, at best, maintained the infrastructure from most of a century ago. Pick a suburb in Ohio and compare it to one in Florida or Texas.
Air conditioning has really changed things.
What if you compare it to one in say Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi or New Mexico?
Granted, I don't live on that side of the Atlantic Ocean but Florida and Texas have never seemed to me to be modal examples of "the South".
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A backwater seaside province. Northern California/Southern Oregon or Maine. Ma-aybe Florida Panhandle/Mobile/Biloxi.
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Because it wasn't about corruption as such. They just didn't want Caesar (or, early on in his career, his allies Pompey and Crassus) to win
You can't really map it unto America by making it all about corruption in the shady business deal sense. You can't really explain anyone's behavior here (though arguably some Optimates seem crazy or reckless either way) without the civil war that preceded Caesar and what it did to the Roman psyche.
America isn't really there.
I mean, if we're going to compare to the Roman Republic, it should be noted that many attempts were made to pass laws to fix the problems caused by corrupt people. Including, sometimes, by those very people!
It didn't work, and the after-effects of their corruption and norm-breaking outweighed their good intentions.
The Republic, once it became so "corrupt" that it lost the ability to promise its citizens safety in the pursuit of politics, could no more legislate that back into existence than it could control the weather or enforce a positive economic sentiment.
You can't always get it back. You can't always write something that outweighs your lack of virtue. Sometimes you just break things.
You'll forgive me if I find this to be more of a similarity between Caesar and the optimates/Trump and the establishment than a difference.
The other side remembered the proscriptions and chaos caused by people pushing their reforms and will too far. People lost friends and colleagues and people like Pompey and Crassus were prime beneficiaries.
They weren't scared of just losing a political battle. They were scared of getting liquidated this time around if they let anyone claim enough political clout by getting certain wins.
Very different from the initial backlash to Trump. The moment of realization that history hadn't ended and there wasn't going to be a coronation by the emerging democratic majority may have felt existential but hard to argue it's the same.
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Virtues are dead so there is no point in up holding them. In Rome during Caesar's time the system was broken and people knew it. The same is true in modern day America.
When the system is broken and dysfunctional you need someone who doesn't care about the rules but instead can fix things. Trump and Caesar are both less focused on formalities and more focused and doing. The current system consists of people like the people in Versailles who were more concerned with trivialities at dinner parties than the national budget.
Trump's biggest issue is that he is far older than Caesar was when Caesar was in power and the US has far more institutional inertia than Rome had. Trump can't get nearly as much done even if he blatantly disregards the rules.
Virtue is predictability. Those with honor can be trusted to at least follow the terms of a deal and not try to screw you at the last minute. A man who promises wine at one drachma per amphora but who will fill it with cholera water is less worthy a partner than a man who sells at five drachmas per amphora but who fills it honestly.
That is the big problem with corruption: it is an open ended incentive to race to the bottom, and it ruins any faith that any activity with a time lag will be honored. Did the property owners intimidated by Crassus have any faith that Crassus would not come back later and spike up the rates? The main advantage is that Crassus would have stopped other arsonists from burning down their property if only to reserve that right for himself, which from our modern lenses is insane.
What we see in modern USA is a different form of corruption: the corruption of credit. The wheel of loans and equity and finance have made money in hand disconnected from money that is spent, and so it is those who game the system that benefit. Republican corruption may involve private benefit, but Democrat corruption involves robbing the public purse to pay off their friends and pets. I again point to the homeless advocacy industrial complex that exists only to drain coffer for the privilege of inconveniencing everyone including the homeless even further. Its not like the grifter even profits that much; Dominique Davis of Community Passageways per propublika bilked 10m from 'community contribution' which are largely state funds put into 'dollar matched' foundations and the wages only hoovered up 50% of the funds, with the remaining 50% just disappearing.
For all the crimes of Caeser and Crassus and Trump and the republicans, I can at least squint and see they did SOMETHING with their corruption and their grift. For the corruption which includes democrat and socialist and every possible shithole tinpot dictator you'd be lucky to even see the mansions that are built off stolen lucre. Spending money to waste money even more quickly seems to be the order of the day for others, and if you're a US citizen asking what the hell the democrat states do with their current tax bases should make promises of taxing the rich being the panacea suspect.
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I disagree with this. It's good to be personally virtuous.
If (for the sake of argument) "the system" truly is broken and it needs someone who can operate outside of the rules, bending or breaking them at times, even getting his hands dirty, then the necessity of that is worth considering. But the aspiration behind that should be returning to an era where virtue is rewarded, not creating an extraordinary state where the system being broken is acceptable.
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