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Inspired by this tweet, a thought experiment:
Imagine a a country with a two-faction democratic political system. Faction A is anti-free speech. Faction B is (currently and historically) pro-free speech. In the current environment, both factions are approximately equally matched, with majorities in government seesawing between either faction much like in our own government.
Question: Should Faction B also become anti-free speech?
I am interested in both, “would this be good for the country?” and “would this be good for the party?”
Some arguments I would imagine to hear as part of Faction B’s internal debate over the subject:
“We’re suckers for letting Faction A speak when we control the government. They don’t let us speak when they are in charge, so why should we let them speak when we are in charge?”
“We already get half the vote letting Faction A speak openly in favor of their policies. Imagine how much better we could do in the next election if we didn’t let them speak!”
“When people aren’t worried about consequences for their speech it makes them feel more free. We get more votes when voters think we will make them feel more free than Faction A will.”
“It is important for us to have honest feedback on our policies and the state of the country. If we didn’t let Faction A speak we would be flying half-blind.”
In case you need me to spell-out the subtext: a lot of discussion has been treating the free speech issue as a bargaining chip, rather than a straightforwardly good policy. I’m not sure how much I buy that argument. It sounds a little convenient, like people are looking for excuses to descend into an orgy of vengeance.
In a world where
then obviously the winning move is to suppress your opponents speech. But this proves too much - obviously the winning move is to go full Sulla, execute your opponents, steal their stuff, keep half of it and use the other half to reward your supporters, and use the temporary lack of opposition to amend the Constitution to permanently install your preferred policies. This doesn't happen because all factions in real-world politics rely to varying degrees on the support of normies who care more about the fate of the country than about their preferred faction winning.
The more serious issue about "is speech suppression tactically wise" is that empirically movements which don't support free speech can't stick to a free-speech-for-me-but-not-for-thee policy, and end up suppressing their own internal debate as much as they suppress the enemy. Whether it's the Nazi Night of the Long Knives, the various Communist purges, McCarthy turning on right-aligned institutions like the army, woke cancel culture purging far more lefties (whether for heresy or just mis-speaking) than righties, political movements which start suppressing speech mostly end up turning speech suppression from a weapon against the outgroup to a weapon for resolving intra-group personal beefs. And then you have a culture of fear which gums up your own internal decision-making processes and you end up doing something self-destructively stupid like Arische Physik, Lysenkoism, or defunding the police.
Liberalism didn't just win in the debating club, it also won at Hiroshima. There might be a reason for this, and I think resistance to self-destructive purges is a big part of it.
The problem is the fate of the country often depends on who does win. In large parts of American society there’s been a huge and growing quiet withdrawal from certain demographics that even the Brookings Institutions has published books about, simply because the people steering the helm of the cultural ship excludes and doesn’t partake of the vision of society that would include these people. You won’t get people to participate if they feel there’s nothing in it for them. That’s why it’s so imperative that your side win out. Because if the other side wins, you don’t just lose, you lose everything, including a reason to keep trying.
Sulla’s proscriptions were actually successful, and he didn’t have to be overly concerned with ordinary people because ideology isn’t always relevant to most of what people had to do to get along with their daily lives thousands of years ago. And information also had a much shorter range and traveled much slower.
A society can often only please one party at the expense of another losing out. It’s why every society that exists on Earth, liberal or not, consists of winners and losers. Effective ones can figure out a way for people to make do with their unhappiness or until a political pressure valve allows them relief of their anger and frustration, which is difficult to manage. But it’s better than a liberal society that tries to please all parties involved because a society that tries to please everyone will end up pleasing no one in the long term.
Sulla wasn't successful at anything other than enriching his cronies and buying enough breathing room to not have to face revenge for his actions.
His reforms were soon rolled back and the power of the tribunes returned. Apparently, despite the lack of telecommunications, the Roman people understood what it meant to hobble that office and wanted it so badly that even his own former cronies played along to their advantage.
It's actually a story with the opposite moral: he was right about being wronged, right about the problem and put in a situation where taking the high road would mean he personally lost but his own escalation destroyed any chance for his solution to work, no matter how much everyone could see something had to give. Even if you can pull off the coup de grace, it won't necessarily end the way you hope. Taking the L may be the best move.
By what standard of the ancient world are we judging him according to this? That’s practically how ‘all’ these societies were ran back then. By a modern more objective metric, sure, Sulla was as you describe him. If we’re grading him on a curve and placing him in the context and circumstances he lived with, he was pretty ‘good’ for the most part in governing a system where that kind of nepotism and cronyism went by the rule of law 2,000 years ago.
Part of the problem is looking back on this with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t like Sulla as a leader in virtually any capacity, but he was quite effective when it came to running the show and conducting the orchestra of the power brokers he was a part of.
His own? He manifestly failed at his self-appointed task of reform and was criticized even within his time for his behavior. Which, even then, was necessarily norm-breaking for a republican.
@Sunshine's point is damning actually: proscription worked for Augustus because he wanted to permanently destroy the constitutional order. Sulla was trying to fix a republic and picked the tools of a tyrant and expected it to work out.
I think you and I will just fundamentally disagree on this. Caesar also ultimately failed at his task of reform and picked the tools of a tyrant to do it. Things didn’t exactly pan out for him either. Sulla wasn’t the guy the Republic needed at the time, but he was the one they got nonetheless. And as I mentioned earlier, I’m not a guy that readily defends Sulla and I don’t like him, but I don’t think this is an appropriate criticism of him.
To my point he was brilliant, to your point he was ruthless. Two things can be true at the same time. His main failure as a reformer came from him not being able to stay in power long enough to cement them. Something that I don't point to as proof of his incompetence or idiocy. At any rate he was a guy who thought the ends justified the means. Plenty of people not his equal thought the same way and yet he stood head and shoulders over many of them. I regard that as quite impressive. The man died peacefully in his own bed.
His first march on Rome was in response to Marius's use of the Tribunate of the Plebs to essentially usurp the authority of the Senate. It's difficult for me to decide whether this move was actually a good or bad one. On one hand the citizens and plebeians of Rome lose a say in the governance of the Empire and therein the ability to protect their self interests. Any few senators who did genuinely care for the welfare of the people would have been hard pressed to help them in an apathetic Senate. On another hand the plebeians were easily manipulated by wild demagogues like Gracchus, Saturnius and Sulpicius who had only self-interest on the agenda.
His proscribing of his political enemies was more testimony to his character, utterly ruthless and unforgiving. (Sulla's epitaph was literally "No better friend, no worse enemy.") In that respect he was greatly feared by both Senate and people and was allowed to retire when he had enacted his laws with very little political opposition.
Probably not but at least we validated the stereotype that men are always thinking about Rome.
Nobody said he was incompetent. Like Caesar he was obviously a great man. I admitted from the start that he was wronged and that he could clearly see some of the problems in the constitution as it stood.
I said his program was hindered from the beginning by his means and probably ill-conceived because of the fundamental contradiction. This defense, imo, is just leaning on the same contradiction. This worked for Augustus because he was trying to institute monarchic rule.
A Republican system depends on others buying into it and continually making the choice to restrict their own use of power. This cannot necessarily be achieved by Sulla just hanging around. If anything that increases the chance for the system to collapse into monarchy.
Sulla revealed the secret of the Republic - that generals can order their men to commit violence against the state and thus capture it - and somehow thought he'd put it back in the bottle. It went about as well as the realization that the emperor could be made outside of Rome.
I suppose we can say that this is all in hindsight. That it's easy to say it's wrong now precisely because we can appeal to Sulla's experience. Maybe, at the time, it seemed just as likely that he'd be a new Cincinnatus.
But it is what it is. We should also consider that his motives, like Caesar's, were not pure. Both of them did what they did to defend their own dignity and interests. I'm more sympathetic to Caesar, since the risks were so much greater for him. But in both cases it wasn't just concern for the Republic.
As opposed to the rational decisions of people like Cato whose level of obstinacy precipitated the very outcome they were supposedly against? Even when people like Pompey tried to respect at least the form of republican politics they were blocked and so made common cause with the populists. If anything one could argue that the Senators were playing games with things that were essential to the livelihood and comfort of the plebes. If they had been willing to take steps to address them rather than vetoing their enemies things might have been different.
He died, what? A few years after resigning? If Cicero had died within a similar timespan he would never have faced a reckoning for killing Catiline and it might have looked like a move with all upside too.
I'm pretty big into ancient history and consequently Roman history. Good to know there's others here like that.
Well. Seems we agree then. That's much closer to the conclusion I wanted to emphasize. Not that his reforms weren't quickly reversed after he withdrew into retirement. They obviously were.
There is a question in here as to whether the Republic at large was just at the end of it's natural lifespan as it was transforming into something that was already beginning to look and feel different. I'm not saying the solution would've been for Sulla to linger around on the sidelines only that it was ultimately concluded more prematurely than it should've been. As far as collapsing into monarchy goes, you could argue Octavian's proscriptions were worse than Sulla's (a controversial statement, but one I've seen people make) but people are more willing to overlook it because it concluded with the Pax Romana, whereas Sulla's ended having enriched his friends and further solidified their positions among a corrupt ruling class.
Septimius Severus did that. There have been more than a few provincial emperors, albeit that they came at a bad time; being at the tail end of a dying Empire.
I'm also more sympathetic to Caesar by a long shot. With him however, I think his motives ultimately were questionable as to whether he wanted to become king or not. It's not as cut and dry as people think it is.
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Here's the fun epilogue: Two generations later, Augustus Caesar pulled a reverse-Sulla. Augustus realized that the office of Tribune was so powerful that it was the only office he actually needed to hold in order to rule Rome with an iron fist. He kept all the forms of the Senate in place, but he turned every office from Quaestor to Consul into powerless ceremonial roles he could use to reward his supporters while he himself ruled as a 'mere' Tribune.
Sulla weakened the Tribunes to shut the common people out of power, whereas Augustus weakened everything except the Tribunes to shut the Senate out of power. Unlike Sulla, Augustus' 'reforms' actually stuck.
The thing about the Senate is that it held almost no legal power at all. It was basically a club which every notable Roman was a member of. It had power as long as its informal methods of influence worked: elected public officials had to align their values with the Senate norms or they would be badmouthed and never win any important election. It was their version of "the Cathedral".
When political outsiders realized they could bypass the Senate by dialing up their populism without violating the letter of the Roman law, the whole republican system started crumbling. It took them a hundred years to get from Tiberius Gracchus to Augustus, but
Israel in 4BC had no mass communicationRome had no mass media, let alone social media.The actual heck are you talking about? The Senate had almost unlimited power through the Republic and well into the Empire (in theory if not in practice). The Senate could declare the Senatus Consultim Ultimum to suspend the constitution and grant the Consuls unlimited power, which Cicero used to execute a high-ranking Senator. The Senate could appoint a Dictator. The Senate appointed the governors of provinces. The Senate could declare someone an enemy of the Republic. The Senate could declare war.
To be clear: Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus usurped all that power, but they did it by packing the Senate. Julius Caesar added 300 of his supporters to the Senate, including non-Roman Italians and Gauls. This is like if Trump added 10 diehard loyalists to the Supreme Court and told them how to vote on each case, and someone came along 2,000 years later and said "the Supreme Court held almost no legal power at all." The Senate had lots of power, that's why Julius and Augustus spent so much time usurping it!
It was not a legal power, the difference is subtle: they were not saying, "by the power of the Senate, this man is above the law". They were saying, "the members of the Senate have agreed to never prosecute the man for his actions in the service to the Republic". And since every public official was a senator, this approach worked. It's like the blue wall of silence.
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Sort of? I’m not a super Roman expert so I could be wrong and welcome corrections, but IIRC Augustus himself in practice spent a lot of time fighting in the several civil wars after the assassination. He was also patient and clever and politically savvy not to rush things or look too dictatorial? I was also kind of under the impression that by the time he was firmly in control it had been like a century of unrest and many of the big players already had played their hands so the Senate was already weak in practical terms not just because of legal or political maneuvers. Even then, it took like 40 years of rule to solidify things, so to me it looks more like good timing and skill of one rather than his approach necessarily being better, but again I could be wrong.
This is correct, but when people say "the Senate was weak" they elide a key factor: Augustus had himself elected consul 13 times. 11 of them were consecutive, meaning that Augustus was consul for 11 straight years (with various cronies as his co-consuls). The Senate was weak, but also, Augustus was monopolizing the power of the Senate.
After his 11-year term Augustus mostly stopped ruling as consul and started ruling with the powers of a tribune instead. This was in large part to free up the other consulship to give to his supporters as a reward, since the consulship was still prestigious even with all the real power stripped out of it. You can identify the exact time the consulship lost its power, because that's when Augustus no longer felt the need to hold it personally.
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