On why studying Rome makes All This scary

There are two good explanations for the fall of the Roman Republic which emerged in the later twentieth century: one English, and one German. Both are truly political explanations, and both start from the idea that the Republic was actually popular, and no one really wanted to get rid of it. This post is to think through these explanations, not because I want to talk about Rome, but because they suggest things to me about Australia.

I’m not suggesting Australia is at the point where democracy will collapse. Rather, this post is a warning: political systems look robust and secure until they don’t, when they suddenly look horrifyingly fragile.

The first is the Oxford historian P.A. Brunt. Brunt’s explanation is that leadership in Rome was in the hands of the Senate, and that the Senate alienated every important interest group. It failed to solve the problems. The rich landowners and businessmen; the soldiers; the city’s poor—it wasn’t that these groups wanted to end the Republic. But the Republic (by which Brunt means the Senate) hadn’t done anything for them, so why should they care about it? So when that Republic did face a major threat, they weren’t willing to defend it—they weren’t really committed to it, and so were happy enough to look on while it was destroyed and replaced by a monarchy. These groups then made their various accommodations with monarchy. These accommodations could be lived with easily enough (especially under a competent monarch like Augustus, who knew how to make the chains feel light), but they did mean the loss of freedom.

And that’s a worry I have for Australia. We have a political class (on both sides) which has done nothing positive for anyone for a generation. Which rests on an incredibly narrow and transactional base of active support. If it was seriously attacked, would anyone defend it? Who would fight to defend the system we have? Not the system we want, not the ideal version of the system we have, but the actual system we have. Who would take to the streets, risking liberty and skin, for Albanese or Dutton, for franking credits and negative gearing?

The other explanation for the Roman Republic’s failure is by Christian Meier, in German—and it really helps that Roman history is both a global discipline and an old one, because the same questions have been approached from radically different political and intellectual viewpoints, which makes for a much richer body of interpretation.

Anyway, Meier’s explanation is more complex than Brunt’s. For him, the world in which the Roman political system operated was changing, and those changes were major and quite rapid. The political system faced problems arising from all this change, and it resolutely refused to confront them. This, for Meier, was the heart of the problem: the Romans were unwilling to face, or even unable to see, the problems that actually mattered, the problems that eventually swamped and destroyed their precious Republic. There was a lot of politics going on, but most of it (what Meier calls regelmäßige Politik, “routine politics”) was about irrelevancies: the minor squabbles over influence and position within the political class. “The parties regularly revolve around minima, while the entire constitution is under threat.”

The existing constitution was self-evidently the best one, and no one seriously contemplated an alternative—and for Meier, born in 1929, “alternative” meant a different conception of the state like Communism or Fascism. When faced with serious crises which even they could not ignore, the political elite clung ever-more-tightly to their traditional way of doing things—or what they imagined was traditional. The collapse was both a failure of imagination and a failure to mobilise political power in the service of reform which could have prevented that collapse. For both Meier and Brunt, the threat which eventually brought down the Republic was the powerful generals, men like Sulla, Pompey and Caesar. It wasn’t that they were that big, but that the Republic had got that small.

We in Australia are in the middle of a Federal election campaign. We face climate change, something which both parties have ignored for a decade. Our major ally is abandoning us and turning into a dictatorship. In housing and education there is a growing divide which is approaching the point of crisis. There are louder and louder extremist voices, with plenty of money behind them. And what is the election about? None of that.

I do not think Australia is on the brink of political collapse. We have a strong democratic culture; we have a broadly sensible population. But our political system is much weaker and more brittle than we believe. If we look at Australia through the lenses of Brunt and Meier—if we imagine ourselves looking back from the future and explaining how Australian democracy ended, what would be the warning signs? What should worry us is not how large and strong are the enemies of democracy, but how small and weak are the forces that would fight to defend it. Also, that as problems pile up—as we face tasks for which thoughtlessly muddling through will not be good enough—our political class seems not just unwilling to face them, not only unable to solve them, but incapable of even seeing them as problems.

If we do not solve our problems, they will keep getting worse. And that’s scary.