Re: The Last Days of the American Republic

[Mark Lause <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie wrote, "The dominant culture of America used to seek to have
Americans identify with the Athenians, who were democratic and imperialistic
at the same time.  But nowadays the dominant American culture wants to
have Americans identify with oligarchic Spartans."

The far more dominant comparison was to the Romans, who were a much larger
and more federalized republic in its origins.  A number of us have written
fairly extensively on this.

In early America, the comparison to Rome drew such conclusions as--

* republics are inherently short-lived (but that calling yourself a
"republic" outlasts being one, as it did in the case of Rome),

* unaccountable power concentrates authority in the hands of the executive,
making possible a seizure of the power by the Caesars through the military
in the name of national security, etc.

* a separation of powers that would check and balance each other provided a
temporary brake on the process,

The Old South added that slavery had always been essential to republican
civilization, and that given the choice of having the republic decay or
expanding into an empire, the latter was preferable.

Radicals argued that the concentration of class power was also unaccountable
and urged various measures in response, most commonly in the early days a
radically democratic land redistribution, hailing back to the "Agrarianism"
of the Gracchi, etc.

As an interesting aside, Alvan Earl Bovay, a classical scholar of sorts and
the national chair of the working class National Reform Assocaition
advocated calling the new party that emerged in 1854 in opposition to the
Kansas-Nebraska Act, the "Republican" Party, as opposed to the "imperial"
policies of the South.  Marx and Engels identified the NRA as the American
equivalent of the British Chartists, the French Blanquists, and the German
Communist League.

After the Civil War, the argument over Rome and republican decline remained
central to the various third party movements that sometimes attained mass
proportions...most famously the Peoples' Party or the Populists, of
course....

Solidarity!
Mark L.