Emperor Trump?

An American Caesar would cost us the beauty of Christianity’s harmonious vision.

President Joe Biden is currently trying to put former President Donald Trump, his sole political opponent, in prison. Jailing political opponents is a sure sign of a collapsing republic. It is the kind of action that democracy dies in. These current events beg a timeless question: When a republic dies, where is the tragedy? Clearly, there is something sad about the vibrancy of self-government and earnest civic-participation being replaced with an autocracy. However, liberals, misidentifying the root of the sadness, sow the seeds of democratic destruction that they so earnestly claim to protect. 

Liberals believe that government gains its legitimacy from the “will of the People.” To make a long story short, if the People are being governed against their consent, the government is illegitimate. Therefore, to liberals, anti-democratic governments are in themselves the tragedy, for they violate this consent. It is no wonder, then, that liberals speak of civilizational decay in terms of democratic backsliding, or the destruction of rights. 

However, liberals are incorrect to covet the “will of the People” as they do. Placing anything as an ultimate end causes all other things to be sacrificed when different ends conflict. In placing the “will of the People” as the ultimate, unimpeachable political end, liberals must scrape that which is good for the people to the wayside. This is because of a plainly simple truth: people can want things that are bad for them. A loving state would not let bad things – even if self-imposed – befall their people, for it is loving to will the good of the other. Is it loving to let a friend drink themselves to death, just because they want to? When the people are morally corrupt, being ruled is better for them than being allowed to rule themselves. Herein lies what actually makes the birth of autocracy a sombre thing: it is not that the people do not deserve it, it is that they are bad enough to need it. 

Self-government is a wonderful thing, for it reflects the social ideal found in the Garden of Eden. St. Augustine describes the “first, [unfallen] human beings” as “undisturbed” in their “love [...] for God and for one another, and that in this “sin[less]” state, harmony and co-operation were completely spontaneous and uninterrupted (City of God, 602). God “did not intend that His rational creature, made in His own image, should have lordship over any but irrational creatures” (City of God, 942). As it concerns the ideal civil society, Augustine’s message is clear: perfect people do not need to be forced to obey the proper things. 

This reality – that harmonious self-government is completely contingent on the people’s virtue is concisely reflected in the Roman Republic and its eventual fall to autocracy. According to the Roman historian Sallust, the self-governing Republic was made of a “harmonious” citizenry, among whom “avarice was minimal.” He states that “with friends they were trustworthy,” and that they “exercised political power more often with kindness than with fear” (Catiline's War, 14). Power in the Republic was delegated amongst multiple offices representing different classes, all of whom compromised and stayed within each other's purviews in keeping with unwritten mores (called the mos maiorum). In large part, Romans did not need to be forced to obey the rules and do the proper things. 

However, this all changed as the Roman soul lost its virtue, sliding down the slippery slope into sin. Sallust describes how the Romans came to first be honour-loving, then “greedy,” “boundless and insatiable” in their licentiousness, and then “disgusting and cruel” in their treachery and violence (Cataline’s War, 15). Goodwill amongst citizens died away, as did the mos maiorum in the government; the once harmonious offices fell into strong-arming, blackmail, and eventually civil war between generals vying for domination of the realm. 

The rampant political violence was eventually ended by Caesar Augustus, who would become Rome’s first emperor. Tacitus describes how Augustus amassed support through satisfying the appetites – “bonuses” for the army and “cheap food” for the public – instead of through senatorial debate or forums in the assemblies (Annals, 2) . As for the warring political factions, “war or judicial murder had disposed of all men of spirit,” and that “upper-class survivors found that slavish obedience was the way to succeed,” and so they obeyed (Annals, 2). Having let their violent and licentious passions overtake them, the Romans lost the ability to govern themselves, making them bad enough to need autocracy. The Republic was replaced with an Empire.

Today, liberalism misses the forest for the trees in decrying the loss of self-government in and of itself. In reality, autocracy is a system most befitting those who have lost the virtue necessary to govern themselves; the “peace” that Augustus brought, while reducing the Roman population to an appetitive, disengaged servitude, reigned in the murderous passions that defined Roman souls up to that point, making it a sort of second-best to St. Augustine’s self-government vision of spontaneous, voluntary harmony. 

Where does that leave America? We do not seem to be self-governing particularly well at the moment. Our moral stock, like that of the Romans, is in ruins. Our shared understandings of true and false, even concerning the most basic questions, have been completely destroyed by the heresies of liberalism. What is worse, the liberal consensus around freedom and self-government has left the sensible defenseless in the face of such evil. We have passed the honor-loving and greed stages of the descent into the licentious and decadent, meaning that the next step is that of violence and treachery. The wisdom of the ages tells us that we will soon enter dangerous waters if we do not turn the ship of civilization around. 

This degradation is reflected in our political realm, where our own mos maiorum are completely disintegrating. America’s separate branches of government have been consumed by a vast, unaccountable, administrative “deep” state, thereby making the republic a shell of its former self. That deep state is tirelessly working to put its chief political opponent in jail; our once harmonious offices no longer respect one another.   

Postliberals recognize the limits of self-government; that, in the words of Edmund Burke, the people “require a sufficient restraint upon their passions,” which can “only be done by a power out of themselves” (Reflections on the Revolution in France, 51). Only Postliberals can correct for liberalism’s centuries-old damage. We have two options for going about this fixing:

Option one is the scalpel. The scalpel would attempt to organically restore morality and religion to the populace within the existing shell of multipolar self-government; banning certain evils, incentivizing certain goods, and reversing the liberal long march on our institutions and positions of power – all from a new, postliberal place. This option may sound sort of ambivalent and uncoordinated, but it is not: the worst evils that bedevil our culture could certainly be chased out of the public square through the means of self-government. 

Option two is the hammer. The hammer would be surrendering the entire helm of government to an American Caesar who would command the entire state to force the People virtue. We could ban evils quite quickly with this method, but it would cost us the beauty of independent courts and open conversations, thereby reducing civic participation to the numbness of a servile peace. 

The scalpel is better than the hammer. We can stamp out evil and preserve self-government at the same time: our goal should be to make the American people worthy of ruling themselves. We ought to pursue a “new and improved” American Republic with new solutions created for and by the People to remedy our confused age. 

An American Caesar would cost us the beauty of Christianity’s harmonious vision. We must do everything we can to preserve our republic – and that starts with electing President Trump in November 2024.

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Works Cited:

Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans, edited by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Sallust. Catiline's War, The Jurgurthine War, Histories. Edited and translated by A.J. Woodman. Penguin Classics, 2008.

Tacitus. The Annals of Imperial Rome. Translated by Michael Grant. Penguin Classics, 1956.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.