Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (13 page)

On January 13, 27 BC, Octavian appeared in the Senate, which had legitimized its own demise by ceding most of its powers to him and which now bestowed on him the new title of Augustus, first Roman emperor. The majority of the senators were his solid supporters, having been hand-picked by him. In 23 BC, Augustus was granted further authority by being designated a tribune for life, which gave him ultimate veto power over anything the Senate might do. But his real power ultimately rested on his total control of the armed forces.

His rise to power tainted by constitutional illegitimacy—not unlike that of our own putative Boy Emperor from Crawford, Texas—Augustus proceeded to emasculate the Roman system and its representative institutions. He never abolished the old republican offices but merely united them under one person—himself. Imperial appointment became a badge of prestige and social standing rather than of authority. The Senate was turned into a club of old aristocratic families, and its approval of the acts of the emperor was purely ceremonial. The Roman legions continued to
march under the banner SPQR—
senatus populus que Romanus
(the Senate and the people of Rome)—but the authority of Augustus was absolute.

In response to the demands of empire, the army had grown so large as to be close to unmanageable. It constituted a state within a state, not unlike the Pentagon today. Augustus reduced the army’s size, providing generous cash payments to those soldiers who had served more than twelve years. Of course, he made clear that this bounty came from him, not their military commanders. He also transferred all legions from Rome to the remote provinces and borders of the empire, to ensure that their leaders were not tempted to meddle in political affairs. Astutely, he created a Praetorian Guard, an elite force of nine thousand men whose task was to defend him personally and he stationed them in Rome. Their ranks were drawn from Italy, not from distant provinces, and they were paid more than soldiers in the regular legions. They began as Augustus’s personal bodyguards, but in the decades after his death became decisive players in their own right in the selection of new emperors. It was one of the first illustrations of an old conundrum of authoritarian politics. If a bureaucracy, such as the Praetorian Guard, is created to control another bureaucracy, the regular army, before long the question will arise:
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
(Who will watch the watchers?)

Augustus is credited with forging the Roman Peace (Pax Romana), which historians like to say lasted more than two hundred years. It was, however, based on a military dictatorship and entirely dependent on the incumbent emperor. Therein lay the problem. Tiberius, who succeeded Augustus, reigning from 14-37 AD, retired to Capri with a covey of young boys who catered to his sexual tastes. His successor, Caligula, who held office from 37-41, was the darling of the army, but on January 24, 41 AD, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and proceeded to loot the imperial palace. Modern archaeological evidence strongly suggests that Caligula was an eccentric maniac, just as history has always portrayed him.
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The fourth emperor, Claudius, who reigned from 41 to 54, was put in power by the Praetorian Guard in a de facto military coup. Despite the basically favorable portrayal of him by Robert Graves in his novel /,
Claudius
of 1934, and decades later adapted for TV (and played by Derek Jacobi), Claudius, who was Caligula’s uncle, was addicted to gladiatorial games and fond of watching defeated opponents being put to death. As a child, Claudius limped, drooled, stuttered, and was constantly ill. He had
his first wife killed so he could marry Agrippina, daughter of Caligula’s sister, after having the law changed to allow uncles to marry their nieces. On October 13, 54 AD, Claudius was killed with a poisoned mushroom, probably fed to him by his wife, and at noon that same day, the sixteen-year-old Nero, Agrippina’s son by a former husband, was acclaimed emperor in a carefully orchestrated piece of political theater. Nero, who reigned from 54 to 68 AD, was probably insane as well as a tyrant. He set fire to Rome in 64 and executed those famed early Christians Paul and Peter, although his reputation has been somewhat rehabilitated in recent years as a patron of the arts.
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After Augustus, not much recommends the Roman empire as an example of enlightened government. The history of the Roman Republic from the time of Julius Caesar suggests that imperialism and militarism— poorly understood by all conservative political leaders at the time— brought down the republic. The professionalization of a large standing army in order to defend the empire created invincible new sources of power within the Roman polity and prepared the way for the rise of populist generals who understood the grievances of their troops and veterans as politicians could not.

Service in the armed forces of the United States has not been a universal male obligation of citizenship since 1973. Our military today is a professional corps of men and women who commonly join up to advance themselves in the face of one or another cul-de-sac of American society. They normally do not expect to be shot at, but they do expect all the benefits of state employment—steady pay, good housing, free medical benefits, education, relief from racial discrimination, world travel, and gratitude from the rest of society for their “service.” They are well aware that the alternatives on offer today in civilian life include difficult job searches, little or no job security, regular pilfering of retirement funds by company executives and their accountants, “privatized” medical care, bad public elementary education, and insanely expensive higher education. They are ripe not for the rhetoric of a politician who followed the Andover-Yale-Harvard Business School route to riches and power but for a Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, or Juan Peron—a revolutionary, military populist with little interest in republican niceties so long as some form of emperorship lies at the end of his rocky path.

Regardless of who succeeds George W. Bush, the incumbent president will have to deal with an emboldened Pentagon, an engorged military-industrial complex, our empire of bases, and a fifty-year-old tradition of not revealing to the public what our military establishment costs or the kinds of devastation it can inflict. History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless. Roman history suggests that the short, happy life of the American republic may be coming to its end—and that turning it into an openly military empire will not, to say the least, be the best solution to that problem.

One common response to this view is that ours is actually a “good empire” like the one from which we gained our independence in 1776. Whatever its faults and flaws, contemporary America, like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is said to be a source of enlightenment for the rest of the world, a natural carrier of the seeds of “democracy” into benighted and oppressed regions, and the only possible military guarantor of “stability” on the planet. We are, therefore, the “cousins” and inheritors of the best traditions of the British Empire, which was, according to this highly ideological construct, a force for unalloyed good despite occasional unfortunate and unavoidable lapses.

The expatriate Scot and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson typically argues that the British Empire was motivated by “a sincere belief that spreading commerce, Christianity, and civilization was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.”
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He insists that “no organization [other than the British Empire] has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world” and that “America is heir to the empire in both senses: offspring of the colonial era, successor today. Perhaps the most burning contemporary question of American politics is: Should the United States seek to shed or to shoulder the imperial load it has inherited?”
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The
Los Angeles Times’s
right-wing columnist Max Boot thinks that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”
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According to journalist Erik Tarloff, writing in the British newspaper
Financial Times,
“Claims that the British Raj redounded to the economic benefit of India as well as the mother country [are], I should think,
irrefutable.”
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Given that for two centuries—between 1757 and 1947— there was no increase at all in India’s per capita income, that in the second half of Victoria’s reign between thirty and fifty million Indians perished in famines and plagues brought on by British misrule, and that from 1872 to 1921, the life expectancy of ordinary Indians fell by a staggering 20 percent, the idea that India benefited from British imperialism is at least open to question.
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The rewriting of history to prettify the British Empire has long been commonplace in England but it became politically significant in the United States only after 9/11, when the thought—novel to most Americans—that their own country was actually an “empire” began to come out of the closet. Beginning in late 2001, approval of American imperialism became a prominent theme in the establishment and neoconservative press. “It was time for America unabashedly and unilaterally, to assert its supremacy and to maintain global order,” writes Joshua Micah Marshall, editor of an influential Washington Internet newsletter. “After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.”
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Bernard Porter, a professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and a recognized specialist on Britain’s imperial past, likes to argue that his country acquired its empire unintentionally. Apologists for American imperialism also contend that the United States acquired its continental girth as well as its Caribbean and Pacific colonies in a fit of innocent absentmindedness.
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Despite his tendency to minimize the importance of the British Empire, Porter is an acute observer of trends in the candor with which this history has been approached. In the twentieth century, he observes, “Imperialism—in the old, conventional sense—suddenly became unfashionable.... [New books] took an entirely different line on it from before: hugely downplaying the glorious military aspects of it; almost giving the impression that most colonies had asked to join the Empire; stressing Britain’s supposed ‘civilizing’ mission; and presenting the whole thing as simply a happy federation of countries at different stages of ‘development.’ ... A new word was coined for it, which was thought to express this sort of thing better: ‘Commonwealth.’ A popular metaphor was that of the ‘family.’ “
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In Porter’s view, the ordinary Victorian Englishman was never much interested in the empire, which was always a plaything of the military classes and those who wanted (or had) to get out of the British Isles. But in America, the idea that the British Empire was really nice—totally unlike its French, German, Russian, and Japanese contemporaries—had long been well received by novel readers and latter-day fans of the long-running TV series
Masterpiece Theater.

During the post-9/11 period of American enthusiasm for imperialism, one of its most influential proselytizers was Michael Ignatieff, a Harvard professor and self-appointed spokesman for “humanitarian imperialism,” also known as “Empire Lite.” As the demand for his cheerleading faded in light of the Iraq war, Ignatieff decided to return to his native Canada and became a politician. Back in Toronto, he acknowledged to a journalist that his many essays and op-eds had all been written as if he were an American, and he apologized for having used “we” and “us” some forty-three times throughout his essay entitled “Lesser Evils,” which is a defense of official torture.
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In the
New York Times Magazine
of January 5, 2003, Ignatieff proudly asserts, “Ever since George Washington warned his countrymen against foreign entanglements, empire abroad has been seen as the republic’s permanent temptation and its potential nemesis. Yet what word but ‘empire’ describes the awesome thing that America is becoming? It is the only nation that polices the world through five global military commands; maintains more than a million men and women at arms on four continents; deploys carrier battle groups on watch in every ocean; guarantees the survival of countries from Israel to South Korea; drives the wheels of global trade and commerce; and fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires.”

In numerous one-liners, Ignatieff sings the praises of American imperialism: “Multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bares its fangs.... Regime change is an imperial task par excellence, since it assumes that the empire’s interest has a right to trump the sovereignty of a state.... The question, then, is not whether America is too powerful but whether it is powerful enough. Does it have what it takes to be grandmaster of what Colin Powell has called the chessboard of the world’s most inflammable region? ... The
case for empire is that it has become, in a place like Iraq, the last hope for democracy and stability alike.”
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Ignatieff’s warlike prose comes from an essay entitled “The Burden,” an unmistakable reference to Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden,” written while he was living in Vermont and addressed to Americans as they prepared to subjugate the Philippines:

Take up the White Mans Burden
And reap his old reward
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.

Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, compares Ignatieff’s epistles to the Americans to “a sprig of cilantro on the nouveau-imperialist bucket of KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], transforming Bush’s blunderings into a treat for liberal white folks the world over.”
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