A Walk in Rome in the Days of Trump
Two forces eerily contemporary have traditionally been thought to bring down ancient republics: the oligarch and the demagogue. What makes republics fragile are compacts of the very rich confiscating wealth in ways that makes injustice too palpable, and the demagogue who, usually rising as an opportunist among the oligarchs, can manipulate the incoherent discontent of the plebeians.
.. The fall of the Roman Republic, in any case, left a bad thousand-year savor, a certainty that democracy, even constrained republican democracy, was doomed by demagoguery. This was so much the standard view that when Shakespeare, never having known any democratic institutions at all—aside from a few local, limited Stratford ones—tried to imagine them in “Coriolanus” and his other Roman plays, he could only picture a setup that was divisive, factional, and pitifully easy to manipulate by a demagogue or two. The superiority of an authoritarian arrangement seemed, well, self-evident.
.. Today, though, we find ourselves in the midst of the ascent of a figure right out of Petronius: an orange-colored vulgarian of meretricious display, right down to the trophy wives from Far Elsewhere—with an ambition to dominate, a cunning out of proportion to his wisdom, a contempt for truth coupled with a readiness to manipulate, and a personal arrogance combined with, and indifferent to, a universal understanding that he is utterly unfit to govern.