Vote For Cicero

Over at Kiwipolitico I see that Pablo (A Moment of Friction) thinks that the world is approaching a global inflection point on governing:

In the past I have written at length about the systemic realignment and long transition in post Cold War international relations. The phrase refers to the transition from a unipolar post-Cold War international system dominated by the US (as the “hegemon” of the liberal internationalist world order) to a multipolar system that includes rising Great Powers like the PRC and India and constellations of middle powers such as the other BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, South Africa and recently added members like Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Ethiopia and perhaps Argentina (if it ratifies its accession)) as representatives of the rising “Global South.” In spite of their differences, these rising power blocs are counterpoised against what remains of the liberal institutionalist order, including the EU, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Or as one of his Lefty commentators put it:

What we all agree on is that the centre can no longer hold, in the words of WB Yeats. And in the words of Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” 

Over on some parts of the Right there is agreement that things are in turmoil and that it is growing worse in that institutions, both inside nations and between them (e.g. the UN) are breaking down, with resu lting huge loss of public trust and faith in them.

But while looking only at the domestic scene, especially the American domestic scene, some of the Right see the West’s past in our future – the Ancient Past that is:

The influential far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin was one of the first in American politics to start calling for a new “Caesar” in the 2000s. According to Yarvin, America’s problems lie in its subtle transformation from a democratic regime to a theocratic oligarchy, in which a number of left-wing “priests” determine the sort of social and economic viewpoints that remain acceptable. Yarvin does not seem to wish to topple the American republic. He rather aims to find an American Caesar who can restore the lost traditions of the nation.

Yarvin doesn’t seem to want actual Caesarism but argues that an American Caesar arrives on the scene about once every seventy five years to straighten things out and he includes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even FDR in his list. I’ve referred to Yarvin before, in this post, where he defined all these modern institutions as The Cathedral:

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.

But he’s not alone:

The political theorist and prominent Trump advisor Michael Anton has suggested that an American Caesar might be inevitable. The far-right blogger Charles Haywood openly calls for Caesarist government. The influential Catholic journal First Things has provided an impassioned defense of the Emperor Augustus…Other writers, such as the Harvard historian James Hankins, advocate a politics that is more recognizably Caesarism. Hankins is on the temperate side in that he stops short of openly advocating strongman rule. 

The article goes on to argue that all this is a bad idea, no matter how poorly you may think of modern democracy and what it produces, and he points to both the lessons of history (and he goes into quite a bit of the history of the Roman Republic) and the reasoning that would apply in today’s world:

The “reforms” of strongmen quite often plunge the state into total chaos. Under Julius Caesar’s rule, the Roman Republic was split by near constant civil war and the upheaval of continuous attempts to overthrow the tyrant. His expansion of the empire stretched the Roman bureaucracy almost to breaking point.
…
The reason despotic rule of one man does not work is simple enough: such an arrangement is inimical to law and liberty, the twin foundations of a healthy civilization.

Which is all well and good, but it doesn’t help when it is those very foundations that are in trouble.

Our liberties are increasingly bound by ever-growing rules and regulations, pushed by politicians and bureaucrats who can’t stop trying to control people’s lives

Law is increasingly seen as having double standards, whether in the form of anarcho-tryanny, or blatant political partisanship weaponising the legal system against opponents (see the trials of one DJ Trump and the Jan 6 rioters).

I also don’t think a Caesar would fix those problems, but if you pin your political and ideological opponents in a corner where they think they will be finished off permanently, you shouldn’t be surprised if they reach for such a weapon.