No Power Left to the Vanquished
My feelings, Conscript Fathers, are extremely different, when I contemplate our circumstances and dangers, and when I revolve in my mind the sentiments of some who have spoken before me. Those speakers, as it seems to me, have considered only how to punish the traitors who have raised war against their country, their parents, their altars, and their homes; but the state of affairs warns us rather to secure ourselves against them, than to take counsel as to what sentence we should pass upon them. Other crimes you may punish after they have been committed; but as to this, unless you prevent its commission, you will, when it has once taken effect, in vain appeal to justice. When the city is taken, no power is left to the vanquished.
- Sallust, quoting Cato the Younger, Bellum Catilinae
In the late years of the Roman Republic, a conspiracy arose from within the ranks of the Senate. The aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina attempted to seize control of the government after his bid for consulship failed. One of the consuls, Cicero, exposed the conspiracy and Catilina fled Rome to prepare an army. Five of the conspirators were captured after the letters they wrote, in which they urged people to join the conspiracy, were intercepted. The letters were read before the Senate and Cicero urged for the execution of their authors.
Julius Caesar pled for patience and clemency; after all, Rome had laws and customs to observe. He did not want to set a precedent that the ways of Rome could be set aside because they were inconvenient. Cato the Younger, a longtime (and future) opponent of Caesar, spoke next. His appeal won out because the Senate understood the reality of the scenario he was describing: when an institution is in imminent danger from those who seek to dismantle it, you must question if strict adherence to the institution’s laws and customs is worth more than the existence of the institution itself.
Fourteen years later, Julius Caesar, champion of Roman laws and customs, crossed the Rubicon in defiance of law, custom, and the explicit order of the Senate to mark what would become the end of the Roman Republic and the beginning of Caesar’s rule of the Roman Empire. Caesar’s respect for Roman norms and civitas ended when they put him in personal danger. As for Cato, he died with the republic and subsequently became its most lionized martyr.
In 1923, Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff, accompanied by hundreds of other Nazis and members of the paramilitary Sturmabteilung staged the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coupe d'état against the regional Bavarian government. Hitler’s goal was to pressure the elected representatives in Munich to turn against the federal government in Berlin through a public show of force and violence. It failed. Hitler was imprisoned, but he used his trial testimony to continue spreading his propaganda and dictated Mein Kampf while serving his sentence. The Beer Hall Putsch was a success for the Nazi party in spite failing to achieve Hitler’s goals.
Ten years later, Hitler was the presidentially-appointed Reichskanzler of Germany. While the Nazis had the most seats in the Reichstag, it was still a minority party. To ensure the passage of the Enabling Act, which gave the chancellor the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag, Hermann Göring, President of the Reichstag, suspended the rules for quorum and outlawed the opposition KPD (Communist party) from participating. Sturmabteilung forces entered the assembly chamber to surround and intimidate the non-Nazi representatives into voting for the law. The passage of the Enabling Act marked the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of Hitler’s dictatorship over the German Reich.
The differences between the Beer Hall Putsch and and the Enabling Act were differences of organizational power, instruments, and outcome, not intent. In both cases, the same bad actors were seeking to overthrow an existing government. President Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen failed to recognize that Hitler and the Nazis not only threatened the principles of the aristocracy or their other political opponents, but the Weimar Republic itself.
Was the Weimar Republic worth saving? It was, by most accounts, including the little my grandmother remembered of it, an awful state. Its government was, putting it mildly, dysfunctional. Many of its citizens lived through an era of terrible poverty and violence following the end of the first World War. But the Reich is what came after. All other avenues of evolutionary institutional or truly revolutionary change ended with the fall of the republic. The world suffered for it.
Trump and his allies have been attacking American institutions for the last four years. Trump doesn’t have the ideological drive of Hitler or the strategic acumen of Caesar. He just has the most base populist instincts to agitate a mob. What he shares with Hitler, Caesar, and other would-be dictators is a desire to remove opposition and the institutional mechanisms of opposition through whatever means are at his disposal. If he can do it through an executive order, he will. If he can do it through political pressure, he will. If can do it through intimidation, quid pro quo exchanges, and other illegal actions, he will. And if it requires a mob of supporters to storm the capitol during a Senate session to overturn their certification vote, he’ll try use that, too.
People have been likening what happened in the U.S. capitol to the Beer Hall Putsch. It’s a fair and reasonable comparison, though Hitler did actually march in his own coup attempt and was wounded during its defeat; Trump just gathered people together, lit a fuse, and watched them go. But it’s important to remember that the differences between the Beer Hall Putsch and the Enabling Act were of organizational power, instruments, and outcome. What if there had been more pro-Trump agitators at the capitol? What if the Senate had not been evacuated in time? What if Trump had more supporters within the Senate to begin with? What if Trump were even mildly more intellectually competent or the various online factional leaders in his mob were more coordinated in their tactics and goals?
Facebook, twitter, and other social media sites have deplatformed Trump. Several companies have suspended hosting services for online communities that have been involved in coordinating fascist, white supremacist mobs in the past. Trump’s supporters, in ignorance or bad faith, have decried that this violates 1st Amendment rights. They are wrong, but even if they were not, the events of January 6th, planned armed protests on the 17th, and threats of violence against Biden’s inauguration on the 20th, represent the kind of imminent institutional danger that Cato spoke of during the Catiline Conspiracy. “When the city is taken, no power is left to the vanquished.”
We have wrestled with how the government and corporations should moderate social media since these platforms emerged. We will continue to do so in the future. While we must take guard against the transformation of severe actions in time of crisis into the de facto way of handling our day-to-day problems, we must also recognize and act to resolve crises as soon as they appear if we have any interest in preserving the institutions they threaten.
I think of myself as a socialist. My political thought is not as educated, as principled, or as nuanced as many other socialists I know, some of whom think that any efforts to preserve or work within existing American institutions is, at best, naïve, in practice, counterproductive and, at worst, actively reactionary. I often look at our institutions through the lens of a designer. When I do, I see systems that do not work to produce meaningful social change. I see systems which do not often work to accomplish any goals of its body politic. In practice, our systems serve the needs and interests of the ruling class and the powers that have the means and knowledge to manipulate the members of that class. The systems confine the use of violence and its instruments to the state, as the state sees fit, often to the detriment and mortal peril of the most disadvantaged and vulnerable among us. It is hard for me to sympathize with those who deify the state and its institutions, especially a state like America that treats its citizens so cruelly. It becomes even harder when adjacent political cousins perennially denounce any hesitance to support milquetoast centrist candidates as tantamount to treason. Even so, when fascists, white supremacists, advocates of genocide are positioning themselves to imminently dismantle these institutions through intimidation and violence, it is not difficult for me to see the value in their immediate preservation.
But if the state and its institutions do survive the next few weeks, we will still live in a world where social media and the principles of freedom of speech are vulnerable to the predations of those who would use their contentious legal status to spread lies, foment popular dissent, and, if necessary, coordinate another violent coup d'état when the time is ripe. The next time, perhaps the popular figurehead will not be as ignorant, as incompetent, as craven, as plainly stupid as Donald Trump. You can already see his would-be successors positioning themselves for 2024 in the waning hours of his presidency. The next time, the populist agitators may be more focused in their goals, more coherent in their strategy, more careful in their communication. Those among them who have witnessed the spectacular failure of imbeciles like Jake Angeli, Adam Johnson, and Richard Barnett may be shrewd enough to learn from the disaster as they prepare for the future.
The Weimar Republic became vulnerable to the schemes of the Nazi party because its representatives failed to address the needs of its citizens and because its leaders failed to recognize the magnitude of threat posed by leaders like Adolf Hitler, propagandists like Goebbels, and paramilitary groups like the Sturmabteilung. Our elected representatives may have finally, at this recent brink of disaster, comprehended the threat that Trump and his supporters pose to the existence of the state. After they make their way through January 20th, the federal government will have to address the needs of a disaffected, impoverished, violently-policed, often disenfranchised populace. They will also have to disentangle the mess that the government has created through their laissez-faire attitude toward social and news media regulation. Their actions in the immediate future will tell if they intend to effect meaningful change or if they are content to use the next four years to pave a road to the ruin of the republic.
annaxmalina
blakekathryn
izzy806
janainaart
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
theartofmadeline
