I got a great email yesterday from a reader named B.C. about Bush’s willful violations of the Geneva Conventions, including the White House belief that it has the authority to secretly transport detainees out of Iraq for interrogation and concealing them from the International Red Cross. B.C. noted that the Declaration of Independence listed among King George III’s offenses: “For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”
On a similar note, Yale political scientist Jim Sleeper had an interesting piece in The American Prospect yesterday noting that some of Bush’s excesses have led “some warnings by this country’s own Founders leap off the page as never before.”
The Founders were all reading Edward Gibbon’s then-new account of how the Roman republic had slipped, degree by self-deluding degree, into an imperial tyranny. Leaders could bedazzle citizens out of their liberties by titillating and intimidating them into becoming bread-and-circus mobs that “no longer possessed that public courage which is nourished by the love of independence, the sense of national honor, the presence of danger, and the habit of command. They received laws and governors from the will of their sovereign and trusted for their defense to a mercenary army … .”
Gibbon added pointedly that Augustus, the first emperor, “wished to deceive the people by an image of civil liberty, and the armies by an image of civil government” and that he knew that “the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.” Campaigning in an open shirt, as it were, “that artful prince … humbly solicited their suffrages for himself, for his friends and scrupulously practiced all the duties of an ordinary candidate … . The emperors … disdained that pomp and ceremony which might offend their countrymen but could add nothing to their real power. In all the offices of life they affected to confound themselves with their subjects and maintained with them an equal intercourse of visits and entertainments.”
And so Rome became what Gibbon called “an absolute monarchy disguised by the forms of a commonwealth,” not by conspiracy but thanks to a confluence of deeper currents that had enervated people’s republican virtues and beliefs.
Sleeper noticed that some of this sounds familiar. It’s a good point.