Stoicism for Turbulent Times (and Divisive Politics) | History of Rome Podcaster Mike Duncan on Political Parallels

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2:52Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So look, the good news is Rome doesn't just collapse after Marcus Aurelius. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is grossly overstated. It not only endures for hundreds of years, you could argue it still stands. Not just that the traditions are carried on in the West, but the Pontifus Maximus, the Pope, that's the job that Marcus Aurelius had. Marcus Aurelius and Pope Francis held the same job. So the good news is, you know, when you read this sort of doom and gloom, when you follow current events and you get scared and you go, are we Rome?

3:32Is everything about to collapse? Like the reassuring thing is that that's not how it works. It goes oftentimes through many, many, many people's lifetimes. The bad news is the Roman Republic, that fell pretty quickly, like in one man's lifetime. We have Julius Caesar. We have the clash between Caesar and Cato and Pompey. Cicero, all the stuff I talk about in Lives of the Stoics. So all this happens very quickly. And yet even there, it takes longer than people think. Longer in a bad way. In the sense that, you know, the institutions of a republic, a system of government doesn't just magically fall to the decisions of a singular person.

4:13Mike Duncan wrote this amazing book called The Storm Before the Storm, which I passed to so many people over the years who were carrying the bookstore. It's an amazing book. You absolutely have to read it. He says, look, what Julius Caesar did, what happened in that lifetime is the epilogue to a story that stretches back almost 100 years. And he looks at the events which lead up to the collapse of the republic, the normalization of mob violence, the normalization of political violence, assassinations, people breaking the rules, people not following the norms, people thinking that they alone were the solution to the republic's problems.

4:52And then also on the other end of the spectrum, people who had their head in the sand and thought that nothing needed to change, Cato being a great example of this. And the dysfunction and the gridlock of the Roman system over, not in one person's lifetime, but generations lead to a kind of a pent-up energy and a frustration. And then this thing goes very, very quickly. Now, of course, the other side of this, Stokes would say everything has two handles, is that it endures for hundreds of years after that. We get to Mark Surilis and then hundreds of years after Mark Surilis, as I was saying. What does this have to do with anything?

5:25As I was watching the events on Sunday unfold, I was at a birthday party for my children. And I thought of something that Mike Duncan had talked about when I interviewed him on the Daily Stoke website long before we even had a podcast. This was his answer. And I think about this a lot. He says, anytime the world starts to feel like it's being engulfed by entropy, chaos, and noisy disunity, the mind naturally seeks out something that offers cohesion, order, and quiet unity. We get carried away by events and certainly feel our passions leading us into behavior that we might, upon reflection, regret.

6:02Stoicism, he said, offers a solid place to plant your feet and says the winds may howl, but I will not be swept away. I think that's a fantastic and an inspiring definition of what stoicism seeks to cultivate and also what desperately needs to happen now. The center has to hold, people have to calm down, and we have to see what we're teetering on the edge of. So for today's episode, I wanted to bring you an interview that I did with Mike Duncan about his amazing book, The Storm Before the Storm. He also has another book that I love called Hero of Two Worlds about Lafayette. Carry both of those in the painted porch.

6:37I'll link to both of them. So look, this interview was done quite a while ago. So this is long before any of these events. But what you get when you study history, when you read about events from 2000 years ago, is that it helps you process what's happening here in the present because you've heard and seen it before. But also, it helps you predict what's going to happen, right? So that's part of the reason why you're not so surprised. Seneca talks about how, you know, anticipation takes the power that events have over you away from them because, you know, it's something you've considered before.

7:09It's not shocking. It's not unprecedented. All this stuff is very, very precedent, good and bad, particularly bad, like the chaos that can happen. We don't want to see any of this stuff. So I wanted to bring you this episode because I think it's important. And look, a stoic can't pretend that none of this exists, that this isn't happening there in the background. You can't just retreat to the Epicurean garden and live in your fantasy life. No, you need to be aware of what's happening, but you need to have the right perspective, the right understanding. And ultimately, I think this was a really important part of the interview that Mike and I did.

7:44You have to know what your role is in it. You have to focus on what you control, and you have to not get caught up in these passions, right? You have to say, the winds may howl, but I will not be swept away. If you haven't listened to Mike's podcasts, they're amazing. I'll link to those in the show notes. And of course, The Storm Before the Storm and Hero of Two Worlds are two must-read books.

8:08You know, I read your book. When did The Storm Before the Storm come out? 2017. So I read it right when it came out, and I thought, oh, wow, this is relevant to where we are today. And now three years have passed. and unfortunately I'm talking to you when it could not be any more relevant. Correct. Is that what you thought or is it surprised even you?

8:38So I had the idea for the book by the time the history of Rome was over, it was a period I knew I wanted to come back and revisit, it um mostly as a sort of um as a projected sort of prescient look into a near distant future but certainly not like right around the corner um and so when i when i was pitching it in let's say come out in 27 so i was probably pitching the book to publishers like in 2015 okay in 2014 and And it was meant to be, yes, I am beginning to detect troubling signs inside the American body politic that seemed to me to be echoes of some of the things that the Roman Republic was facing.

9:27You know, all caveats about historical parallels aside. And then, you know, I was writing it during the 2016 election is when I was actually like drafting the final, was actually drafting the final manuscript. and, you know, all through that whole process, you know, people are bombarding me on social media. It's like, you got to get this book out, man. And I was like, you know, I was just like, I'm writing the book as fast as I can. And I was just watching things accelerate so much faster than I would have thought, you know, like if I was projecting mentally, I'd be like, oh, by 2030 or 2040, you know, we'll be in a bad place.

10:06And then it just, we really, we really started accelerating towards some things that then, yeah, especially the first couple of chapters of the book, um, are just extremely relevant to what we're facing right now, like as a country. Well, when I, I've recommended your book to like world leaders and, uh, senators and I do appreciate that by the way. Oh, thank you. No, I mean, cause people ask me to sort of what, well, you know, what are you reading or, or what do you think I should read or what's a way to sort of understand this stuff? And when I recommend the book, my sort of summary of it, and I'd be curious, if you think this is accurately depicts it and maybe we riff on this a bit, but I sort of go, people think that Julius Caesar just happened, that he just overthrew the Roman Republic out of, you know, force of personality or genius or necessity, you know, sort of depending on where you come down, but that it was sort of in, he was an aberration that it was a force of nature, essentially.

11:04But the argument of your book is like, no, history doesn't just happen. A hundred years of smaller events contributed to that happening. And you don't start at Julius Caesar if you want to understand why the Roman Republic fell. You have to look at the generation before and the generation before that and the generation before that. And what the storm before the storm does is give you, it sets the table to then understand what you heard about from Shakespeare or movies or anything like that. That's exactly what I was trying to do. And that is exactly, you know, sort of what I discovered for myself when I was writing the history of Rome and going through all those episodes.

11:46And one of the things that I have said, you know, coming out of the history of Rome, and this remains true, is that if you talk to people just out in the general public, you know, what do they know about Roman history, start telling me things about Roman history, um they will tell you things that are really confined to about a hundred year period of the sort of thousand years that at least the western roman empire existed and it usually starts around julius caesar the uh they know they know julius caesar and they know mark antony and cleopatra because they've been in movies and they know caligula and they know nero um because that stuff is like in you know it's in i claudius or or another sort of like it's in pop culture um But yeah, when you talk about the quote unquote fall of the Roman Republic, you are talking about Julius Caesar and you are talking about Cicero and Cato the Younger and Brutus.

12:37And but where did those guys come from? Where did they get the idea to do the things that they were doing? Why was the entire Republican political culture in a place where these things could actually happen? And to understand that, you have to go back about 70 or 80 years in my estimation. I mean, you can backlog everything. You could say like, well, ultimately, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic is like when it wouldn't have happened if Romulus hadn't have founded Rome in the first place. But if the wolf had been different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If that wolf hadn't breastfed Romulus and Remus, there never would have been a Roman Republic to fall.

13:17That's just fun. That's just fun with history. But I do really think that it's true that something happened coming out of the Third Punic War, that the republic itself was in such a place economically and politically that things did need to happen to correct some of the inequalities and correct some of the sort of the mental drift that happened inside of the senatorial aristocracy. that once that drift started to set in and once they started to get away from the things that have bound them together politically up to that point, and we can talk specifics about this, is that that process started to build on itself like a snowball.

13:59And even more than a snowball, it was reactions to reactions to reactions. And the collapse of political norms becomes sort of like a Hatfield and McCoy style feud where people keep responding to whatever the last move on the board was and whatever the last breaking of the most recent norm was. And in that sort of reaction, you always feel like you're responding to some bad thing that somebody else has done. And then you do something to that person, then things, oh, well, you've done something bad and they respond to that. And then suddenly you go from people arguing in the forum to literal armies marching into Rome and literal civil war engulfing your entire political culture, all of which happened, you know, 40 years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.

14:46I mean, the Roman Republic could have fallen multiple times, you know, during the civil wars, during the social war and during the fighting between Marius and Sulla. It's actually something of a miracle that the Republic even lasted for Caesar to take down a couple decades later. Yeah, you know, this is sort of a stoic thing. We're going to let's zoom way out. And then I want to get into the norm stuff for sure. But it's like when you when you look at the Roman history, it feels like it it happened over a thousand years, as you said. But it also feels like it happened over like 10 years. Like when I was just did this book, Lives of the Stoics, which is a biography of all the different Stoics.

15:23But even to go like from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, it's like 600 years. and and yet they all seemed to be just a generation or two away from each other i mean even this is a little bit after your book but like it it struck me to go like seneca lived through five emperors and and so there is this like there is this idea that history is really long but it's also recent like i've talked about this too but you know i met a guy uh he's unfortunately now passed, but he was born when Theodore Roosevelt was president. And you're just like, oh, you think this is so long ago. But to a lot of these Romans in your book, it's like the thing that happened 40 years ago, they grew up with their father talking about or, you know, Cato is like, he's he shares the name with his great, great grandfather.

16:14So these things feel both distant and very current to all these figures. Yeah. I mean, if you and if you look at Julius Caesar, but as you know, a very specific example of this, I mean, who is he? He is, he's related to Marius. Um, you know, his, his, his aunt, his, his great aunt, I'm now blanking which one it was, um, was married to Marius, you know, she's probably named Julia or something. Well, they're all, they're all named Julia, which is, you know, I'm sorry, if you read the book, I'm sorry, they all had the same names. There's nothing I can do about it. Like there's all the names are the same.

16:46I'm like, that's not my fault. That's the Romans. They only had like 12 names. Um, but yeah, he is, you know, Caesar pops up at the end of the storm before the storm as a teenager. Um, he literally lived through this and his, the normal environment that that quote unquote last generation of the Roman Republic was born into Cicero and Cato, the younger and Caesar. I mean, uh, Cicero fought in the social war, which was, which was a huge civil war that nobody ever really talks about anymore because again, sort of a popular culture has confined itself to just this one very specific stretch of Roman history.

17:27But yeah, those guys were teenagers. Those guys were in their twenties. They were just embarking on their own careers as they watched what happens if somebody who is very bold and who refuses to be taken down by their political enemies and is willing to push things to the absolute limit in order to win and not be taken down. That was the lesson they all learned. And that last generation had already learned a lesson about how to wield and utilize power that generations before them, they were growing up in an environment where none of those things were done. None of those things were thought to be possible.

18:06None of those things were, you were not meant to act or behave in that way. And so So a lot of the bad things that happen when a political culture takes itself to that place is not the immediate crisis. An immediate crisis can come and go. We can look, just for example, at what happened on January 6th at the Capitol and say, oh, boy, boy, we really dodged a bullet there. But who are the teenagers who are watching this kind of thing on TV or whatever they watch, whatever the kids are watching things on these days? And then we look forward to 2030 and 2040. And what are people who are being bathed in this version of American politics going to be like in 20 or 30 years?

18:52That was actually one of the things that I told a congressman that I know when we were talking about what happened on January 6th is, you know, history does not judge poor responses to spontaneous violence or rebellion well. And I said, you know, might I remind you of a sort of inadequately punished attempted coup in Germany in 1920? You know, and that's what struck me about the book. There was all these moments where, you know, everyone thought, hey, things are breaking down a little bit. But things are weird. They've always been this way. We'll turn around. And then like a mob would break into a building and tear someone to pieces or a mob would, you know, a mob would demand the execution of so and so.

19:40And it kind of felt like these leaders were just kicking the can down the road, hoping a problem would resolve itself. And really, that was just ensuring that there would be an explosive outcome at some point in the future. Right. And I think I think part of that kicking of the can down the road is that we do get locked into forms of tribalism. right and um the and the i mean the romans literally had you know tribal and and family client patron networks that operated very differently from the way that street gangs and yeah yeah yeah and like and like the way that those client patron networks were operating they operated far more like let's say the mafia does than like an american political party a modern democratic political party does um but one of the things that was really apparent all through the storm before the storm as I was writing it and researching it was that whenever those things happened, you were always right on the tip of everybody's tongue was why the last, why the people who were sort of the victims of this round of violence were actually the causes of it because of this thing that they had done five years earlier or 10 years earlier.

20:56Right. And so when in chapter one, you know, sort of the, so the Grockeye brothers are long associated with the introduction of political violence into the Roman system. And this is really true. If you go, you take the founding of the Republic around 500 BC, all the way through to the Grockeye brothers, who now you're talking the 130s, 120s BC, you're talking about centuries. There wasn't really a whole lot of political violence inside of the Roman Republican system. There were some stuff coming out of the conflict of the orders sort of in the early days. But most of it was pretty subdued in terms of, you know, like knifing people or beating them over the head with table legs.

21:41If you didn't get your way, if you lost an election, let's say, and one of the actually not to get off on a tangent, but one of the genius things about the Roman system is, you know, the two consul ships every single year. We often talk about that being really smart, because no one person could ever accumulate power, right? So there was no sort of, it was a guard against dictatorship. You got two guys in office and they're gonna be out by the end of the year. And one of the benefits of that system though, in terms of political stability, was that it also meant that everybody got their bite at the apple from the senatorial class.

22:16So everybody was always gonna have another, always gonna have another bite at the consulship if they lost this election, right? So losing an election was not an apocalyptic event for these guys because they can always come back around next year and win. So that's just like a little thing. But the Gracchi are associated with the introduction of political violence. And what people forget though, is that they were not actually the ones who instigated the violence. They were doing things and pushing things beyond the normal limits of the Republic. But at least Tiberius in the very first instance of this is a group of conservative senators who don't like what he's doing.

22:53The Pontifex Maximus leading a mob of armed, like basically an armed gang, who's going to go up there and beat Tiberius to death and beat his supporters to death and push them off the tarpan rock. So that basically a reactionary violence attack on the Gracchi that happens there in 133. And then again, to his brother a decade later, that rooted in the minds of more populist oriented Roman politicians and their supporters that like we have to take revenge on these people. And then a lot of what happens in the one teens and like, and like, as you approach the turn of the century, um, like during the time of the Jugurtha war, um, a lot of what they were doing was a, was, was a 15 years later getting their revenge on what had happened to the Grot guy.

23:47And then once those guys start to do these, start to take it out and have their revenge on the senatorial aristocracy, to purge certain members, to bring them before various courts, to drive them out and exile them from Rome, now that creates a system where those guys feel like they need to respond to it. And it just, you see this very long running tit for tat feud between these different families that you see, I see this a lot in American politics where, you know, Democrats will bring up the treatment of Merrick Garland and say, this is an example of a completely violated norm in terms of a president being allowed to appoint somebody to the Supreme Court and having the Senate basically be like, well, is he qualified?

24:32If he's qualified and he's not a horrendous candidate, then the Senate should go along with it. And that's kind of the way it was always done, except then Republicans will say, well, what about Robert Bork? Right. Isn't it amazing how sort of self-serving, and I think it's true in Rome and it's true today, how self-serving the rationalization is, you know, it's like, hey, we're going to steal a Supreme Court seat, but you did it, you know, 30 or 40 years ago. And by the way, the circumstances are totally different. and it didn't actually cost you a seat, that we managed to find a way to root. Nobody ever comes out and says, I am overthrowing a democratic norm.

25:13What we do is we find a way to root it in precedent. However, baldly preposterous that precedent is, I was appalled, for instance, in Ted Cruz trying to rationalize the failure to certify an election, the precedent of the 1876 election, which is one of the travesties of American democracy when we ended, you know, reconstruction in the South and basically deprive black people of their rights and shove them back into pseudo slavery as a political bargain. That's the precedent he's using to rationalize a destruction of an important norm. And then, of course, what we're also watching, I mean, and if you go from Bork, which is like, we don't like him, etc.

26:00Yeah, there's there's then there was lots of reasons for the Democrats to oppose him. But then they did bring it to a vote and they voted him down. Right. And that was the thing that happened, which then then you fast forward 20, I guess, 25, 30 years. And you've got the Senate majority leader just refusing to even have hearings at all. And that's how that's how these things can escalate while still also being not really my fault. It's your fault that you started this like 30 years ago. And then Democrats will always be able to point to Merrick Garland as, you know, and wave the, you know, sort of the lost flag of Merrick Garland, I think, justly.

26:36And this is how these things are just going to keep going.

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28:52So how do you break that cycle, right? Because so it's like it's like what happens with Merrick Garland. And then you get the Republicans that go, hey, you know, Kavanaugh gets sort of jammed up with this me too thing that, you know, I think a reasonable person could agree or disagree with. And then, you know, now you have the Democrats saying, hey, if we if we take all branches of government, we're going to pack the Supreme Court. And you do see Biden saying, hey, that's not a good idea. It's both tempting, but then also like almost from a game theory standpoint, rational to meet the breaking of one norm with the breaking of another norm.

29:29It feels like a sucker's payoff to be like, hey, I'm going to let the other people get off scot-free with political violence or what have you. or norm breaking, but I'm going to follow the rules to the letter, only the Cato's do that. Right. And they lose. And so it is important to note that underlying all of this is profound differences in your vision for what the United States ought to be. And if you have profoundly different visions for how the country ought to be, then yeah, for one side, to allow your political opponent to just sort of behave any way that they want without any repercussions while you say, well, we are going to adhere to these old traditional norms.

30:14And like, you know, if they retake the Senate to listen to what Republicans have to say about anything, which, you know, Mitch McConnell didn't listen to anything any Democrat wanted while he was in power. And so it would be, again, as you say, from sort of a game theory or a political strategy or simply advancing your own interests, what you think you want to have happen to the country, it would be madness to do anything but play as equally as hard ball as you got played. So your question, though, is the big one. I mean, it's the million dollar question. Once you have gotten into a feud like this, how do you ever extract yourself from it?

30:56And how do you pull out of the spin? Okay, so I've obviously given this a lot of thought. And to my best guess, because partly, I got to tell you, I'm just incredibly pessimistic about not pulling out of it. It's a hard thing to do because these hurts are deep. These resentments that we feel about each other are really down in our core of our bones. But I think that the correction has to come from inside the team, as it were, or inside your group, inside your tribe, right? And this is one of like, and we had a moment just now, and the moment got missed, the moment was pretty much blown, where we had something straight out of Roman history, which is early, you know, the bad bits of Roman history, which nobody ever likes to say we're living through the bad bits of Roman history, where the president of the United States and a clique of allied senators and representatives sort of whipped up and egged on through a really dedicated mission of disinformation and lying about the results of the election.

32:13They whipped up a mob and that mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt the legal transfer of power, right? And so now the United States can no longer say that we do peaceful transitions of power. Like we actually just on January 6th, we lost the right. It's like how many, we've had 240 years of no workplace accidents and that's not the case anymore. Right. Well, yeah, the last workplace accident was like an 1860. But since then we, and you know, we, we always like to, you know, like that's one of the things we do. Like, you know, we, we have these peaceful transitions of power, which we can't say anymore because we did not just have a peaceful transition of power.

32:51We had, there was violence associated with it. There was violence to try to stop the legal transition of power. So - And that's why it's fundamental for anyone listening. That's why what happened on January 6th was fundamentally different than all of the violence during the Black Lives Matters protests over the summer combined. And it's fundamentally different than any violent protest or looting or disruption or even terrorism that's happened in the United States, because the core purpose of what happened on January 6th, and I'm saying this because I do know I have some listeners who are not clear on this, the fundamental purpose of what those protesters did on January 6th was to stop the certification of a democratic election.

33:36It was effectively a coup attempt, and that has never happened in American history, and God willing, it never happens again. Yeah, I hope so. The precedent is now there, which is part of what makes the storm before the storm so distressingly relevant. And all of it didn't just happen once in Rome, each time it escalated. There's no doubt in my mind that something like this is going to happen again. There's no doubt in my mind. I hate to say it. What happened didn't even really surprise me because all the warning signs were there. They were doing this all right out in the open. Like, I mean, I don't know how many times you have to treat somebody like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and take them at their word for what they say and do.

34:18People show you who they are as leaders. You got to believe them. Yeah, they constantly follow through on the wild ass things that they were promising to do in public all the time for like two months. So but the but again, the million dollar question is, how do you stop this? And the response, to be clear, lots of Republicans, lots of conservatives expressed shock, horror, condemnation for what happened, right? Like this is disgusting. This is violent. This is not how we're supposed to do it. All the people who were involved should be arrested. It would be flagrantly dishonest to say that Republicans have not responded to what happened on January 6th with words of strong condemnation.

35:05I mean, George W. Bush is putting things out there, as he rarely does to say that this is a bad and terrible thing. But then when it comes to what do we do about the leaders who stirred this up, who revved this up, who were planning to benefit politically from it, what do we do about those people who didn't just aid and abet what happened, but actually started it in the first place for their own political advantage? What's going to happen to the representatives who gave tours to people who we would now, just as a piece of political science terminology called insurrectionists? What do we do about Ted Cruz?

35:51What do we do about Hawley? And what do we do about Trump? And unfortunately, at the moment, the response seems to be absolutely nothing, right or if something is going to happen it's going to be entirely the democrats who do it and as and what they said was that you know you can't you should not impeach trump you should not try to remove him from office because that will be an entirely partisan response to what happened um and it is in the grand scheme of things not great to only have democrats being the one responding to this because it will create a sense of grievance and a sense of resentment and a sense of um i think you're right it's like uh some of the republicans have said like hey we need to unify we need to come together in and in a sense they're completely correct we just all need to come together and re-establish in some unified way to come together as both parties and impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office.

36:48The Senate needs to come together and vote 97 to 3 to remove Ted Cruz from the Senate, to remove Hawley from the Senate, right? There are lots of examples all through Roman history and all through the history of democracies across the world that sometimes representatives, senators, delegates, peers, whatever, do things that are so heinous that they simply are forbidden henceforth from serving in government. And the problem though, is that the Republicans are exactly right when they say that it will look bad and be bad for the political climate if only Democrats are the ones trying to impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office or remove Cruz from office.

37:33And I happen to agree with that, which is why I would implore all Republicans to get on board with the vote. The answer is then not to let's come together and do nothing about it, right? That's even worse. It's let's come together and do something about it together. Because if Republicans are not the ones saying, our guy screwed up and we're going to punish them too, then the message is going to be this is still just a running political feud between two hyper-partisan factions. And we've moved beyond that. And so if you want to stop this, If you want to stop the dissent into what ultimately becomes a civil war, like we are on a path right now to civil war, like just objectively and historically.

38:19If you want to arrest that, Republicans need to take care of what's happening in the ranks of the Republicans. And to the extent that similar things are happening inside the Democratic Party, Democrats need to be the ones who are taking care of that. And so it becomes a bit of we need to take care of our own tribes. a little bit because we are already in a place where we all feel persecuted. Democrats feel persecuted by Republicans. Republicans feel persecuted by Democrats. And the fact that the Republicans just let only the Democrats respond forcefully to what happened on January 6th will leave that persecution complex in place.

38:57And that stinks, man. That stinks. Right. Yeah. It's like in the lead up to the Civil War, you have the beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate as a Congress, I forget. But you can't allow these things to happen because they escalate. And so let me, I would say that one of the Republican responses, and this is probably true in Rome as well, and I think this segues into obviously what I write about, is that they might go, but to expel Trump or to have impeached him earlier this year, or I guess last year now, to expel Republican members from the Senate, to vote against something that not all of their base supports is to commit political suicide, right?

39:38And so maybe what we're really also talking about, and the Stoics were there in the events of the books we're talking about, what you need beyond politics and beyond the sort of the compass of self-interest is you need some sort of personal virtue or some philosophy that guides you. So when you say, hey, look, I'm choosing between committing political suicide and doing the right thing, it's very clear to you what the right choice is, right? That it would be better to not be in power or to have to go into the political wilderness for a while than it would be to stay relevant, to maintain your party's hold on things and do it by tolerating or tacitly condoning something that is, you know, beyond the pale and a violation of one's democratic norms.

40:37Yeah, it has always been a bit astounding to me, the lengths, the things that people will let go on and the lengths people will go to, and the things that they will accept simply in order to continue to be a congress person in the United States House of Representatives for six years, you know, from 2012 to 2018. Or if you have somebody who's planning on running for office here coming up, you know, the I don't know what the average 10 year of a congress person is. Sometimes, sometimes you get these people that serve for 50 years, of course, and we know this. But sometimes it's just like, yeah, I do it for six years, and then I become a lobbyist.

41:19right like go back to my law firm or like whatever and it's you know it's a cool thing you get to put in your obituary um but there is a degree to which as you say like what is the consequence of joining an effort to impeach trump or doing something about ted cruz the the consequence and we can talk about the um you know the physical threats that they do feel which i think is a little bit true. It's very real. Yeah, it's very real. But in general, what we're talking about is they might not get to keep that job anymore. As if they're privately, they all complain about not liking to begin. Yeah, which, yeah, you can go back to being a lawyer, you can be a lobbyist, like I don't that maybe that's not that that's not a particularly virtuous thing either.

42:07But there are many things that you could do. It's not literal suicide. We're not saying if you do this, then you have to go home and light incense and candles and, you know, cut your stomach open with a sword. You know, you don't have to sit in a hot bath and open your veins because you voted to impeach Trump. Like, that's not what we're talking about here. But the apocalyptic - Jeff Blake's doing fine. Yeah. The apocalyptic visions that people have, like, what are the consequences? I will lose an election if I do this. And then what that does is, I firmly believe that many, many, many, many, many Republicans have done many, many, many, many, many things over the past four years and over the past eight years.

42:48And even before that, in terms of their opposition to President Obama, that doesn't actually align with their worldview, doesn't actually align with their ethics or their values, but they do because they feel driven to do it or they will lose their job. They will not get to be congresspeople anymore. They will not get a good seat at a restaurant. They will not get to go on Morning Joe or whatever the perks of this job are, they're going to lose those. And they find that to be, for some reason, the consequences so intolerable that they will tolerate all of this stuff. And at the moment, yeah, we're watching them be afraid of their own voting base, partly because they will lose an election.

43:35And of course, by now, we've let things get to the point where it's not just, I'm afraid I'll lose my job. It's, I'm afraid somebody's going to murder me, which is like, that's also like, if anybody's listening and doesn't think that that's like a true fear that they have or a true theft that they have, of course it is. There was a, that was a lynch mob that we saw march into, um, march into the Capitol. And in, in the American experience, you know, uh, lynch mobs are very closely linked to, uh, racist violence in the South. And if you say lynch mob in the American context, you're, and I mean, there were many, many racists in that, in that crowd, but a lynch mob happened in the French revolution happens in the Russian revolution.

44:15It's a, it's a phenomenon that happens a group of people who want to murder somebody once they're, once they're sort of bloodlust is up. This is a thing that has happened in human history many times. And it happened on January 6th. You know, some of the people in that crowd were totally ready to kill Mike Pence. They were totally ready to kill nancy pelosi they were totally ready to kill chuck schumer like they wanted those people dead um not weird not everybody but enough of them and it doesn't take many people in those circumstances you only need a couple of people um to actually start to start the killing and there's there's french revolutionary precedents for all this too which is which are always fun and troubling but i think it's so fascinating how how utterly indistinguishable the mob on January 6th is from the mobs that you talk about in the storm before the storm.

45:04Like this is something human beings do when the systems break down or when they've been encouraged in such a way. And on the other side of the sort of the self-interest and the rationalization from the senators and the congressmen and women is also, I mean, you're also describing Seneca and Cato and And countless other senators who always, a little bit after your book, but sought to rationalize horrendous things, probably in part because they didn't want to lose their jobs and also because they told themselves they were so indispensable to the process that if they were not to be in power, things would be worse.

45:47Yeah. And so you start, you get this weird mixture of this sort of very individual personal self-interest and human beings are wonderfully gifted with the power of rationalization. I mean, we can take anything that we have done, anything that we have said, anything that anybody else close to us has said or done, and take that raw material and turn it into a story where we are still the hero and other people are still the villain and have it make and just fit it right into our existing worldview. You know, it is something that human beings can absolutely do. And as you referenced too, the easiest and most obvious comparison that we're talking about right now is what happened on January 6th versus the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, right?

46:43Which is instantly where many conservatives and many Republicans went feeling, as I said, there's this mutual resentment and mutual persecution complex that is absolutely infected the United States of America at the moment. where it is impossible to look at what happened on January 6th for a conservative or for a Republican and not say, why are these hypocritical Democrats so up in arms about some people taking selfies in the Capitol when they just cheered on mobs of people burning down America for three straight months? The hypocrisy is beyond comprehension. I hate these people with the heat of a thousand suns, right?

47:26They want to impeach Crump. They want to kick Cruz out. They want to purge all these people from Twitter and from social media. I cannot believe how hypocritical this all is. But as you said, there are many, many profound differences, right, between Black Lives Matter and what happened on January 6th. But more germane to what we're talking about right now is how quickly their minds shifted and how quickly their rhetoric shifted from actually confronting what happened on January 6th to re-litigating what happened last summer, right? They don't want to talk about what happened on January 6th because it's very bad for Republicans and it's very bad for conservatives.

48:08So they want to keep the conversation on what happened over the summer because that they feel is bad for Democrats and bad for liberals. And so the conversation that we're having right now is like, you know, it continues to be persecution complex leading to a prosecutorial mentality aimed at Democrats and liberals over what happened during Black Lives Matter, rather than actually confronting what happened just now, right now in front of everybody. And that too is a part of this system of dodging responsibility and not facing the things that are actually happening right in front of us and always making it the other side's fault that anything has gone bad or wrong.

48:43Well, and this is where I think also the sort of intellectual rigor and sort of self-discipline and accountability of a philosophy like Stoicism, but really any religious code or any set of values is so important because whataboutism is a plague on the mind and the spirit of a human being? You know, like I've joked about this, like if if I do something wrong and my wife says, Ryan, don't do that. I don't like that. I don't get to just bring up a bunch of other irrelevant shit that I don't like that she does. Like that's that that's a nice recipe for a toxic relationship that immediately is going to fall apart because no one ever has to be accountable for themselves.

49:28And you can't have a discussion about what is right there in front of you. And so the fact that the other side is doing it is irrelevant. The fact that when the other side does stuff, they bring up how you do stuff is irrelevant. You have to have the intellectual and intestinal fortitude to deal with the facts in front of you, regardless of what anyone else is doing. And take your lumps as they need to be taken. And I think that there are actually, you know, personally, I think that there's far more, there are many more people that probably ought to resign from office for having done so much since the election to build up and gin up, like not even just like the people who were really organizing what happened on January the 6th, right?

50:21The final batch of ringleaders. But the rhetoric over the past two months has been apocalyptic about the consequences of Joe Biden becoming president of the United States. The consequences of Democrats potentially taking control of the Senate. They built it up into such insane, like it would be Armageddon. And this is what they're pumping out there. This is what they're feeding their voters. And it became a feedback loop. But there is a there is a degree to which many, many people out there should probably take a good hard look at themselves and say, what am I actually a part of? What am I actually helping to promote here?

51:07What was my role in all of this? And should I take responsibility for my role in all of this? And my pessimism about what's happening in the United States right now comes from a place of not really believing these people have it in them to do that. And that the crop of leaders that we are currently saddled with by our own choosing, because obviously we still do have democracy and these are still, you know, these are the people that are being elected to serve as our political leaders. the introspection and the desire to take responsibility is pretty much nowhere to be found. I don't, I wouldn't even know where to start looking for such a rare and extinct animal in the halls of government at the moment.

52:09The Stoics talk about, you know, sort of finding inspiration in your heroes, right? The exemplars that the people from the past who did, you know, sort of embody the traits that you want to embody or you need people to embody today. And one of the heroes of, he's a minor character in your book, but he's sort of become a hero to me, having talked to you about him already. And then I did a chapter on him in Lives of the Stoics. But maybe tell the story of Rutilius Rufus real briefly, because I think there is this theme, as bad as it was getting in Rome and as bad it would get after the rise of Julius Caesar and after, there was always amidst the dregs of Romulus, as Cicero would say, some heroes, some bright spots.

53:00Well, if you want me to tell the story of Rutilius Rufus, you are out of luck because he is a minor character at the end of the storm before the storm. And I do not have his brief little bio sketch in front of me to remind me exactly what it is that I need to be saying about him at the moment, which stinks. He would be a good person to think about because, I mean, what you have there is someone who is indicted by the political corruption of his time, wrongly brought up on charges, and sort of insists on, hey, I'm going to be an honest man despite all of the norm breaking around me. And I do think that was common.

53:40Oh, right. He takes the exile and thumbs his nose at him on the way out the door. Right. That's right. There we go. Okay. And look, I think Cato and Cicero are two examples too. You know, everyone else is cheating in their elections, right? All the elections are bought and rigged at this time. And these two men say, I'm not going to play the game that way. I'm going to try to win honestly. And so there, I mean, there are people who say, I'm not going to be infected by what's happening. Yeah. But of course, Cato, the younger, you know, he spread his bribes around too when it actually came down to, you know, when it was, you know, if it's this or Caesar, you know, he too made his choices there at the end.

54:22And they all did. Because as he said, you know, at a certain point, from a game theory standpoint, if, you know, you have one side that is behaving and doing anything they want to do, like in the fall of the Republican context, Julius Caesar did not feel bound by any rules at all, right? He seemed to have found all of those old norms and rules so quaint and so archaic, you know, like, of course, I'm going to bribe voters to vote for me. I want to win the election. Like, you'd be a fool not to do this. Why wouldn't I do it? And so the problem then becomes if one side is doing it, to try to not do it, you're really mostly setting yourself up to lose.

55:10One of the examples that's really easy to use because everybody knows it is what happens to the Washington Generals every time they play the Harlem Globetrotters. They get their asses kicked because the Harlem Globetrotters do whatever they want and the Washington Generals are out there playing by the rules. They're not traveling. They're making sure they dribble all the time. They don't go out of bounds. They don't pull the ref's pants down and then just run up and do a slam dunk. And that's the problem. If you're going to actually have a sporting contest in that way, or you're actually going to try to win a sporting contest, which is what politics can be considered in certain ways, you have to be playing by the same set of rules.

55:58And if one side is going to chuck the rules overboard, then you are saying to yourself, either I sacrifice my principles, the things that I care about and take the hit, or I don't. And so what I mean when I say we need to self-police ourselves is that what you need to have happen is not the Washington generals decide that because the Harlem Globetrotters are flagrantly cheating, I mean, so flagrantly, it's amazing the refs never catch it. But it's not about encouraging the Washington generals to stop playing by the rules. It's about encouraging the globetrotters to play by the rules. And that's where it needs to come from.

56:45Now, obviously, that would make for crappy entertainment. And nobody wants that to actually happen in fun exhibition basketball. But in terms of politics, that's where these things need to happen. And what you're talking about, finding the honorable people who are willing to take their personal lumps and lose, you know, and accept the loss, that has to come from the people who have violated the rules and have violated the norms and have tossed them overboard. because right now the fear is not necessarily, because when I say we're going to see something like this in the future, I don't mean the Republican Party is uniquely on some dark path, which I mean, I do think the Republican Party is on a uniquely dark path at the moment, but not - No, the other side can rationalize doing the same.

57:37That's exactly what I'm saying, is that when's the next time it's going to happen? Is it going to be Democrats? Well, maybe, you know? And I've talked about this on social media, And everything is happening so fast that it's really hard to articulate everything that's going on. But there is a scenario where, okay, let's just run through this for a second. Let's say that on election day, Trump was very clearly losing the election. And then let's say, let's make up some crazy hypothetical, not like this would ever happen. But the president starts calling various secretaries of state and encouraging them to find votes.

58:17however they can in order to, let's just say in Georgia, to turn the election that's going against him. And let's say that instead of saying no to the president, as the secretary of state of Georgia did, because that all happened, we just pretend like Donald Trump didn't spend two months trying to steal this election. It's insane. But let's say he says yes. And then we get up one day and Georgia and Pennsylvania have suddenly found a bunch of votes. And now Trump has won the election. And what's the response of Democrats going to be to this and liberals to this who believe that Donald Trump is so fundamentally dishonest?

58:55Let's say we have evidence that he did this. We get the same phone call. We get all the evidence that Donald Trump has actually successfully stolen the election. And now we're in sort of an alternate timeline where that certification process that's going to happen on January the 6th is a fraudulent certification of Donald Trump's fraudulent re-election, right? So now who's out in front of the Capitol? It's a bunch of Democrats. It's a bunch of liberals. It's a bunch of leftists, right? They are the ones who are screaming and braying and saying, you know, hey, we have at all costs, we have to stop this because this is a fraudulent election.

59:36I think that that is very, that is a very plausible scenario. like everything I just outlined could have just, it could have happened so easily because Donald Trump did try to steal the election. He did try to find votes that didn't exist. Liberals and Democrats are so pissed at him already. And he was already, he was already signaling many, many times that he was going to try to steal the election. He spent two months trying to steal the election. So what then is the difference between those two things? Would I be sitting here and encouraging protesters to storm the Capitol because this is the last gasp of American democracy.

1:00:13And if you don't overturn this, you know what, man, I don't know what I would say at that point. Um, because I don't know as we're talking right now, where we're at politically, is it inherently bad to just charge into the Capitol and turn over and try to overturn the vote. What if we know for a stone cold fact that Donald Trump stole the election? What if it was actually proven beyond all shadow of a doubt? What do you do in that situation? I can't answer that question because it never actually happened, but I will say this about it, is that one of the huge differences between that scenario that I just outlined and what actually happened is that those Those people who charged in the Capitol did so fraudulently based on lies, not to secure American democracy, but to overturn it.

1:01:05But perhaps many of them or some of them - Oh, they all believed it. Oh, of course they were. I absolutely 100 % believe that they believed it. But you know, and I know that there is something called empirical truth. and as much as it becomes a very sort of lazy, cynical thing to say, which is, oh, well, perception is reality. Or we live in this digital world where people are allowed to choose their own realities and live in their own realities. And their belief that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him is equally valid to my, let's say, Mike Duncan's belief that the election was not stolen.

1:01:51that Biden won the election, right? That's my belief. The people who stormed the Capitol had the belief that Joe Biden did not win the election. And some people will try to tell you that those two beliefs are equally valid because they're both earnestly believed. The problem is that one of them is actually empirically true and the other one is not. That's where this other virtue of wisdom comes in. The ability to, like, you know, I saw this meme the other day, it was like, what good is my college education? It's like not falling for a fake coup, you know, like, like to be able to discern fact from fiction is a skill that not everyone has.

1:02:30And I think when you want to look at the collapse of norms in Rome or today, it's probably rooted in the fact that, I mean, even, even I think some of the politicians we're talking about, we're not cravenly manipulating the masses, but we're themselves the manipulated masses. Right. Because I mean, that's the thing is I like, so I think that Ted Cruz, for example, knew that he was cynically manipulating people. I think that's really clear. He's a smart guy. He knows exactly what's going on. Now, the question is, like, what about Trump? Because that dude's brain is pickled. And that dude's brain has been pickled by watching way too much TV and reading propaganda that is fed to him either over the TV or on the internet, that it is impossible to understand whether or not he...

1:03:21And I don't think it matters to him, right? He's a pure bullshit artist in the sense that he doesn't care what's true or not true. He is a liar, but he doesn't care, mostly. So does he actually believe that he won this election and that it was stolen from him? Is his narcissism so powerful? is his delusional, the delusional feedback loop that he lives in, where he just watches Fox and Friends and tweets about it. What does he actually believe? What was going through Nero's mind? You know, was Nero a Machiavellian, you know, murderer of his enemies? Or did he delude himself into thinking that this was the rational response to real threats?

1:04:04And I think, you know, Seneca talks about this in his plays. He's never sure he talks about it overtly, but it goes, empty fears earns one real fears. It creates your delusions and your insanity. It also contributes to the feedback loop that we're talking about. Yeah. And this is actually something that happens a lot in all the work that I do on revolutions, which is most of the leaders that I'm talking about, and I'm talking about them because they get hit by a revolution, whether it's Tsar Nicholas or Louis XVI or Charles X, these people were living in delusional bubbles, right? And they were protected from, and I actually just said this about Nicholas, Sir Nicholas, that he was living in a reality only slightly less manufactured than the Truman Show.

1:04:49He didn't know what was happening beyond the walls of the palace because there was an information bubble that he was trapped in. And for Trump, you know, this is not so it's not like courtiers are I mean, though he was protected. I mean, he got it now that I'm thinking about it, he was protected in exactly the same way that they used to coddle like the Habsburg rulers, right, who wind up getting overthrown because, you know, they're printing out the good news for him and stuff. And so this guy has been living in a narcissistic reality bubble that is entirely possible that he believes that he won that last election by 20 million votes.

1:05:23And that, you know, that it actually was stolen from him. But again, you go back to it. There is, and I actually do believe this as a matter of philosophy, that not all reality is strictly plastic and plastic in a way that what your mind impresses upon it is as equally true as what somebody else impresses on their plastic reality in terms of what can be manipulated and what is not. And I think that's true. But I think that people like just out in the discourse do lose track of that. And they do say, well, they believed it. So it's, you know, so it's the same, but it's not the same because it was lies.

1:06:06It was disinformation. It was misinformation, right? Those people believed a delusional fantasy that was not true. And it drove them to violently attack the legal transfer of power. Cop got killed. You know, people died because of what just happened. And so it's not the same as saying, you know, I don't think that Trump won the election, which I don't. For the record, I don't think Trump won the election. No, no, I think you're totally right. And you sort of, but you get, it does start to make sense, the dilemma you're talking about. Okay, there is an illegal seizing of power. And this is a dilemma that the Stoics go through, right?

1:06:49So at the end of Julius Caesar's reign, you know, short life, then there's the second civil war, and then Octavian becomes emperor. And now all these Stoics, all these students and peers and descendants of Cato are forced to reckon with a new reality, right? Athena, Doris and Arius become the advisors to Octavian. Seneca, you know, by the time he comes around and works under Nero, this dude has seen, this guy has seen five emperors. emperors, you know, the Republican days of Cato and Cicero are a distant memory and they have to adapt themselves to the environment they're in. So it's, you know, it's sort of what is the right thing and then what's the reality of the moment you're in?

1:07:40These are all timeless, but very timely questions. Yeah. And then I was reading, I'm reading this book on historiography at the moment and it was it was going through some of the you know we're talking about you know the book's talking about polybius and um uh this calling wood in case anybody cares um but but he was talking about tacitus and uh and tacitus's whole dilemma and one of the things that he was trying to um uh trying to convey to his readers is how do you live in what is a fundamentally rotten system. He was writing from the perspective of the defeated senatorial class, the people who had essentially lost those civil wars 150 years earlier.

1:08:26Yeah, I mean, he's writing for the Flavians a bit, and he's especially hard on the Julio-Claudians because it sounds good for the flavians. But how does one live inside of a fundamentally rotten system? And I was reading that and I was like, God, is that what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life? Is this tacitest time? Because I do have a hard time not being pessimistic about the course that we're on because I really don't see people making the kind of corrections that need to be made. And I feel the same way about this that, you know, I feel about, I felt about, let's say, climate change 20 years ago.

1:09:14You know, when I was in university, you know, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, you know, global warming and climate change was a big thing. And everybody was beating the drum saying like, we need to do something now, we need to do something now. And I can remember having conversations with people in 2003 and 2004, just being like, you know, I don't see anything happening at the level of politics and industry that needs to happen right now to actually head this off. Like it's coming. I just don't think anybody, it's clearly nobody's doing anything to head this off. And now 20 years later, it's all happened, right?

1:09:50Like climate change is here. Like it's a done deal. We're not, we can manage it. We can try to work with it or work around it or mitigate it, but we're not. We didn't turn it back. We didn't avoid anything. And I feel the same feelings that I felt back then about the course of politics that we're on. I still don't see anywhere the political or moral will to actually address what's going on head on because we're still too busy trying to blame each other for what's gone wrong. You and I are talking on Martin Luther King Day. The only thing that's given me hope recently is I just went through Taylor Branch's epic series on Martin Luther King and really getting a sense of how horrendously awful it was.

1:10:33I sort of had the high level understanding of the civil rights movement, but just the amount of extra political violence and the destruction of norms and you could murder someone and then you'd get off by a fake jury trial. And that was also how they could circumvent federal laws about elections. And these people controlled states with populations of millions of people. And when you look at where we were to where we are, it does make me think that it is possible. It just requires an incredible amount of will and luck and leadership. And I think at the core of it, and this goes to me, what your book is fundamentally about and where we're struggling today as a society, what Martin Luther King did that very few leaders have done since, before or since, is he tried to get everyone on the same page about a set of ideals.

1:11:27He pointed us back to the Constitution and back to the Declaration of Independence and back to the founding myth. And that is partly what reestablished some of the norms that you and I are you know, talking about sorely missing today. And that's what Lincoln did. That's what Cato, I think, tried to do and failed to do. But you have to go back to your, what is it, the mas morium? You have to go back to the old ways, root it, and then use that to justify a new way of being. Yeah. Yeah. I think that that's all true. And also, I mean, since we're talking about it from that angle, like, let's be clear too, is that like, so I wrote this book about the Roman Republic.

1:12:08you know, let's say 2 ,000 years ago. And, you know, their political system was different. Their social system was different from our social system. And a lot of what we're seeing happen right now, you know, when people talk about how, you know, America has never experienced political violence, you know, you would have to be pretty ignorant of American history. But there's graveyards to all those people who would disagree, yeah. Yeah, there's been a lot of political violence in American history. Most of it top down. Most of it racially motivated. Not all of it racially motivated because, you know, the entire history of American labor is replete with murders and bombings on both sides.

1:12:54So, yes, the fact of the violence is not actually unique in American history. um but where where are we going to find the will and the way to start drawing back from where we have taken ourselves um and i don't know where we find that will and that way because a lot because everything that you just talked about with martin luther king and the civil rights movement there are a lot of people who will tell you that what we're seeing right now is the end of second Reconstruction. And Second Reconstruction really starts with the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s, and then proceeded through to, let's say, the election of Barack Obama, and is now being violently closed in the same way that we had after the first Civil War, we may be calling it at some point in the near distant future, that first Reconstruction was a period that existed.

1:13:58and was then later closed. And I think that there is something to the idea that we've lived through Second Reconstruction and that we are seeing an attempt to close Second Reconstruction. So this is all to say that we can use Roman history to guide us because it is, the Romans do lace us with a certain universal mode of thinking about things because of how much our culture directly or indirectly is related to Roman tradition and Roman history. We are the heirs of Rome, whether we like it or not. Their history does actually matter to us. They're not Martians. They're not from another planet. The Romans are us and we are the Romans.

1:14:44This all is taking place not in the context of the Roman Republic, but in the context of the United States through the 19th century and the 20th century and now the 21st century. It is always important to keep that in mind, you know, as we go forward. But yeah. Well, I was trying to end on a hopeful note and you twisted it back. Oh, I did. I did. I completely twisted back. No, let's end it on a hopeful note. The decline and fall of Rome happened over hundreds of years. It did. It happened over. Oh, here we go. This is a good one. I have a great deal of confidence in the United States military.

1:15:19I think that there is a code of professionalism and centrally, the pay stubs are centrally distributed rather than by an individual general. Because, I mean, one of the things that actually led to Marius and Sulla and those civil wars is that those guys, their pay and their prosperity was based entirely on how successful their general was. Right? And the United States doesn't – we don't have that same system and we don't have that same problem. We have a military apparatus that is far more based off of the post-Civil War Augustine model, which involves a great deal of stability and neutrality rather than the personal armies that were allowed to be revved up by Marius and Sela.

1:16:09So I don't see personal armies in the near future. So that can, it cannot be helpful. It's not much, but I'm a ray of sunshine. I love the book. I can't wait for the next one. Let's talk about that when it comes out. Okay. Thanks. You're the best, man.

1:16:32Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

1:16:46Thank you.