Could the Roman Republic have survived
into the Christian era if Caesar had not won the Roman civil war? The Roman
patricians of the Republic had invested heavily in foreign concerns and cared
too little for the nation. Of course they wanted to preserve their class
political power yet who exactly was to mind the store?
History presents interesting questions and lessons
to learn about human social environments from. The Phoenicians were before the
Romans the great naval power of the Mediterranean.
With the rise of Roma as a rival they sent their General Hannibal to beat down Rome and of course he
failed. Though a greatly innovative and determined military leaders Phoenician
Carthage was a naval and trading power instead of one with a history of
successful land war. Eventually at the critical moment when Hannibal had Rome in his grasp the
Carthaginian financiers cut off his military funding as too costly. Perhaps the
Roman
Republic
could be understood as dying from a similar cause of distracted commercial
leaders in political-economic power unwilling to comprehend and support their
real national interest.
The charismatic Julius Caesar was a populist
supported by the common plebian urbanites who understood their rich Republican
rulers were busy concentrating wealth through foreign interests across the
ancient world including luxurious villas in France (trans-alpine Gaul) while
they had high unemployment and uncertain economic security. Republicanism might
have appeared like an aristocracy on a hill, aloof, imperious and callous
uttering advice of a stoic nature to the poor to bite the bullet and stuff will
trickle down in a hypothetical spatiotemporal time parameter acceptable to
proper civil order conserving the interests of the rich. Julius Caesar crossing
the Rubicon with his legion understood the circumstance of popular discontent.
Over the course of the war he met and defeated Pompey’s legion in Greece who then
fled. Winning the civil war he would
eventually become with recalcitrance, Emperor. The plebian mob liked it. The
imperial Empire buried the Roman Republic for good
replacing bad coin with worse. When wealth is over-concentrated concentrated
Republicanism becomes a casualty. In the U.S.A. the
concentration of wealth supported by Democrats and Republicans could lead to
the end of Republicanism and Democracy.
The United States
seems to have similar dangers today as did Republican Rome. Its political
leaders are tools for commercial global interests. Federal and Wall Street
misadministration built up the 2008 financial crash. Federal debt continues to
compile and civil leadership to reduce global expenses on standing military and
increase ecosphere reconstruction with employment and quality of life
improvements are lacking.
Contemporary plebeians experience an unresponsive
and aloof, ineffective political leadership class unwilling to reform
capitalism that has moved its center of effort offshore. The U.S. Senate is led
by a quietist majority leader used to raising daughters so non-dynamic that the
President is tempted to be too executive such as to disregard the Congressional
right to make the laws and his duty to obey and execute the laws of Congress.
When the United States
was founded it inherited the problem of slavery created by imperial government
before. Importation of slavery was stopped as soon as reasonably possible in
that era-about 20 years after the signing of the constitution into law. It
would take fourscore and ten years before the American civil war to end
slavery. It wouldn’t have been possible for the United States
to have long endured without the slave states sandwiched between imperialists
North and South. The experiment in democracy would have quickly ended. The
wisdom of the founders brought in the slave states to the revolution and cut
off the head of the imperialist leaders, politically speaking, later in winning
the civil war. Rehabilitating the southern states into democracy was a time
consuming and costly process. The war of 1812 though demonstrated how dangerous
British imperialists still were and the need to include the southern states in
the revolution of 1776.
The revolutionary era of American history was still
on something more of a human level of egalitarianism than today. There wasn’t
so much difference between rich and poor and neither did medical procedures
give the rich the assurance of longer, healthier lifespan. The revolutionaries
fought human beings rather than half billion dollar stealth bombers, nuclear
attack submarines, space satellites, and nuclear weapons. I mention this
enormous change in the relationship between the power of any government of that
era and its citizens and those of today for a reason; to point out that it may
be impossible for Americans to revolt against their government today and
without that ability, one enshrined in the Declaration of Independence,
government power may have no real limit to its ability to degrade democracy and
popular sovereignty.
It is difficult to imagine the President becoming
an Emperor in this or any of the next few administrations, yet the
transformation of the U.S. Government to an insular institution loyal to global
financial Plutocracy isn’t. A benevolent dictatorship is an oxymoron however a
sham democratic government protected by loyal to the rich broadcast media
isn’t. Mercenary broadcast media political opinion hasn’t the same political
interests at all as plebian urbanites and rural Americans. More illegal aliens
arrive in America
every few years than there were American citizens in the early Republic. With
open borders and cheap air travel or to the beach
of Laredo and Phoenix hundreds of millions of migrants would move if they
could, anytime before the U.S.A. runs out of natural resources and jobs to
plunder and take. Inrushing masses care little about the national ecospheric,
security or civil rights and order issues of the nation-they are in quest of
cash and have cell phones and the internet to get instructions from the world
with about where to g and what to do.
The President seems to live in the 19th
century on the subject of immigration and not recognize the numbers of people
involved. There are more illegal aliens in the U.S.A. today than were
Americans in the country in 1860. It has real consequences to let in a few
million illegals here and a few more there.
The scalar field increase of resource consumption and inverse reduction
of per capita land area available is a fact in the arrival of illegal alien
millions that does no good at all to the democratic concept of self-determination of the people of the United States
from within.
American democracy is premised to be a country of,
by and for the people with political rule with the consent of the governed.
Americans don’t set illegal immigration levels for the year the illegals decide
for themselves to enter whenever they choose destroying the sovereignty of the
citizens of the United States
over immigration.
The people of the United States
have historically set immigration levels. Immigrant quotas from Europe
were set early in U.S.
history. When the danger of anarchists and communist seemed to develop amidst
eastern Europeans immigration quotas were drastically cut. Most Americans
arrived here legally and were hence acting within the popular sovereignty of the
people of United States
unlike the illegal immigrants from the south the past 50 years. President Obama
has supported the idea of making law breaking of the sovereign laws of the
people of the United States
a pathway to U.S.
citizenship in accord with his tendency toward an imperial executive power.
Control of immigration levels are important for
sovereign citizen government designs of policy reacting satisfactorily to
public will. Surplus labor supply may be undesired by the masses of Americans
without prospects for good jobs or even any job at all so they may not want
millions of immigrants in some year or decade. The environment may be viewed as
endangered by human exploitation and the public will by a majority may be for
zero or low population growth. There are any number of reasons why political
will of the majority may oppose high immigration levels yet illegal immigration
bypasses the political system completely. Illegal aliens can enter illegally
because the Democrat congress and neo-imperial executive won’t defend the
border adequately or empower local law officials to arrest illegal aliens and
remand them to federal custody for repatriation to real homeland.
President Obama as an executive enforcing laws
selectively seems to prefer a plutocratic imperialism down-grading American
democracy. Support for mass illegal immigration and refusing to let Bush II era
tax cuts expire are imperial policy directions. While there is any public debt
the taxes on the rich should not have been cut. The way to cut public debt is
to tax the rich. The poor will get off reliance on public support when they
have good jobs or good job prospects that won’t happen with surplus cheap
labor. The rich are concentrating wealth
in the meanwhile, the environment is in decay, public debt increases at
something like a trillion a year more or less and the President sets a new
record every week on the number of gold games played in two terms by a
President. The broadcast media like imperialism with the people experiencing
democracy vicariously through them in a new age bread, circuses (T.V.) and
soporifics.
Imperial and brute imposition of alien will from
leaders and migrants into the nation is traditionally un-American. The former
was a stimulus to the American Revolution. Today the globalist
government-corporate entity finds distance non-existent with speed-of-light
communication and U.S.
ideas about the sovereign political will of plebian Republicans quaint.
American Republicans were, to start with, more like Roman plebeians than Roman
republicans- that were more like an aristocracy after more century increasing wealth
and power. It’s hard to say where it will develop or it what manner reform
could occur.
The Roman Republicans might have evolved a broader
representative franchise and avoided the transition to imperialism yet failed
with their attention focused on concentrating wealth and training foreign
mercenaries to serve in their army and substitute for them in military service.
The failure of elite Republican leadership to comprehend what comprises and
interests the populous seems recurrent to a certain extent. Examples are
limited because Republics are limited in number to review over history.
Ronald Reagan understood populism and was a popular
Republican leader-it wasn’t just the conservativism of rich. Elite
Republicanism detached from the plebian sort of populism that is supposed to be
the true foundation (under God) of American democratic government
(representative government) probably leads in the same sort of direction as the
Republicanism of ancient Rome toward imperialism- even if in a new age form of
global plutocracy and Wall Street networking of concentrated wealth (the 5% of
the 1%).
Republicanism that fails to lead on ecological
economic reform will not get the chance often enough to stop the illegal
immigration that will eventually undermine democracy and their own political
base. Imperialism ends Republicanism with concentrating wealth rather leading
to fewer and fewer Republicans. It is then that the populous feeling repressed
support a symbolic popular imperialist (Caesar) to be the benevolent dictator
ostensibly working for the masses. Democracy has then died.
