Harpers/Scott Horton: The President-Tyrant

[babylonsister]

The President-Tyrant
BY Scott Horton
PUBLISHED December 9, 2007


The irreplaceable Fritz Stern reminds us that as a democracy with two-hundred thirty years of experience, America is better situated than most to weather the storms of a wannabe tyrant. “But that,” he adds, “would presuppose that such a nation really understood its heritage and had a genuine historic sense.” We live now with a Government that shamelessly fabricates and alters history—both from the last two hundred years and from the last six years. It does so with a purpose—making its outrageous deeds seem perfectly reasonable and in tune with the past.

But the Founding Fathers had a very profound sense of history. As I have noted before in discussing the influence of Virgil’s writings on some of the founding precepts, most of the Founding Fathers were classics scholars. They knew their Virgil, Ovid and Horace, and traded quips, indecipherable to most of us today, based on their readings. And they especially knew the historians—Livy, Tacitus and Sallust. If there was one epoch in the history of Rome that held them captive, then it can quickly be identified—it was the long descent of the Roman Republic into empire and tyranny. How did a state blessed with the republican institutions they spilled blood to gain come to lose them? What was this process? How could it be guarded against? These were questions that preoccupied them. Questions, moreover, that stand in the shadows behind the debates over the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and much of the genesis of our modern institutions. It is of course no coincidence that much of the nomenclature of the new republic can be drawn from the pages of Livy’s Ab urbe condita: president, senate, congress… and even some now-lost offices such as censor and auditor.

Distilling that historical experience to its essence, however, we come to a consensus on the threat to the republic. It is internal, and it is the risk that one man aided by a clique will assume tyrannical authority and end the republic. As Livy reminds, the citizens of the nascent republic “valued their liberty so much precisely because their last king had been so great a tyrant.” And if there was one essential principle which stood as the republic’s bulwark against tyranny, then it was this: that “no man stood above the law.” Both of these phrases appear in the second book, in which Livy lays the foundation stones of the new republic, and repeatedly warns that deviation from these precepts will mean ruin.

It is common for people today to question how any leader can be a tyrant who achieves office through popular election, and, indeed, who remains popular. But such talk is foolish and betrays an ignorance of the origins of the term and the historical context of its use. Throughout history, tyrants came to power through means of control and manipulation of popular opinion. This was so familiar a feature to the thinkers of antiquity, that Aristotle charts it as a characteristic of the tyrant. And in the history of the dark, past century, how many little men in search of a balcony came to power on the back of a jubilant and cheering mob? And indeed, no less a man that Thomas Jefferson was quick to remind his fellow citizens of this principle. And it was Jefferson who raised the cry of “tyrant” against the president, when he proceeded in disregard of the constraints of Constitution and law, setting into play a plan of persecution targeting his political opponents and the poor, downtrodden and defenseless immigrants. Jefferson spoke sharply and loudly because the republic was under siege by a popularly elected (and popular) government. He was right to have done so, and he is vindicated by history for it.

The question was whether the president has put himself above the law and assumed powers far beyond those the Constitution measured to him.

And today, America faces precisely this question. We have a president who acts in shameless disregard of the Constitution’s restraints upon his office, and who feels himself above the law, and who constantly seeks to manipulate and mislead the public. How many times just in the last week have we witnessed this?

more...

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/12/hbc-90001887

[jimshoes]

1. It's good to see that a growing number

of people have finally seen the criminal administration for what it is. And pretty much sums up the nightmare we are living in with this phrase... "We live now with a Government that shamelessly fabricates and alters history—both from the last two hundred years and from the last six years. It does so with a purpose—making its outrageous deeds seem perfectly reasonable and in tune with the past". It's time to find out who is complicit in these outrages against America's priciples which would leave the founding fathers not only shaking their heads but waving torches and pitchforks as well and remove them from doing the work of "We the People".

[babylonsister]

2. It's way past time to find out who is complicit, and you're right, I guess

this is progress, but it seems like the process is so slow-w-w.