With his four-year tenure in office finished, three supreme court nominees seated, and the federal judiciary transformed, Donald Trump has given Mitch McConnell everything he ever asked for. If either Kelly Loeffler or David Purdue manages to win their Georgia run-off election, McConnell will even retain the power to obstruct President Biden’s agenda by withholding votes in the Senate. Despite their mutually beneficial successes over the last four years, however, the two men have come into conflict as of late, with McConnell refusing to go along with Trump’s plan to overturn the election results using a set of increasingly dubious legal maneuvers.
On the one hand, this conflict is power politics at it’s purest. McConnell and Trump both seek to lead the GOP over the next four years, and to lead the GOP along their own chosen path. Trump rightly recognized, for example, that McConnell intends to freeze him out. But this isn’t just a competition for primacy in the GOP, it’s a clash of values that will define the Republican Party over the next decade, one that resembles in some ways a political debate from Ancient Rome.
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In the Roman Republic, the complicated system of Consuls, Praetors, Quaestors, and Tribunes was designed around the apex of Roman government, the Senate. In the Senate, men of appropriate birth, wealth, education and experience were meant to guide the Republic, and it’s officials, towards a path in line with Roman values and traditions. Given the elite dominance over the Senate, Romans from non-elite backgrounds, especially those who had made great contributions to the Republic, sought ways to usurp it’s power and influence for themselves.
The Optimates, that is, those who supported the power of the Senate and believed in the values and traditions of Rome as their religious faith, were not a political party like our current Republicans and Democrats, but they did represent a kind of tendency. A tendency marked in it’s most hardline form by orators like Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, and it’s more pragmatic form by Senators like Marcus Tullius Cicero. The kind of strict constitutionalism and dedication to traditional Roman values puts the Optimates in line with traditional conservative American organizations like the Federalist Society, and figures like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. While the Optimates did tend to reflect the priorities of Roman elites, they were not solely patrician based. Cicero himself was from a new money family.
Opposing the Optimates were the Populares. While certainly Optimates like Cicero had served the Republic with distinction, the Populares tended to come from the ranks of Romans who, in their efforts to accomplish tasks set out for them by the Senate, felt the need to ignore the rules and restrictions placed on them in order to succeed. From making promises to their soldiers that the Senate did not wish to keep to creating new positions designed to rein in the Senate. The Optimates rightly feared that the growing cults of personality around various leading Populares would lead to the undermining of Rome’s Republic founding.
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While it is certainly easy to see the inherent conservatism in the Optimates’ position, it would be wrong to describe the Populares as progressives, liberals, or leftists simply for being on the other side of the fence. In reality, neither group represented ideas that we would associate with those concepts today. Even the Populares advocacy for the plebian class should not be seen as leftwing advcacy. While plebians certainly ranked below the noble Patricians and wealthy Equestrians, they were still citizens of Rome, with the right and privileges that came with that position. They also ranked significantly ahead of the freedmen and slaves. In many ways, the Populares-supporting plebians represented the working middle classes of Rome. Without the education of the Optimates and the understanding of Roman rites and history that went along with it, they still viewed themselves as loyal servants and patriots of Rome. In reality, these were two different ways of being conservative.
In the United States, conservatism, especially in the Republican Party, tended to be of the strongly Optimate variety. From Taft to Coolidge to the Tea Party movement, conservative Republicans have emphasized the symbols of America’s founding, promoted the reading and analysis of documents like the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and dedicated themselves to a strict interpretation of the founders’ intent, called Originalism. In many ways, McConnell has fashioned himself as America’s Censor(censors controlled the appointment of new senators), deciding for himself who gets appointed to federal courts, and ensuring that they are stacked with people sympathetic to his Optimate worldview.
During Trump’s attempts to overturn the election, his legal team has been repeatedly slapped down by Optimate Judges he appointed at the behest of Optimate Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Pat Toomey. While McConnell has sought to avoid open conflict with Trump, and the conflict with his supporters this would lead to, it has become unavoidable as the outgoing President comes to fully realize how much better the alliance worked for McConnell than it did for himself. Unlike McConnell, Trump does not see value in the federal judiciary. The idea that ‘America is a nation of laws, not men’, an Optimate slogan if there ever was one, is alien to him. In his transactional world of deeply personal loyalty and hostility, the idea that men and women who owe their appointments to him would defy him is infuriating, and he sees McConnell as the culprit.
Like the Optimates, McConnell and his Federalist Society allies are seeking to use the legal structures of the state, especially the appointed judiciary, as a bulwark against changes in society that are occurring more rapidly than they are comfortable with. Yet, in Rome, the Optimates often found that domination of public office did not always lead to getting their way. After hundreds of years of existence, nation tend to change. The Protestant, Christian, Anglo-Saxon America that wrote the Constitution and created our institutions no longer exists. Just as Rome was permanently changed by the wars that turned it from a city-state to a global hegemon, so too was America altered by it’s rise into an international empire.
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In the end, America is a very different place than ancient Rome. We do tend to follow our constitution. Our legal system is protected from the whims of the mob. We have a genuine democracy, leading to greater contentment and less propensity for violent murder sprees among our people. We abolished slavery and made citizenship universal for residents. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t similarities too. Like their ancient predecessors, American Republicans are faced with the challenge of how to adapt to a country that no longer reflects their values or values their institutions. If they are unable to meet it, the party will be an easy target for would-be Caesars.