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0:00:48 – At Apple Podcasts, we’re obsessed with good stories.
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0:01:37 – If you were a Roman citizen around, say, 200 BC,
0:01:40 you might have assumed Rome was going to last forever.
0:01:46 At the time, Rome was the greatest republic in human history
0:01:49 and its institutions had proven resilient through invasions
0:01:52 and all kinds of disasters.
0:01:54 But the foundations of Rome started to weaken
0:01:57 less than a century later.
0:02:01 And by 27 BC, the republic had collapsed entirely
0:02:03 and became an empire.
0:02:05 And even though the Roman state persisted,
0:02:09 it was no longer a representative democracy.
0:02:12 The fall of the republic is both complicated
0:02:13 and straightforward.
0:02:17 The state became too big and chaotic.
0:02:20 The influence of money and private interests
0:02:23 corrupted public institutions.
0:02:26 And social and economic inequalities became so large
0:02:30 that citizens lost faith in the system altogether
0:02:33 and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.
0:02:40 All of that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
0:02:46 I’m Sean Elling and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:48 (upbeat music)
0:03:02 Today’s guest is Edward Watts.
0:03:04 He’s a historian at the University of California,
0:03:07 San Diego, and the author of two terrific books
0:03:08 on ancient Rome.
0:03:11 One in 2018 called “Mortal Republic,”
0:03:14 how Rome fell into tyranny.
0:03:17 And the other in 2021 called “The Eternal Decline
0:03:18 and Fall of Rome.”
0:03:23 “Mortal Republic” is probably the best thing I’ve read
0:03:25 on the history of Rome,
0:03:28 both because it lays out what went wrong and why.
0:03:31 And also, because it makes an attempt to explain
0:03:34 how the lessons of its decline might help save
0:03:37 fledgling republics like the United States.
0:03:40 So I invited Watts on the show to talk about those lessons
0:03:43 and why he thinks the American republic
0:03:46 is in danger of going the way of ancient Rome.
0:03:52 Edward Watts, welcome to the show.
0:03:53 Thank you.
0:04:00 So last year, there was a hilarious TikTok thing
0:04:04 where women were asking men in their lives
0:04:07 how often they think about the Roman Empire.
0:04:11 And perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer was quite a bit.
0:04:14 So I ask you, good sir.
0:04:17 How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
0:04:19 And is it healthy?
0:04:22 I think about the Roman Empire all the time.
0:04:24 My wife does not think it’s healthy.
0:04:27 She feels that the Roman Empire has been imposed
0:04:29 on her thought world for a very long time.
0:04:32 And when that came out, she commented,
0:04:36 “I think about the Roman Empire involuntarily every day.”
0:04:38 I’ve never heard the phrase “thought world.”
0:04:41 I think I’m gonna steal that.
0:04:44 Were you always into the Roman Empire?
0:04:45 I mean, when you got into history,
0:04:47 I mean, was there a chance you were gonna do the Ottoman Empire
0:04:49 or ancient Greece or whatever?
0:04:52 Or was it just Rome all the way?
0:04:55 Yeah, I think what got me interested,
0:04:58 like a lot of people was to go to the Roman Forum,
0:05:01 walk around there and just realize how much we have
0:05:04 and how we have this ability to interact
0:05:08 with this civilization and these people
0:05:12 who exist in this deep past that seems so remote.
0:05:17 But it resonates with us in a really powerful way
0:05:19 because we can have that experience
0:05:21 of walking through this space.
0:05:23 And so I became interested in figuring out
0:05:26 how to understand that connection.
0:05:28 I started assuming we didn’t know all that much
0:05:30 about the Roman Empire.
0:05:32 And so I started on a journey
0:05:35 assuming I would run out of stuff to look at.
0:05:37 And I haven’t run out of stuff to look at.
0:05:40 So I think I’m still on that.
0:05:42 I think what I later learned
0:05:45 is that whole experience was basically creation of Mussolini.
0:05:48 I mean, the space was cultivated to do exactly that.
0:05:53 And so in a way, the interaction that I have
0:05:56 with the Roman past is a kind of conflicted interaction
0:06:01 where I fell into a trap that Mussolini had set for us
0:06:05 to create a world where the modern sort of
0:06:07 20th, 21st century reality
0:06:10 links to this first century BC reality
0:06:12 and we’re supposed to feel what I felt.
0:06:16 And so I have really come to believe
0:06:17 that part of the mission of a Roman historian
0:06:19 is to understand why that works
0:06:22 and what obligations we have to acknowledge
0:06:25 that that’s an experience that was created for us
0:06:26 very deliberately.
0:06:28 It works really well.
0:06:32 And there are things that we can learn about our world
0:06:33 and about our experience living in this world
0:06:37 because of the way that Rome resonates for us.
0:06:40 – You wrote what is still my favorite book about Rome,
0:06:42 “Mortal Republic.”
0:06:44 But I do know you’re working on a new book
0:06:47 and I’d love for you to just say a bit about what that is
0:06:50 and how it relates to your other book, your first book.
0:06:52 – The project I’m working on now
0:06:55 is a history of the Roman state from beginning to end.
0:06:58 And it starts with the city of Rome
0:07:03 as basically a set of huts in the early, early Iron Age
0:07:06 and it ends in Constantinople
0:07:08 at the dawning of the gunpowder age.
0:07:12 And so the idea is you have a society and a state
0:07:14 that lasts for 2000 years
0:07:16 and every aspect of that state is different, right?
0:07:19 It starts out as a pagan Latin speaking,
0:07:22 small settlement in the central part of Italy
0:07:26 and it ends up a Christian Greek speaking settlement
0:07:30 in Constantinople, 1,000 miles away from where it started.
0:07:32 Everything about that state changes
0:07:34 but that state still remains.
0:07:37 And so “Mortal Republic” was a way to think about
0:07:40 political collapse, “Resilient Rome,”
0:07:42 which is the working title of the book,
0:07:44 is a way to think about how a society
0:07:48 can create that ability to remake itself.
0:07:50 – 2000 years is a hell of a run.
0:07:55 It really is, but it’ll probably come as no surprise
0:07:58 to this audience that I’m really
0:08:01 into the collapse part of the story.
0:08:03 I think it’s safe to say
0:08:08 that America is in a politically unstable period,
0:08:14 not the most unstable in our history, but it’s shaky.
0:08:16 And people like to invoke the fall of Rome
0:08:21 as a cautionary tale of how republics break apart.
0:08:25 Do you, an actual expert in Roman history,
0:08:28 see parallels between us and Rome?
0:08:34 – Yeah, I think historians tend to want
0:08:36 to understate the connections they see
0:08:39 because the connections are not 100%.
0:08:41 But the connections I think between the fall
0:08:42 of the Roman Republic and the things
0:08:45 that we’re experiencing right now are pretty close.
0:08:50 For reasons that both relate to how our republic was created
0:08:54 and the fact that the founding fathers grew up
0:08:57 in an educational system that drilled down
0:09:01 the function of the Roman Republic as an ideal.
0:09:03 And they deliberately emulated it.
0:09:06 And they deliberately emulated even the actions
0:09:08 of some individual Romans.
0:09:10 This Roman model is so deeply drilled
0:09:13 into what our republic is supposed to be
0:09:17 that the structural weaknesses of the Roman Republic
0:09:20 are also present in our republic.
0:09:22 So I think the risk that we face in the United States
0:09:25 is in a sense similar to what the Roman Republic faced.
0:09:30 There’s a lack of connection between what the ruling
0:09:34 and administrative class believes the society ought to do
0:09:37 and what the majority of Romans believe ought to be done.
0:09:39 And this is something created in part
0:09:44 by economic dislocation and economic inequality.
0:09:45 It’s also created in part
0:09:48 by the fundamental unfairness of the system
0:09:51 that most of the time people acknowledged was there
0:09:52 but were willing to accept
0:09:54 because the system seemed devoted
0:09:59 to the betterment of everybody’s lives in that state.
0:10:01 What happened in Rome
0:10:03 that I think is very similar to what’s happening here
0:10:05 is eventually people became frustrated
0:10:08 with the ineffectiveness of that system
0:10:13 and resorted to intimidation and eventually to violence
0:10:17 to overcome the restrictions that you have placed
0:10:18 on you by that system.
0:10:21 I think what’s so alarming in the United States
0:10:24 is in Rome, the first outbreak of political violence
0:10:27 that you have after 300 years
0:10:31 of peacefully resolving conflict occurs in 133.
0:10:34 It takes two generations before you get to the point
0:10:36 where people are actually fighting a civil war.
0:10:40 It takes one generation before somebody has actually tried
0:10:43 to disrupt the counting of votes in an election.
0:10:48 In the United States, the threats in Trump rallies in 2016
0:10:52 within four years have a mob trying to attack
0:10:55 the counting of votes and the casting of votes
0:10:57 in an election to determine presidencies.
0:11:02 So what took Rome a generation took us a presidential term.
0:11:04 And I think that’s what’s particularly alarming, right?
0:11:07 We have the same imbalances.
0:11:10 We are seeing some of the same tensions
0:11:13 and we’re courting the kind of violence
0:11:15 that ultimately destroyed the Roman state
0:11:18 but it’s happening much faster.
0:11:22 – So the political class in Rome became corrupt
0:11:25 and self-dealing, which is a pretty familiar story
0:11:29 in the history of declining civilizations.
0:11:32 How quickly did that happen in Rome?
0:11:36 Was it a gradual thing or was it more abrupt?
0:11:43 – In Rome, the entire makeup of the society changed
0:11:44 after the victory over Hannibal.
0:11:46 So the second Pinoch war is the,
0:11:48 it’s the World War II moment for Rome, right?
0:11:52 It’s the great war where everybody was fighting
0:11:55 on the side of good against the aggressor,
0:11:57 the evil sort of Carthaginians.
0:11:59 And it was incredibly devastating.
0:12:02 It was something where at one point
0:12:05 it’s estimated like 70% of the fighting age men
0:12:08 in all of Italy were enrolled in the army.
0:12:09 Many of them died.
0:12:12 You have in a three year span,
0:12:14 the Roman army loses more people
0:12:16 than the United States has lost in every war
0:12:18 combined since World War II.
0:12:23 And that’s in a population where the male citizen population
0:12:24 is about 300,000 people.
0:12:26 Once they win that war,
0:12:28 they have to figure out how you rebuild a society
0:12:30 that suffered all of that devastation.
0:12:33 And there are all kinds of dramatic shifts
0:12:35 in the way Romans live their lives.
0:12:39 The marriage age drops, the size of family increases.
0:12:42 The Roman state starts providing supplements
0:12:46 and land for people to go out and farm again
0:12:49 because Italy has been emptied by this war.
0:12:52 And so for two generations,
0:12:55 you have everybody in Rome has an opportunity
0:12:57 to have a better and more productive
0:13:00 and more lucrative career
0:13:02 than their fathers or their ancestors had.
0:13:05 And so you have generations that are now
0:13:09 as wealthy or wealthier than Romans before.
0:13:11 But this stops after about two generations
0:13:14 because Italy fills out.
0:13:17 These people have settled the empty spaces.
0:13:21 And what then happens is a financial sector
0:13:24 that had developed to support these activities
0:13:26 continues to grow.
0:13:28 And so the people who understand that financial sector
0:13:30 become very, very rich
0:13:33 while regular people’s opportunities have dried up.
0:13:35 And this creates an imbalance,
0:13:37 but it takes a while for this imbalance
0:13:39 to result in actual conflict.
0:13:42 So what’s remarkable is for 20 years,
0:13:45 the people in the middle, the upper middle,
0:13:47 people who are doing well,
0:13:50 but not doing as well as the financiers,
0:13:53 they believe that the system can somehow fix itself.
0:13:55 And so they play along with it.
0:13:58 But starting in the 130s, they will not play along anymore.
0:14:03 And so when you start seeing elections swinging
0:14:06 on the basis of economic inequality,
0:14:10 the inequality is not just affecting poor people.
0:14:13 It’s actually affecting people who are relatively well off,
0:14:15 who are feeling squeezed.
0:14:18 And so I think that’s what’s remarkable, right?
0:14:20 And it’s also, I think, a good analog
0:14:22 to what we see in the United States
0:14:26 where after 2016, when you looked at the sort of
0:14:30 economic factors and the breakdown of votes,
0:14:33 you saw a lot of Trump voters actually weren’t poor.
0:14:37 They were upper middle class or lower upper class people.
0:14:41 A lot of people making six figures and more
0:14:43 voted for Trump in 2016,
0:14:48 not because they were economically impoverished,
0:14:50 but because they were frustrated
0:14:51 that the system seemed broken.
0:14:57 – We have known for a very long time, hell,
0:14:59 Aristotle was writing about this,
0:15:02 that you can have some rich people
0:15:04 and you can have some poor people.
0:15:08 But if you want a sustainable democracy or republic,
0:15:10 you better have a robust middle class
0:15:13 that’s invested in the system.
0:15:16 And if you don’t, it’s not gonna work.
0:15:20 And maybe it’s just simple greed and stupidity.
0:15:23 I mean, that does seem to be the answer very often,
0:15:25 but it just never ceases to amaze me
0:15:28 how willing people empower then and now,
0:15:30 and I guess forever,
0:15:33 how willing they are to destabilize the system
0:15:35 that allowed them to be so successful
0:15:37 and wealthy in the first place,
0:15:40 just to hoard a few more resources.
0:15:42 I mean, it’s just, it’s mind boggling.
0:15:44 It shouldn’t be, but it is.
0:15:47 – I think that the thing that really strikes me
0:15:53 is you need to maintain an optimism in that group of people.
0:15:58 And you need to make them believe that things are fair
0:16:02 and that the system is unequal.
0:16:04 They’re okay with inequality, right?
0:16:06 I mean, they benefit from inequality,
0:16:08 but they do not like a system that seems unfair.
0:16:11 They do not like a system that seems rigged.
0:16:13 And in Rome, in the middle part of the second century BC,
0:16:15 the system seemed rigged.
0:16:17 And as they voted for people
0:16:20 who were supposed to fix the system,
0:16:22 they ran into a really significant problem
0:16:25 because the Roman Republic worked on consensus
0:16:27 and it worked on compromise.
0:16:30 And the big issue that these people faced
0:16:32 was the people who are rich,
0:16:34 the financiers who are wealthy,
0:16:36 they got their money legally, right?
0:16:40 They do not have to give that money up
0:16:42 and they cannot be compelled to give that money up
0:16:44 unless you’re gonna undermine the rule of law
0:16:46 and the rights of property.
0:16:49 And so there is no legal solution to this,
0:16:51 but there is an ethical problem
0:16:53 that these people don’t acknowledge.
0:16:55 And so you have an imbalance
0:16:58 between what’s legal and what’s fair.
0:17:00 And this imbalance longer, it persists.
0:17:02 The more it creates this sense of, you know,
0:17:05 a lack of optimism and a lack of fairness
0:17:08 that just further fuels a suspicion
0:17:10 that the system can’t fix itself.
0:17:13 – So would you say even more than inequality,
0:17:15 that maybe the biggest problem in Rome
0:17:19 was the collapse of trust and faith
0:17:20 in the government itself
0:17:22 and public institutions and the whole thing?
0:17:23 – Absolutely.
0:17:27 I think there’s a sense that the system’s supposed to work
0:17:29 and it’s not.
0:17:30 And when it’s not working,
0:17:32 it’s supposed to have mechanisms to fix itself
0:17:36 and it’s not, you know, I think, again,
0:17:38 I mean, it’s not a hundred percent parallel,
0:17:40 but the situation in the United States
0:17:44 between say Reagan and Trump,
0:17:46 you see moments where people try to fix things, right?
0:17:48 I mean, Occupy Wall Street was a moment
0:17:50 where people tried to fix things.
0:17:52 The aftermath of 2008 was a moment
0:17:55 where people wanted to actually fix things.
0:17:58 What instead you get is a doubling down on that system
0:18:02 where you try to fix things within the context of a system
0:18:05 most people feel is unfair and broken.
0:18:07 And ultimately you get people saying,
0:18:09 you know what, I just wanna scrap this thing.
0:18:10 It’s not working.
0:18:14 I would rather have anything else than this.
0:18:16 I would rather have violence than this.
0:18:20 And I think that actually points to a really important thing
0:18:22 we need to understand about Rome too.
0:18:25 Rome actually got lucky when it blew up the republic
0:18:28 that it had a figure who could create something
0:18:32 that could rebuild a system that functioned.
0:18:39 You got someone in Augustus who was a genocidal maniac
0:18:42 willing to do whatever it took,
0:18:46 kill as many people as possible to take power,
0:18:47 but he also somehow had a talent
0:18:52 to build something on the ruins that was sustainable.
0:18:54 You cannot guarantee you’re gonna get that.
0:18:57 You know, if you blow up a republic,
0:18:59 the chances you get in Augustus
0:19:03 who builds a system that actually could work are very low.
0:19:07 And so if that’s what we’re hoping for
0:19:09 or thinking we’re gonna get,
0:19:13 the chances are very high that we are not getting that.
0:19:15 We’re just gonna blow up a system and get nothing.
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0:23:14 (gentle music)
0:23:28 – We spoke a few years ago and you told me then
0:23:33 that you thought America could be in the beginning stages
0:23:38 of a similar decline as Rome.
0:23:40 How do you feel about that now?
0:23:44 Where do you think, where are we in that process?
0:23:49 – I was much more optimistic in 2018 than I am now.
0:23:54 What I saw in 2018 was a set of imbalances.
0:23:57 I saw a sort of primal scream by the American electorate
0:24:01 that said, “We do not like what we’ve got.”
0:24:06 And I saw hints that we might have violence injected
0:24:08 into our political life.
0:24:12 I had no idea that within two years
0:24:14 that violence would take the form that it did.
0:24:18 And it would come so close
0:24:20 to actually destroying the political system.
0:24:23 I mean, I was talking to a friend from Italy
0:24:28 a couple of weeks ago who was talking about January 6th
0:24:30 and he was like, “Oh yeah, it’s a blip.”
0:24:32 And I said, “Well, let’s game this out.”
0:24:36 They came very close to actually getting in there
0:24:39 when the representatives were present in the chamber.
0:24:42 It was something like 15 minutes or something
0:24:44 between when the representatives left
0:24:47 and when the rioters got in.
0:24:50 What would happen if they actually had gotten in
0:24:54 and seized some representatives or disrupted the vote?
0:24:57 And my friend said, “Well, they would call in the army.”
0:24:59 Who would call in the army?
0:25:01 Who is actually legitimately in charge at that point?
0:25:03 Who does the army answer to?
0:25:06 How do we answer those questions?
0:25:10 If it is January 21st, is Biden in charge of the army
0:25:12 even though we didn’t have an electoral college vote
0:25:14 or is Trump in charge of the army?
0:25:15 Who’s giving the orders?
0:25:18 We don’t have answers to any of this.
0:25:21 This was the situation Rome found itself in.
0:25:23 Once you break a system,
0:25:26 there are no rules governing what happens.
0:25:29 And all of the institutions that depend on that system
0:25:34 free float and people start making choices as individuals
0:25:36 not governed by any set of rules that exist
0:25:40 because there is no overarching structure to those rules.
0:25:43 And I think we don’t appreciate how close we came
0:25:46 to a moment where that was our government
0:25:47 or our lack of government.
0:25:50 And in Rome, that happened.
0:25:55 And it was profoundly devastating.
0:25:58 Hundreds of thousands of people died because of that
0:26:01 in a population that is one-fifth of the population
0:26:02 of the United States.
0:26:04 It’s not something that we should play with.
0:26:08 It really is pretty sobering how contingent and fragile
0:26:09 the whole thing is.
0:26:12 And as you said, if just something broke,
0:26:14 a couple of things broke differently here or there,
0:26:19 it could have become something so much worse than it was.
0:26:21 And it was already bad.
0:26:25 And you just can’t count on being that lucky
0:26:27 the next time and the next time and the next time.
0:26:30 And so after Caesar’s assassination,
0:26:33 there’s a five-day span in the city of Rome
0:26:34 where nobody knows what it means.
0:26:36 Nobody knows what’s gonna come next
0:26:41 because Caesar had been the linchpin of a system
0:26:44 that brought order in the chaos of the later republic.
0:26:45 And when Brutus destroyed Caesar,
0:26:47 he destroyed that system.
0:26:48 It all collapsed.
0:26:52 And once that happens, you do not have any say
0:26:53 over what people are gonna do
0:26:56 and how they’re gonna respond to the stimuli
0:26:57 that now are not controlled.
0:27:00 – So both the Roman political system
0:27:05 and our own system were designed to be slow moving
0:27:10 with the idea that change should happen
0:27:12 plottingly and deliberately.
0:27:16 Do you think in retrospect that that trade-off
0:27:18 wasn’t worth it for Rome?
0:27:21 That it was too hard and too convoluted
0:27:24 and therefore incapable of being responsive enough
0:27:28 to what was happening to do what needed to be done
0:27:31 before things careened too far off the tracks?
0:27:34 – Yeah, this is I think where the 2000 year span
0:27:36 is so important.
0:27:38 So over and over again in Roman history,
0:27:40 there are these moments where people step back
0:27:42 and say what we have is broken.
0:27:44 But because you have leaders
0:27:47 and because you have a tradition of adapting that,
0:27:50 most of the time what Rome does is it doesn’t blow up
0:27:53 all of these traditions and systems it inherited.
0:27:57 It tries to find ways to amend them and to adapt them
0:27:59 and to create kind of new ways
0:28:02 to make them more responsive to the needs of its citizens.
0:28:05 And so I think a great example of this
0:28:06 is in the third century AD
0:28:09 where the empire was built initially
0:28:12 as a kind of Italian enterprise to extract stuff
0:28:15 from all of these other places that it controlled.
0:28:17 But by the early part of the third century,
0:28:19 every single free person in the Roman Empire
0:28:21 was a citizen of the Roman state.
0:28:24 And so this model of Italians extracting things
0:28:27 from colonial subjects was gone.
0:28:29 You couldn’t run an empire that way anymore
0:28:31 because you have six million Italians
0:28:34 and 60 million other Roman citizens.
0:28:36 And so the third century was a process
0:28:39 of trying to figure out how you make a society,
0:28:43 how you remake a society that was originally devoted
0:28:45 to sending resources into Italy,
0:28:47 make it responsive to the needs
0:28:49 of all of those people everywhere.
0:28:52 – Would you say that adaptability,
0:28:56 that expansion of the circle of citizenship
0:29:00 was maybe the key to Rome’s survival for that long?
0:29:02 – Yeah, and I think that’s a lesson
0:29:06 we should really fundamentally take away from Rome.
0:29:09 What Rome was able to do from its very earliest point,
0:29:12 I mean, from the point when there were Roman kings,
0:29:14 was it was able to identify who could contribute
0:29:18 to its society and find ways to empower people
0:29:20 who maybe were initially outside of the inner circle
0:29:22 or even outside of the citizen body,
0:29:25 who you could incorporate and bring in
0:29:27 and allow their talents to serve Rome.
0:29:31 So some of the first Roman kings actually weren’t Roman.
0:29:33 They were chosen because they were the best people
0:29:34 for the job.
0:29:39 The third to last king, Tarquinius Priscus,
0:29:41 he wasn’t even born in Rome.
0:29:45 He was actually grew up in a city in Naturia
0:29:47 and his prospects were limited in that city.
0:29:49 And he moved to Rome because Rome was a place
0:29:52 where your talents would allow you to rise
0:29:54 as high as your talents would permit.
0:29:55 This society wouldn’t block you
0:29:58 because you weren’t of the right background.
0:30:02 And so that’s deeply ingrained in what Roman society was.
0:30:04 And I think that’s a lesson for us, right?
0:30:07 You have to remain grounded in the things
0:30:10 that make your country function.
0:30:13 But you have to also acknowledge that there are people
0:30:16 who may not have been born in a position of authority
0:30:18 who have something to contribute.
0:30:19 And if you’re gonna make your society function
0:30:23 in the longterm, you have to find a way to bring them in,
0:30:25 not just because it’s fair,
0:30:27 but because if you’re being sort of naked
0:30:30 in your calculations about what’s good for your country,
0:30:32 they make your country better.
0:30:35 – So you’re saying if Rome built a wall
0:30:37 and made Mexico pay for it,
0:30:40 it would not have worked out well for them?
0:30:41 Is that what you’re saying?
0:30:45 – Rome did build walls, but Rome also let people in.
0:30:49 And Rome also said, you have a talent,
0:30:54 I want you to have a position where you can make things better.
0:30:57 And so Rome did those sorts of things,
0:30:59 but not in a way that said, we’re not letting anyone in.
0:31:01 It never worked when they did that.
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0:32:25 just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.
0:32:28 And honestly, that’s not what it is anymore.
0:32:32 – That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.
0:32:35 These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates
0:32:39 than individual con artists, and they’re making bank.
0:32:43 Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
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0:32:52 There are hundreds, if not thousands,
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0:32:58 These are organized criminal rings.
0:33:02 And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,
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0:33:07 – One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face
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0:33:16 But Ian says, one of our best defenses is simple.
0:33:18 We need to talk to each other.
0:33:20 – We need to have those awkward conversations around,
0:33:22 what do you do if you have text messages
0:33:24 you don’t recognize?
0:33:25 What do you do if you start getting asked
0:33:28 to send information that’s more sensitive?
0:33:31 Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,
0:33:33 a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim,
0:33:35 and we have these conversations all the time.
0:33:38 So we are all at risk,
0:33:41 and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:33:43 – Learn more about how to protect yourself
0:33:46 at vox.com/zel.
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0:35:01 (upbeat music)
0:35:12 – So when we spoke back in 2019,
0:35:13 and we were talking about whether America
0:35:17 was on a similar glide path as Rome,
0:35:19 you said to me, and now I’m quoting,
0:35:22 I think that we’re in the early stages
0:35:24 of a process that could lead to that.
0:35:27 The point at which Romans were willing to make that trade
0:35:32 occurred after almost 150 years of political dysfunction,
0:35:34 but it also occurred after a generation
0:35:36 of really brutal civil war.
0:35:40 It’s almost encouraging that it took the Romans that long
0:35:43 to finally decide they were done
0:35:44 with the whole Republic thing.
0:35:48 For the reasons you mentioned earlier,
0:35:50 my sense is that Americans will not wait that long
0:35:55 before making a comparable choice today.
0:35:57 And when you look around the world
0:36:00 and notice how many democracies are in decline,
0:36:05 you don’t find many reasons to feel more optimistic
0:36:05 about that.
0:36:08 I think what I’m really asking you is,
0:36:14 do you believe we have that much time
0:36:17 to get our political affairs in order as a country?
0:36:21 – I think where I’m different in my thinking
0:36:26 from then is first, I did not imagine
0:36:30 the level of political violence that we’re seeing now, right?
0:36:32 I mean, just in the last four years,
0:36:34 we’ve had people try to storm Congress
0:36:35 in two assassination attempts,
0:36:39 one that within a couple inches almost succeeded.
0:36:42 It took Rome a really long time to get to the point
0:36:44 where they were willing to do that.
0:36:46 And the fact that we’re barely talking
0:36:48 about those two assassination attempts right now
0:36:50 is, I think, stunning.
0:36:55 But I think what I also realized is,
0:36:59 in 2018, I thought that systems were strong
0:37:02 and individuals needed those systems to become weak
0:37:05 before they could take advantage of that weakness.
0:37:08 What I think now about Rome
0:37:11 is that there’s a sort of creative tension
0:37:14 that usually functions well, but sometimes doesn’t
0:37:17 between individuals who wanna push change
0:37:20 and systems that are designed to resist this,
0:37:22 designed to resist rapid change.
0:37:26 And I think there are a couple moments in that period
0:37:28 between the introduction of political violence
0:37:32 and assassination with Tiberius Gragas in 133 BC,
0:37:35 and the moment in really 27 BC
0:37:39 where Augustus figures out how to create a regime
0:37:40 where he is the dominant figure
0:37:42 for the rest of his life.
0:37:47 There are a couple moments where individuals make choices
0:37:49 that could have gone differently,
0:37:54 but they have enough faith in the integrity of the system
0:37:56 and they have enough trust,
0:38:00 that they trust the aesthetics of that system,
0:38:02 that they do not go that far.
0:38:04 So I think the moment that jumps out to me immediately
0:38:07 is Silla, who is a dictator, he wins a civil war,
0:38:10 he murders Roman citizens in a fashion
0:38:13 that is totally contrary to what a Roman state
0:38:16 is supposed to do or what any state really is supposed to do.
0:38:19 But what Silla fundamentally believed is,
0:38:21 a republic is important.
0:38:24 It was important to him that Rome had a republic.
0:38:27 And so he seized power and he occupied a position
0:38:31 of authority as an autocrat for a couple of years
0:38:33 and then gave the republic back
0:38:35 because he believed that was important to do.
0:38:37 He did not need to do that.
0:38:43 And I think that’s a moment where we should reflect
0:38:47 on whether some of the people who could find themselves
0:38:50 in a position similar to Silla in the United States
0:38:52 would make that same choice.
0:38:53 Would they walk away?
0:38:54 Because they feel like, okay,
0:38:56 I changed what I wanted to change.
0:38:57 I don’t think so.
0:39:02 – You said something else to me last time.
0:39:03 We spoke, that really lingered.
0:39:08 And you said that people like Trump pop up
0:39:12 in an old republic, every generation or so,
0:39:14 when things reach a certain point
0:39:18 and either the system reboots and gets back on the tracks
0:39:21 or it goes the other way.
0:39:24 And here we are, Trump is running again.
0:39:28 It’s entirely possible that he wins again.
0:39:30 What do you make of that?
0:39:32 And know that I’m not really asking you to weigh in
0:39:33 on the politics here.
0:39:38 I’m asking what you as a historian make of Trump
0:39:44 as a symptom of these deeper problems in the country.
0:39:50 – Yeah, I think that this is where the tension
0:39:55 between the system and the individual becomes so important
0:39:59 because there are moments where Republican systems
0:40:04 are not working and an individual does seize the momentum
0:40:08 and seize the opportunity to potentially refashion them
0:40:10 in whatever way that person wants.
0:40:15 They could do like Silla or Caesar, right?
0:40:17 I mean, Silla seizes the republic.
0:40:19 He kills a lot of people, but he turns it back.
0:40:21 He restructures it.
0:40:23 He believes in the republic.
0:40:25 Caesar also takes over the republic
0:40:27 and what he wants to do is create a republic
0:40:30 that is, you know, a republic.
0:40:33 Caesar, I think, deeply, deeply believed
0:40:37 that there are certain aspects of the Republican structure
0:40:38 and certain aspects of this idea
0:40:41 of a citizen-held political community
0:40:43 that he did not wanna transgress
0:40:45 even if it would cost him his life.
0:40:47 He understood that there’s a real danger
0:40:49 that by pardoning Brutus and Cassius,
0:40:51 they could come back and kill him
0:40:54 or some of the other people could come back and kill him.
0:40:57 It’s much more important to him to have a republic
0:41:02 than it is to make himself safe, right?
0:41:03 He made that choice, knowing full well
0:41:05 that it was a choice.
0:41:07 What I think is alarming to me about Trump
0:41:09 is I do not believe he cares
0:41:11 whether this country is a republic or not.
0:41:15 And so if he takes power and he has the ability
0:41:19 to remake the state, he’s not gonna remake it as a republic.
0:41:21 He’ll remake it as whatever he decides he wants it to be,
0:41:26 but he has no deep commitment to the idea of the republic.
0:41:30 And that’s different from every Roman who takes power.
0:41:33 – Look, I don’t care for Trump.
0:41:36 Anyone who listens to the show knows that.
0:41:39 I don’t make any efforts to hide that,
0:41:42 but I’ve always been frustrated
0:41:44 by some of the discourse around him,
0:41:47 where it’s, you just wanna write it off.
0:41:51 Oh, it’s because most of the country is racist
0:41:55 and that’s it, or it’s because economic anxiety or whatever.
0:41:57 And there’s some truth in all of that.
0:41:59 But if you just set that aside
0:42:03 and just set him in particular aside,
0:42:08 the fact that his political existence is possible at all
0:42:12 is a huge blinking red sign
0:42:15 that something has gone really wrong.
0:42:20 Like there is a rot at the center of our political life
0:42:26 that whether it’s Trump, it’ll be someone else like Trump,
0:42:27 maybe worse, maybe better.
0:42:30 But the fact that his political existence is possible
0:42:35 is indicative of the fact that we’ve got a real problem.
0:42:39 And if it doesn’t get addressed,
0:42:45 Trump is not the last of this type of figure
0:42:46 we’re gonna deal with.
0:42:49 – No, I think that’s exactly right.
0:42:51 Because I think again, what Rome shows
0:42:54 is these things are technologies.
0:43:00 Everybody who sees a political action learns from it.
0:43:04 And if you’re particularly ambitious,
0:43:06 you learn how to do something better
0:43:08 than the person who did it the first time.
0:43:14 And the fact that we basically now have the idea
0:43:17 that you can disrupt an electoral college vote,
0:43:20 the counting of an electoral college vote,
0:43:25 as part of the way we now can imagine political directions,
0:43:28 somebody is gonna do that and do it better.
0:43:29 And we can see that
0:43:31 because they’re already talking pretty openly
0:43:32 about how they will.
0:43:40 That should be a really, really significant red flag.
0:43:43 Because whatever Trump has done,
0:43:47 I think that logistics for that kind of operation,
0:43:49 he hasn’t done particularly well.
0:43:54 Somebody will do it better and somebody will try
0:43:57 because it’s out there now.
0:43:58 – And as you said earlier,
0:44:02 Rome was dynamic and survived
0:44:05 because it was able to adapt to a lot of change.
0:44:09 But that change is part of the reason you get tyrants
0:44:12 because that change creates a lot of discomfort
0:44:14 and uncertainty and anxiety.
0:44:17 And that is a very easy thing to weaponize and channel
0:44:19 if you’re a figure of that ilk.
0:44:24 And things change much faster today
0:44:25 than they did back then.
0:44:29 Which again, is another reason to be alarmed.
0:44:33 – I think that that’s one thing I would push back on.
0:44:34 – Yeah, please do.
0:44:36 – I mean, things changed rapidly there too.
0:44:41 Human life moves as human life does,
0:44:43 according to rhythms of 24 hours
0:44:46 and days and months and years.
0:44:49 And Rome could change very, very quickly.
0:44:53 And people could feel very disoriented
0:44:54 at the pace of that change
0:44:57 and did feel very disoriented at the pace of that change.
0:44:58 – It may be right.
0:45:02 I guess I’m thinking mostly in terms of technology
0:45:03 and technological change.
0:45:07 I mean, I think for most of human history,
0:45:09 the world that people died in looked a lot
0:45:11 like the world they were born into.
0:45:13 Whereas, I mean, I’m 42 years old.
0:45:19 The idea of TikTok and Twitter and smartphones
0:45:22 when I was a kid was just the stuff of science fiction.
0:45:27 And think how much those technologies have changed us
0:45:29 and the world we live in, how we think,
0:45:31 how we communicate, how we do politics,
0:45:34 how we consume content.
0:45:38 That is a bewildering kind of change
0:45:42 that I don’t think was possible then.
0:45:45 But maybe I’m thinking of this too narrowly.
0:45:48 – So where I’ll agree with you is,
0:45:50 we can now send messages
0:45:53 to much larger groups of people worldwide.
0:45:55 They couldn’t do that, that’s for sure.
0:45:59 But one of the things that Caesar learned in particular
0:46:02 was you can manage the messaging
0:46:04 in the city of Rome very effectively.
0:46:06 So he created a daily newspaper
0:46:08 that was posted at sort of corners
0:46:10 in every kind of neighborhood in the city of Rome
0:46:12 with news that he curated.
0:46:15 That didn’t exist before.
0:46:17 And now all of a sudden, you have a news source
0:46:20 that is providing you with a sort of steady curated narrative
0:46:23 about what’s going on in the world around you.
0:46:26 It’s no surprise that then you have somebody
0:46:29 who is able to really seize the popular imagination
0:46:32 in a fashion that no Roman had before.
0:46:35 Rome does show us that you can, like you just said,
0:46:36 blow the minds of the people
0:46:40 who are consuming the information you’re presenting
0:46:44 in a fashion that makes it impossible for them
0:46:46 to really evaluate the truth
0:46:49 of what you’re actually telling them
0:46:51 and why you might be choosing to tell them
0:46:52 what you have chosen.
0:46:55 And it’s no surprise that when Caesar’s gone,
0:46:57 you have utter chaos in the city of Rome
0:46:59 ’cause nobody’s managing the message
0:47:02 and people expect there to be a message.
0:47:05 – There are obviously many lessons that we can draw
0:47:07 from Rome’s fall.
0:47:11 And as we sort of wind down here,
0:47:14 I just wanted to know if you thought
0:47:16 there was anything in particular,
0:47:18 maybe one or two lessons
0:47:20 that we really should be thinking about
0:47:23 right now in this political moment.
0:47:25 – Yeah, I think the biggest point,
0:47:29 and I’m afraid the ship has already sailed,
0:47:32 but violence should never be a part of politics.
0:47:37 Once it’s there, it is very hard to make it go away
0:47:39 without even more violence
0:47:42 that ultimately neutralizes the people willing to do it.
0:47:45 Violence has no part in a political system
0:47:48 and especially in a representative political system.
0:47:49 But I think the other thing
0:47:52 that I think is really important for us to understand,
0:47:57 you cannot wait or hope that a single individual
0:47:59 is going to fix the problems in a society.
0:48:01 And you certainly cannot wait or hope
0:48:03 that a single individual will fix the problems
0:48:05 in a political system.
0:48:06 If you have a political system
0:48:08 that has functioned reasonably well
0:48:10 and has been adaptable
0:48:13 over the course of decades or centuries,
0:48:14 that’s a very valuable thing.
0:48:18 It creates rules, it creates assumptions,
0:48:20 it creates a kind of state of play
0:48:23 where everybody more or less knows
0:48:27 when you do X, this is kind of how the system
0:48:28 is going to respond.
0:48:31 If you destroy that, you have nothing.
0:48:33 And if you destroy that because of an individual,
0:48:36 you just have that individual.
0:48:39 Occasionally, you will get an individual,
0:48:40 I mean, very occasionally,
0:48:42 you will get an individual who creates something
0:48:46 that maybe isn’t even better, but is at least something.
0:48:49 Most of the time, the person who destroys this
0:48:52 not have the capacity to create.
0:48:54 And so you’re gonna replace something
0:48:57 that has governed just about every aspect
0:48:59 of your civic and personal lives
0:49:01 for your entire existence,
0:49:03 and probably in the United States,
0:49:06 for the existence of 10 generations
0:49:08 of your ancestors potentially.
0:49:12 If you throw that away for an individual,
0:49:15 you’re making a really significant bet.
0:49:16 And if that individual is somebody
0:49:19 that you don’t 100% trust is capable
0:49:22 of creating something different,
0:49:25 you are throwing away an incredibly valuable thing
0:49:26 for nothing.
0:49:30 And you’re not gonna have somebody miraculously
0:49:32 pop up to fix it.
0:49:35 – It is far easier to break than it is to build.
0:49:37 You shouldn’t forget that.
0:49:39 Edward Watts, this is great.
0:49:40 Thanks for doing it.
0:49:41 – Thank you.
0:49:46 – And if you’re listening and you haven’t read Ed’s 2018 book,
0:49:50 Moral Republic, do it immediately
0:49:53 and when is your next book gonna come out?
0:49:55 – It will come out in the fall of ’25.
0:49:56 – Okay, read that too.
0:50:09 All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode.
0:50:11 You know I did.
0:50:13 As always, you know, we wanna know what you think.
0:50:17 So drop us the line at the gray area at box.com.
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0:50:28 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
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0:00:48 – At Apple Podcasts, we’re obsessed with good stories.
0:00:52 That’s why this fall, we’re introducing series essentials.
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0:01:37 – If you were a Roman citizen around, say, 200 BC,
0:01:40 you might have assumed Rome was going to last forever.
0:01:46 At the time, Rome was the greatest republic in human history
0:01:49 and its institutions had proven resilient through invasions
0:01:52 and all kinds of disasters.
0:01:54 But the foundations of Rome started to weaken
0:01:57 less than a century later.
0:02:01 And by 27 BC, the republic had collapsed entirely
0:02:03 and became an empire.
0:02:05 And even though the Roman state persisted,
0:02:09 it was no longer a representative democracy.
0:02:12 The fall of the republic is both complicated
0:02:13 and straightforward.
0:02:17 The state became too big and chaotic.
0:02:20 The influence of money and private interests
0:02:23 corrupted public institutions.
0:02:26 And social and economic inequalities became so large
0:02:30 that citizens lost faith in the system altogether
0:02:33 and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues.
0:02:40 All of that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?
0:02:46 I’m Sean Elling and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:48 (upbeat music)
0:03:02 Today’s guest is Edward Watts.
0:03:04 He’s a historian at the University of California,
0:03:07 San Diego, and the author of two terrific books
0:03:08 on ancient Rome.
0:03:11 One in 2018 called “Mortal Republic,”
0:03:14 how Rome fell into tyranny.
0:03:17 And the other in 2021 called “The Eternal Decline
0:03:18 and Fall of Rome.”
0:03:23 “Mortal Republic” is probably the best thing I’ve read
0:03:25 on the history of Rome,
0:03:28 both because it lays out what went wrong and why.
0:03:31 And also, because it makes an attempt to explain
0:03:34 how the lessons of its decline might help save
0:03:37 fledgling republics like the United States.
0:03:40 So I invited Watts on the show to talk about those lessons
0:03:43 and why he thinks the American republic
0:03:46 is in danger of going the way of ancient Rome.
0:03:52 Edward Watts, welcome to the show.
0:03:53 Thank you.
0:04:00 So last year, there was a hilarious TikTok thing
0:04:04 where women were asking men in their lives
0:04:07 how often they think about the Roman Empire.
0:04:11 And perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer was quite a bit.
0:04:14 So I ask you, good sir.
0:04:17 How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
0:04:19 And is it healthy?
0:04:22 I think about the Roman Empire all the time.
0:04:24 My wife does not think it’s healthy.
0:04:27 She feels that the Roman Empire has been imposed
0:04:29 on her thought world for a very long time.
0:04:32 And when that came out, she commented,
0:04:36 “I think about the Roman Empire involuntarily every day.”
0:04:38 I’ve never heard the phrase “thought world.”
0:04:41 I think I’m gonna steal that.
0:04:44 Were you always into the Roman Empire?
0:04:45 I mean, when you got into history,
0:04:47 I mean, was there a chance you were gonna do the Ottoman Empire
0:04:49 or ancient Greece or whatever?
0:04:52 Or was it just Rome all the way?
0:04:55 Yeah, I think what got me interested,
0:04:58 like a lot of people was to go to the Roman Forum,
0:05:01 walk around there and just realize how much we have
0:05:04 and how we have this ability to interact
0:05:08 with this civilization and these people
0:05:12 who exist in this deep past that seems so remote.
0:05:17 But it resonates with us in a really powerful way
0:05:19 because we can have that experience
0:05:21 of walking through this space.
0:05:23 And so I became interested in figuring out
0:05:26 how to understand that connection.
0:05:28 I started assuming we didn’t know all that much
0:05:30 about the Roman Empire.
0:05:32 And so I started on a journey
0:05:35 assuming I would run out of stuff to look at.
0:05:37 And I haven’t run out of stuff to look at.
0:05:40 So I think I’m still on that.
0:05:42 I think what I later learned
0:05:45 is that whole experience was basically creation of Mussolini.
0:05:48 I mean, the space was cultivated to do exactly that.
0:05:53 And so in a way, the interaction that I have
0:05:56 with the Roman past is a kind of conflicted interaction
0:06:01 where I fell into a trap that Mussolini had set for us
0:06:05 to create a world where the modern sort of
0:06:07 20th, 21st century reality
0:06:10 links to this first century BC reality
0:06:12 and we’re supposed to feel what I felt.
0:06:16 And so I have really come to believe
0:06:17 that part of the mission of a Roman historian
0:06:19 is to understand why that works
0:06:22 and what obligations we have to acknowledge
0:06:25 that that’s an experience that was created for us
0:06:26 very deliberately.
0:06:28 It works really well.
0:06:32 And there are things that we can learn about our world
0:06:33 and about our experience living in this world
0:06:37 because of the way that Rome resonates for us.
0:06:40 – You wrote what is still my favorite book about Rome,
0:06:42 “Mortal Republic.”
0:06:44 But I do know you’re working on a new book
0:06:47 and I’d love for you to just say a bit about what that is
0:06:50 and how it relates to your other book, your first book.
0:06:52 – The project I’m working on now
0:06:55 is a history of the Roman state from beginning to end.
0:06:58 And it starts with the city of Rome
0:07:03 as basically a set of huts in the early, early Iron Age
0:07:06 and it ends in Constantinople
0:07:08 at the dawning of the gunpowder age.
0:07:12 And so the idea is you have a society and a state
0:07:14 that lasts for 2000 years
0:07:16 and every aspect of that state is different, right?
0:07:19 It starts out as a pagan Latin speaking,
0:07:22 small settlement in the central part of Italy
0:07:26 and it ends up a Christian Greek speaking settlement
0:07:30 in Constantinople, 1,000 miles away from where it started.
0:07:32 Everything about that state changes
0:07:34 but that state still remains.
0:07:37 And so “Mortal Republic” was a way to think about
0:07:40 political collapse, “Resilient Rome,”
0:07:42 which is the working title of the book,
0:07:44 is a way to think about how a society
0:07:48 can create that ability to remake itself.
0:07:50 – 2000 years is a hell of a run.
0:07:55 It really is, but it’ll probably come as no surprise
0:07:58 to this audience that I’m really
0:08:01 into the collapse part of the story.
0:08:03 I think it’s safe to say
0:08:08 that America is in a politically unstable period,
0:08:14 not the most unstable in our history, but it’s shaky.
0:08:16 And people like to invoke the fall of Rome
0:08:21 as a cautionary tale of how republics break apart.
0:08:25 Do you, an actual expert in Roman history,
0:08:28 see parallels between us and Rome?
0:08:34 – Yeah, I think historians tend to want
0:08:36 to understate the connections they see
0:08:39 because the connections are not 100%.
0:08:41 But the connections I think between the fall
0:08:42 of the Roman Republic and the things
0:08:45 that we’re experiencing right now are pretty close.
0:08:50 For reasons that both relate to how our republic was created
0:08:54 and the fact that the founding fathers grew up
0:08:57 in an educational system that drilled down
0:09:01 the function of the Roman Republic as an ideal.
0:09:03 And they deliberately emulated it.
0:09:06 And they deliberately emulated even the actions
0:09:08 of some individual Romans.
0:09:10 This Roman model is so deeply drilled
0:09:13 into what our republic is supposed to be
0:09:17 that the structural weaknesses of the Roman Republic
0:09:20 are also present in our republic.
0:09:22 So I think the risk that we face in the United States
0:09:25 is in a sense similar to what the Roman Republic faced.
0:09:30 There’s a lack of connection between what the ruling
0:09:34 and administrative class believes the society ought to do
0:09:37 and what the majority of Romans believe ought to be done.
0:09:39 And this is something created in part
0:09:44 by economic dislocation and economic inequality.
0:09:45 It’s also created in part
0:09:48 by the fundamental unfairness of the system
0:09:51 that most of the time people acknowledged was there
0:09:52 but were willing to accept
0:09:54 because the system seemed devoted
0:09:59 to the betterment of everybody’s lives in that state.
0:10:01 What happened in Rome
0:10:03 that I think is very similar to what’s happening here
0:10:05 is eventually people became frustrated
0:10:08 with the ineffectiveness of that system
0:10:13 and resorted to intimidation and eventually to violence
0:10:17 to overcome the restrictions that you have placed
0:10:18 on you by that system.
0:10:21 I think what’s so alarming in the United States
0:10:24 is in Rome, the first outbreak of political violence
0:10:27 that you have after 300 years
0:10:31 of peacefully resolving conflict occurs in 133.
0:10:34 It takes two generations before you get to the point
0:10:36 where people are actually fighting a civil war.
0:10:40 It takes one generation before somebody has actually tried
0:10:43 to disrupt the counting of votes in an election.
0:10:48 In the United States, the threats in Trump rallies in 2016
0:10:52 within four years have a mob trying to attack
0:10:55 the counting of votes and the casting of votes
0:10:57 in an election to determine presidencies.
0:11:02 So what took Rome a generation took us a presidential term.
0:11:04 And I think that’s what’s particularly alarming, right?
0:11:07 We have the same imbalances.
0:11:10 We are seeing some of the same tensions
0:11:13 and we’re courting the kind of violence
0:11:15 that ultimately destroyed the Roman state
0:11:18 but it’s happening much faster.
0:11:22 – So the political class in Rome became corrupt
0:11:25 and self-dealing, which is a pretty familiar story
0:11:29 in the history of declining civilizations.
0:11:32 How quickly did that happen in Rome?
0:11:36 Was it a gradual thing or was it more abrupt?
0:11:43 – In Rome, the entire makeup of the society changed
0:11:44 after the victory over Hannibal.
0:11:46 So the second Pinoch war is the,
0:11:48 it’s the World War II moment for Rome, right?
0:11:52 It’s the great war where everybody was fighting
0:11:55 on the side of good against the aggressor,
0:11:57 the evil sort of Carthaginians.
0:11:59 And it was incredibly devastating.
0:12:02 It was something where at one point
0:12:05 it’s estimated like 70% of the fighting age men
0:12:08 in all of Italy were enrolled in the army.
0:12:09 Many of them died.
0:12:12 You have in a three year span,
0:12:14 the Roman army loses more people
0:12:16 than the United States has lost in every war
0:12:18 combined since World War II.
0:12:23 And that’s in a population where the male citizen population
0:12:24 is about 300,000 people.
0:12:26 Once they win that war,
0:12:28 they have to figure out how you rebuild a society
0:12:30 that suffered all of that devastation.
0:12:33 And there are all kinds of dramatic shifts
0:12:35 in the way Romans live their lives.
0:12:39 The marriage age drops, the size of family increases.
0:12:42 The Roman state starts providing supplements
0:12:46 and land for people to go out and farm again
0:12:49 because Italy has been emptied by this war.
0:12:52 And so for two generations,
0:12:55 you have everybody in Rome has an opportunity
0:12:57 to have a better and more productive
0:13:00 and more lucrative career
0:13:02 than their fathers or their ancestors had.
0:13:05 And so you have generations that are now
0:13:09 as wealthy or wealthier than Romans before.
0:13:11 But this stops after about two generations
0:13:14 because Italy fills out.
0:13:17 These people have settled the empty spaces.
0:13:21 And what then happens is a financial sector
0:13:24 that had developed to support these activities
0:13:26 continues to grow.
0:13:28 And so the people who understand that financial sector
0:13:30 become very, very rich
0:13:33 while regular people’s opportunities have dried up.
0:13:35 And this creates an imbalance,
0:13:37 but it takes a while for this imbalance
0:13:39 to result in actual conflict.
0:13:42 So what’s remarkable is for 20 years,
0:13:45 the people in the middle, the upper middle,
0:13:47 people who are doing well,
0:13:50 but not doing as well as the financiers,
0:13:53 they believe that the system can somehow fix itself.
0:13:55 And so they play along with it.
0:13:58 But starting in the 130s, they will not play along anymore.
0:14:03 And so when you start seeing elections swinging
0:14:06 on the basis of economic inequality,
0:14:10 the inequality is not just affecting poor people.
0:14:13 It’s actually affecting people who are relatively well off,
0:14:15 who are feeling squeezed.
0:14:18 And so I think that’s what’s remarkable, right?
0:14:20 And it’s also, I think, a good analog
0:14:22 to what we see in the United States
0:14:26 where after 2016, when you looked at the sort of
0:14:30 economic factors and the breakdown of votes,
0:14:33 you saw a lot of Trump voters actually weren’t poor.
0:14:37 They were upper middle class or lower upper class people.
0:14:41 A lot of people making six figures and more
0:14:43 voted for Trump in 2016,
0:14:48 not because they were economically impoverished,
0:14:50 but because they were frustrated
0:14:51 that the system seemed broken.
0:14:57 – We have known for a very long time, hell,
0:14:59 Aristotle was writing about this,
0:15:02 that you can have some rich people
0:15:04 and you can have some poor people.
0:15:08 But if you want a sustainable democracy or republic,
0:15:10 you better have a robust middle class
0:15:13 that’s invested in the system.
0:15:16 And if you don’t, it’s not gonna work.
0:15:20 And maybe it’s just simple greed and stupidity.
0:15:23 I mean, that does seem to be the answer very often,
0:15:25 but it just never ceases to amaze me
0:15:28 how willing people empower then and now,
0:15:30 and I guess forever,
0:15:33 how willing they are to destabilize the system
0:15:35 that allowed them to be so successful
0:15:37 and wealthy in the first place,
0:15:40 just to hoard a few more resources.
0:15:42 I mean, it’s just, it’s mind boggling.
0:15:44 It shouldn’t be, but it is.
0:15:47 – I think that the thing that really strikes me
0:15:53 is you need to maintain an optimism in that group of people.
0:15:58 And you need to make them believe that things are fair
0:16:02 and that the system is unequal.
0:16:04 They’re okay with inequality, right?
0:16:06 I mean, they benefit from inequality,
0:16:08 but they do not like a system that seems unfair.
0:16:11 They do not like a system that seems rigged.
0:16:13 And in Rome, in the middle part of the second century BC,
0:16:15 the system seemed rigged.
0:16:17 And as they voted for people
0:16:20 who were supposed to fix the system,
0:16:22 they ran into a really significant problem
0:16:25 because the Roman Republic worked on consensus
0:16:27 and it worked on compromise.
0:16:30 And the big issue that these people faced
0:16:32 was the people who are rich,
0:16:34 the financiers who are wealthy,
0:16:36 they got their money legally, right?
0:16:40 They do not have to give that money up
0:16:42 and they cannot be compelled to give that money up
0:16:44 unless you’re gonna undermine the rule of law
0:16:46 and the rights of property.
0:16:49 And so there is no legal solution to this,
0:16:51 but there is an ethical problem
0:16:53 that these people don’t acknowledge.
0:16:55 And so you have an imbalance
0:16:58 between what’s legal and what’s fair.
0:17:00 And this imbalance longer, it persists.
0:17:02 The more it creates this sense of, you know,
0:17:05 a lack of optimism and a lack of fairness
0:17:08 that just further fuels a suspicion
0:17:10 that the system can’t fix itself.
0:17:13 – So would you say even more than inequality,
0:17:15 that maybe the biggest problem in Rome
0:17:19 was the collapse of trust and faith
0:17:20 in the government itself
0:17:22 and public institutions and the whole thing?
0:17:23 – Absolutely.
0:17:27 I think there’s a sense that the system’s supposed to work
0:17:29 and it’s not.
0:17:30 And when it’s not working,
0:17:32 it’s supposed to have mechanisms to fix itself
0:17:36 and it’s not, you know, I think, again,
0:17:38 I mean, it’s not a hundred percent parallel,
0:17:40 but the situation in the United States
0:17:44 between say Reagan and Trump,
0:17:46 you see moments where people try to fix things, right?
0:17:48 I mean, Occupy Wall Street was a moment
0:17:50 where people tried to fix things.
0:17:52 The aftermath of 2008 was a moment
0:17:55 where people wanted to actually fix things.
0:17:58 What instead you get is a doubling down on that system
0:18:02 where you try to fix things within the context of a system
0:18:05 most people feel is unfair and broken.
0:18:07 And ultimately you get people saying,
0:18:09 you know what, I just wanna scrap this thing.
0:18:10 It’s not working.
0:18:14 I would rather have anything else than this.
0:18:16 I would rather have violence than this.
0:18:20 And I think that actually points to a really important thing
0:18:22 we need to understand about Rome too.
0:18:25 Rome actually got lucky when it blew up the republic
0:18:28 that it had a figure who could create something
0:18:32 that could rebuild a system that functioned.
0:18:39 You got someone in Augustus who was a genocidal maniac
0:18:42 willing to do whatever it took,
0:18:46 kill as many people as possible to take power,
0:18:47 but he also somehow had a talent
0:18:52 to build something on the ruins that was sustainable.
0:18:54 You cannot guarantee you’re gonna get that.
0:18:57 You know, if you blow up a republic,
0:18:59 the chances you get in Augustus
0:19:03 who builds a system that actually could work are very low.
0:19:07 And so if that’s what we’re hoping for
0:19:09 or thinking we’re gonna get,
0:19:13 the chances are very high that we are not getting that.
0:19:15 We’re just gonna blow up a system and get nothing.
0:19:18 (upbeat music)
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0:23:14 (gentle music)
0:23:28 – We spoke a few years ago and you told me then
0:23:33 that you thought America could be in the beginning stages
0:23:38 of a similar decline as Rome.
0:23:40 How do you feel about that now?
0:23:44 Where do you think, where are we in that process?
0:23:49 – I was much more optimistic in 2018 than I am now.
0:23:54 What I saw in 2018 was a set of imbalances.
0:23:57 I saw a sort of primal scream by the American electorate
0:24:01 that said, “We do not like what we’ve got.”
0:24:06 And I saw hints that we might have violence injected
0:24:08 into our political life.
0:24:12 I had no idea that within two years
0:24:14 that violence would take the form that it did.
0:24:18 And it would come so close
0:24:20 to actually destroying the political system.
0:24:23 I mean, I was talking to a friend from Italy
0:24:28 a couple of weeks ago who was talking about January 6th
0:24:30 and he was like, “Oh yeah, it’s a blip.”
0:24:32 And I said, “Well, let’s game this out.”
0:24:36 They came very close to actually getting in there
0:24:39 when the representatives were present in the chamber.
0:24:42 It was something like 15 minutes or something
0:24:44 between when the representatives left
0:24:47 and when the rioters got in.
0:24:50 What would happen if they actually had gotten in
0:24:54 and seized some representatives or disrupted the vote?
0:24:57 And my friend said, “Well, they would call in the army.”
0:24:59 Who would call in the army?
0:25:01 Who is actually legitimately in charge at that point?
0:25:03 Who does the army answer to?
0:25:06 How do we answer those questions?
0:25:10 If it is January 21st, is Biden in charge of the army
0:25:12 even though we didn’t have an electoral college vote
0:25:14 or is Trump in charge of the army?
0:25:15 Who’s giving the orders?
0:25:18 We don’t have answers to any of this.
0:25:21 This was the situation Rome found itself in.
0:25:23 Once you break a system,
0:25:26 there are no rules governing what happens.
0:25:29 And all of the institutions that depend on that system
0:25:34 free float and people start making choices as individuals
0:25:36 not governed by any set of rules that exist
0:25:40 because there is no overarching structure to those rules.
0:25:43 And I think we don’t appreciate how close we came
0:25:46 to a moment where that was our government
0:25:47 or our lack of government.
0:25:50 And in Rome, that happened.
0:25:55 And it was profoundly devastating.
0:25:58 Hundreds of thousands of people died because of that
0:26:01 in a population that is one-fifth of the population
0:26:02 of the United States.
0:26:04 It’s not something that we should play with.
0:26:08 It really is pretty sobering how contingent and fragile
0:26:09 the whole thing is.
0:26:12 And as you said, if just something broke,
0:26:14 a couple of things broke differently here or there,
0:26:19 it could have become something so much worse than it was.
0:26:21 And it was already bad.
0:26:25 And you just can’t count on being that lucky
0:26:27 the next time and the next time and the next time.
0:26:30 And so after Caesar’s assassination,
0:26:33 there’s a five-day span in the city of Rome
0:26:34 where nobody knows what it means.
0:26:36 Nobody knows what’s gonna come next
0:26:41 because Caesar had been the linchpin of a system
0:26:44 that brought order in the chaos of the later republic.
0:26:45 And when Brutus destroyed Caesar,
0:26:47 he destroyed that system.
0:26:48 It all collapsed.
0:26:52 And once that happens, you do not have any say
0:26:53 over what people are gonna do
0:26:56 and how they’re gonna respond to the stimuli
0:26:57 that now are not controlled.
0:27:00 – So both the Roman political system
0:27:05 and our own system were designed to be slow moving
0:27:10 with the idea that change should happen
0:27:12 plottingly and deliberately.
0:27:16 Do you think in retrospect that that trade-off
0:27:18 wasn’t worth it for Rome?
0:27:21 That it was too hard and too convoluted
0:27:24 and therefore incapable of being responsive enough
0:27:28 to what was happening to do what needed to be done
0:27:31 before things careened too far off the tracks?
0:27:34 – Yeah, this is I think where the 2000 year span
0:27:36 is so important.
0:27:38 So over and over again in Roman history,
0:27:40 there are these moments where people step back
0:27:42 and say what we have is broken.
0:27:44 But because you have leaders
0:27:47 and because you have a tradition of adapting that,
0:27:50 most of the time what Rome does is it doesn’t blow up
0:27:53 all of these traditions and systems it inherited.
0:27:57 It tries to find ways to amend them and to adapt them
0:27:59 and to create kind of new ways
0:28:02 to make them more responsive to the needs of its citizens.
0:28:05 And so I think a great example of this
0:28:06 is in the third century AD
0:28:09 where the empire was built initially
0:28:12 as a kind of Italian enterprise to extract stuff
0:28:15 from all of these other places that it controlled.
0:28:17 But by the early part of the third century,
0:28:19 every single free person in the Roman Empire
0:28:21 was a citizen of the Roman state.
0:28:24 And so this model of Italians extracting things
0:28:27 from colonial subjects was gone.
0:28:29 You couldn’t run an empire that way anymore
0:28:31 because you have six million Italians
0:28:34 and 60 million other Roman citizens.
0:28:36 And so the third century was a process
0:28:39 of trying to figure out how you make a society,
0:28:43 how you remake a society that was originally devoted
0:28:45 to sending resources into Italy,
0:28:47 make it responsive to the needs
0:28:49 of all of those people everywhere.
0:28:52 – Would you say that adaptability,
0:28:56 that expansion of the circle of citizenship
0:29:00 was maybe the key to Rome’s survival for that long?
0:29:02 – Yeah, and I think that’s a lesson
0:29:06 we should really fundamentally take away from Rome.
0:29:09 What Rome was able to do from its very earliest point,
0:29:12 I mean, from the point when there were Roman kings,
0:29:14 was it was able to identify who could contribute
0:29:18 to its society and find ways to empower people
0:29:20 who maybe were initially outside of the inner circle
0:29:22 or even outside of the citizen body,
0:29:25 who you could incorporate and bring in
0:29:27 and allow their talents to serve Rome.
0:29:31 So some of the first Roman kings actually weren’t Roman.
0:29:33 They were chosen because they were the best people
0:29:34 for the job.
0:29:39 The third to last king, Tarquinius Priscus,
0:29:41 he wasn’t even born in Rome.
0:29:45 He was actually grew up in a city in Naturia
0:29:47 and his prospects were limited in that city.
0:29:49 And he moved to Rome because Rome was a place
0:29:52 where your talents would allow you to rise
0:29:54 as high as your talents would permit.
0:29:55 This society wouldn’t block you
0:29:58 because you weren’t of the right background.
0:30:02 And so that’s deeply ingrained in what Roman society was.
0:30:04 And I think that’s a lesson for us, right?
0:30:07 You have to remain grounded in the things
0:30:10 that make your country function.
0:30:13 But you have to also acknowledge that there are people
0:30:16 who may not have been born in a position of authority
0:30:18 who have something to contribute.
0:30:19 And if you’re gonna make your society function
0:30:23 in the longterm, you have to find a way to bring them in,
0:30:25 not just because it’s fair,
0:30:27 but because if you’re being sort of naked
0:30:30 in your calculations about what’s good for your country,
0:30:32 they make your country better.
0:30:35 – So you’re saying if Rome built a wall
0:30:37 and made Mexico pay for it,
0:30:40 it would not have worked out well for them?
0:30:41 Is that what you’re saying?
0:30:45 – Rome did build walls, but Rome also let people in.
0:30:49 And Rome also said, you have a talent,
0:30:54 I want you to have a position where you can make things better.
0:30:57 And so Rome did those sorts of things,
0:30:59 but not in a way that said, we’re not letting anyone in.
0:31:01 It never worked when they did that.
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0:32:25 just kind of typing away in the middle of the night.
0:32:28 And honestly, that’s not what it is anymore.
0:32:32 – That’s Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.
0:32:35 These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates
0:32:39 than individual con artists, and they’re making bank.
0:32:43 Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion.
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0:32:50 that’s been built to facilitate scamming at scale.
0:32:52 There are hundreds, if not thousands,
0:32:54 of scam centers all around the world.
0:32:57 These are very savvy business people.
0:32:58 These are organized criminal rings.
0:33:02 And so once we understand the magnitude of this problem,
0:33:03 we can protect people better.
0:33:07 – One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face
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0:33:16 But Ian says, one of our best defenses is simple.
0:33:18 We need to talk to each other.
0:33:20 – We need to have those awkward conversations around,
0:33:22 what do you do if you have text messages
0:33:24 you don’t recognize?
0:33:25 What do you do if you start getting asked
0:33:28 to send information that’s more sensitive?
0:33:31 Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness,
0:33:33 a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim,
0:33:35 and we have these conversations all the time.
0:33:38 So we are all at risk,
0:33:41 and we all need to work together to protect each other.
0:33:43 – Learn more about how to protect yourself
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0:35:01 (upbeat music)
0:35:12 – So when we spoke back in 2019,
0:35:13 and we were talking about whether America
0:35:17 was on a similar glide path as Rome,
0:35:19 you said to me, and now I’m quoting,
0:35:22 I think that we’re in the early stages
0:35:24 of a process that could lead to that.
0:35:27 The point at which Romans were willing to make that trade
0:35:32 occurred after almost 150 years of political dysfunction,
0:35:34 but it also occurred after a generation
0:35:36 of really brutal civil war.
0:35:40 It’s almost encouraging that it took the Romans that long
0:35:43 to finally decide they were done
0:35:44 with the whole Republic thing.
0:35:48 For the reasons you mentioned earlier,
0:35:50 my sense is that Americans will not wait that long
0:35:55 before making a comparable choice today.
0:35:57 And when you look around the world
0:36:00 and notice how many democracies are in decline,
0:36:05 you don’t find many reasons to feel more optimistic
0:36:05 about that.
0:36:08 I think what I’m really asking you is,
0:36:14 do you believe we have that much time
0:36:17 to get our political affairs in order as a country?
0:36:21 – I think where I’m different in my thinking
0:36:26 from then is first, I did not imagine
0:36:30 the level of political violence that we’re seeing now, right?
0:36:32 I mean, just in the last four years,
0:36:34 we’ve had people try to storm Congress
0:36:35 in two assassination attempts,
0:36:39 one that within a couple inches almost succeeded.
0:36:42 It took Rome a really long time to get to the point
0:36:44 where they were willing to do that.
0:36:46 And the fact that we’re barely talking
0:36:48 about those two assassination attempts right now
0:36:50 is, I think, stunning.
0:36:55 But I think what I also realized is,
0:36:59 in 2018, I thought that systems were strong
0:37:02 and individuals needed those systems to become weak
0:37:05 before they could take advantage of that weakness.
0:37:08 What I think now about Rome
0:37:11 is that there’s a sort of creative tension
0:37:14 that usually functions well, but sometimes doesn’t
0:37:17 between individuals who wanna push change
0:37:20 and systems that are designed to resist this,
0:37:22 designed to resist rapid change.
0:37:26 And I think there are a couple moments in that period
0:37:28 between the introduction of political violence
0:37:32 and assassination with Tiberius Gragas in 133 BC,
0:37:35 and the moment in really 27 BC
0:37:39 where Augustus figures out how to create a regime
0:37:40 where he is the dominant figure
0:37:42 for the rest of his life.
0:37:47 There are a couple moments where individuals make choices
0:37:49 that could have gone differently,
0:37:54 but they have enough faith in the integrity of the system
0:37:56 and they have enough trust,
0:38:00 that they trust the aesthetics of that system,
0:38:02 that they do not go that far.
0:38:04 So I think the moment that jumps out to me immediately
0:38:07 is Silla, who is a dictator, he wins a civil war,
0:38:10 he murders Roman citizens in a fashion
0:38:13 that is totally contrary to what a Roman state
0:38:16 is supposed to do or what any state really is supposed to do.
0:38:19 But what Silla fundamentally believed is,
0:38:21 a republic is important.
0:38:24 It was important to him that Rome had a republic.
0:38:27 And so he seized power and he occupied a position
0:38:31 of authority as an autocrat for a couple of years
0:38:33 and then gave the republic back
0:38:35 because he believed that was important to do.
0:38:37 He did not need to do that.
0:38:43 And I think that’s a moment where we should reflect
0:38:47 on whether some of the people who could find themselves
0:38:50 in a position similar to Silla in the United States
0:38:52 would make that same choice.
0:38:53 Would they walk away?
0:38:54 Because they feel like, okay,
0:38:56 I changed what I wanted to change.
0:38:57 I don’t think so.
0:39:02 – You said something else to me last time.
0:39:03 We spoke, that really lingered.
0:39:08 And you said that people like Trump pop up
0:39:12 in an old republic, every generation or so,
0:39:14 when things reach a certain point
0:39:18 and either the system reboots and gets back on the tracks
0:39:21 or it goes the other way.
0:39:24 And here we are, Trump is running again.
0:39:28 It’s entirely possible that he wins again.
0:39:30 What do you make of that?
0:39:32 And know that I’m not really asking you to weigh in
0:39:33 on the politics here.
0:39:38 I’m asking what you as a historian make of Trump
0:39:44 as a symptom of these deeper problems in the country.
0:39:50 – Yeah, I think that this is where the tension
0:39:55 between the system and the individual becomes so important
0:39:59 because there are moments where Republican systems
0:40:04 are not working and an individual does seize the momentum
0:40:08 and seize the opportunity to potentially refashion them
0:40:10 in whatever way that person wants.
0:40:15 They could do like Silla or Caesar, right?
0:40:17 I mean, Silla seizes the republic.
0:40:19 He kills a lot of people, but he turns it back.
0:40:21 He restructures it.
0:40:23 He believes in the republic.
0:40:25 Caesar also takes over the republic
0:40:27 and what he wants to do is create a republic
0:40:30 that is, you know, a republic.
0:40:33 Caesar, I think, deeply, deeply believed
0:40:37 that there are certain aspects of the Republican structure
0:40:38 and certain aspects of this idea
0:40:41 of a citizen-held political community
0:40:43 that he did not wanna transgress
0:40:45 even if it would cost him his life.
0:40:47 He understood that there’s a real danger
0:40:49 that by pardoning Brutus and Cassius,
0:40:51 they could come back and kill him
0:40:54 or some of the other people could come back and kill him.
0:40:57 It’s much more important to him to have a republic
0:41:02 than it is to make himself safe, right?
0:41:03 He made that choice, knowing full well
0:41:05 that it was a choice.
0:41:07 What I think is alarming to me about Trump
0:41:09 is I do not believe he cares
0:41:11 whether this country is a republic or not.
0:41:15 And so if he takes power and he has the ability
0:41:19 to remake the state, he’s not gonna remake it as a republic.
0:41:21 He’ll remake it as whatever he decides he wants it to be,
0:41:26 but he has no deep commitment to the idea of the republic.
0:41:30 And that’s different from every Roman who takes power.
0:41:33 – Look, I don’t care for Trump.
0:41:36 Anyone who listens to the show knows that.
0:41:39 I don’t make any efforts to hide that,
0:41:42 but I’ve always been frustrated
0:41:44 by some of the discourse around him,
0:41:47 where it’s, you just wanna write it off.
0:41:51 Oh, it’s because most of the country is racist
0:41:55 and that’s it, or it’s because economic anxiety or whatever.
0:41:57 And there’s some truth in all of that.
0:41:59 But if you just set that aside
0:42:03 and just set him in particular aside,
0:42:08 the fact that his political existence is possible at all
0:42:12 is a huge blinking red sign
0:42:15 that something has gone really wrong.
0:42:20 Like there is a rot at the center of our political life
0:42:26 that whether it’s Trump, it’ll be someone else like Trump,
0:42:27 maybe worse, maybe better.
0:42:30 But the fact that his political existence is possible
0:42:35 is indicative of the fact that we’ve got a real problem.
0:42:39 And if it doesn’t get addressed,
0:42:45 Trump is not the last of this type of figure
0:42:46 we’re gonna deal with.
0:42:49 – No, I think that’s exactly right.
0:42:51 Because I think again, what Rome shows
0:42:54 is these things are technologies.
0:43:00 Everybody who sees a political action learns from it.
0:43:04 And if you’re particularly ambitious,
0:43:06 you learn how to do something better
0:43:08 than the person who did it the first time.
0:43:14 And the fact that we basically now have the idea
0:43:17 that you can disrupt an electoral college vote,
0:43:20 the counting of an electoral college vote,
0:43:25 as part of the way we now can imagine political directions,
0:43:28 somebody is gonna do that and do it better.
0:43:29 And we can see that
0:43:31 because they’re already talking pretty openly
0:43:32 about how they will.
0:43:40 That should be a really, really significant red flag.
0:43:43 Because whatever Trump has done,
0:43:47 I think that logistics for that kind of operation,
0:43:49 he hasn’t done particularly well.
0:43:54 Somebody will do it better and somebody will try
0:43:57 because it’s out there now.
0:43:58 – And as you said earlier,
0:44:02 Rome was dynamic and survived
0:44:05 because it was able to adapt to a lot of change.
0:44:09 But that change is part of the reason you get tyrants
0:44:12 because that change creates a lot of discomfort
0:44:14 and uncertainty and anxiety.
0:44:17 And that is a very easy thing to weaponize and channel
0:44:19 if you’re a figure of that ilk.
0:44:24 And things change much faster today
0:44:25 than they did back then.
0:44:29 Which again, is another reason to be alarmed.
0:44:33 – I think that that’s one thing I would push back on.
0:44:34 – Yeah, please do.
0:44:36 – I mean, things changed rapidly there too.
0:44:41 Human life moves as human life does,
0:44:43 according to rhythms of 24 hours
0:44:46 and days and months and years.
0:44:49 And Rome could change very, very quickly.
0:44:53 And people could feel very disoriented
0:44:54 at the pace of that change
0:44:57 and did feel very disoriented at the pace of that change.
0:44:58 – It may be right.
0:45:02 I guess I’m thinking mostly in terms of technology
0:45:03 and technological change.
0:45:07 I mean, I think for most of human history,
0:45:09 the world that people died in looked a lot
0:45:11 like the world they were born into.
0:45:13 Whereas, I mean, I’m 42 years old.
0:45:19 The idea of TikTok and Twitter and smartphones
0:45:22 when I was a kid was just the stuff of science fiction.
0:45:27 And think how much those technologies have changed us
0:45:29 and the world we live in, how we think,
0:45:31 how we communicate, how we do politics,
0:45:34 how we consume content.
0:45:38 That is a bewildering kind of change
0:45:42 that I don’t think was possible then.
0:45:45 But maybe I’m thinking of this too narrowly.
0:45:48 – So where I’ll agree with you is,
0:45:50 we can now send messages
0:45:53 to much larger groups of people worldwide.
0:45:55 They couldn’t do that, that’s for sure.
0:45:59 But one of the things that Caesar learned in particular
0:46:02 was you can manage the messaging
0:46:04 in the city of Rome very effectively.
0:46:06 So he created a daily newspaper
0:46:08 that was posted at sort of corners
0:46:10 in every kind of neighborhood in the city of Rome
0:46:12 with news that he curated.
0:46:15 That didn’t exist before.
0:46:17 And now all of a sudden, you have a news source
0:46:20 that is providing you with a sort of steady curated narrative
0:46:23 about what’s going on in the world around you.
0:46:26 It’s no surprise that then you have somebody
0:46:29 who is able to really seize the popular imagination
0:46:32 in a fashion that no Roman had before.
0:46:35 Rome does show us that you can, like you just said,
0:46:36 blow the minds of the people
0:46:40 who are consuming the information you’re presenting
0:46:44 in a fashion that makes it impossible for them
0:46:46 to really evaluate the truth
0:46:49 of what you’re actually telling them
0:46:51 and why you might be choosing to tell them
0:46:52 what you have chosen.
0:46:55 And it’s no surprise that when Caesar’s gone,
0:46:57 you have utter chaos in the city of Rome
0:46:59 ’cause nobody’s managing the message
0:47:02 and people expect there to be a message.
0:47:05 – There are obviously many lessons that we can draw
0:47:07 from Rome’s fall.
0:47:11 And as we sort of wind down here,
0:47:14 I just wanted to know if you thought
0:47:16 there was anything in particular,
0:47:18 maybe one or two lessons
0:47:20 that we really should be thinking about
0:47:23 right now in this political moment.
0:47:25 – Yeah, I think the biggest point,
0:47:29 and I’m afraid the ship has already sailed,
0:47:32 but violence should never be a part of politics.
0:47:37 Once it’s there, it is very hard to make it go away
0:47:39 without even more violence
0:47:42 that ultimately neutralizes the people willing to do it.
0:47:45 Violence has no part in a political system
0:47:48 and especially in a representative political system.
0:47:49 But I think the other thing
0:47:52 that I think is really important for us to understand,
0:47:57 you cannot wait or hope that a single individual
0:47:59 is going to fix the problems in a society.
0:48:01 And you certainly cannot wait or hope
0:48:03 that a single individual will fix the problems
0:48:05 in a political system.
0:48:06 If you have a political system
0:48:08 that has functioned reasonably well
0:48:10 and has been adaptable
0:48:13 over the course of decades or centuries,
0:48:14 that’s a very valuable thing.
0:48:18 It creates rules, it creates assumptions,
0:48:20 it creates a kind of state of play
0:48:23 where everybody more or less knows
0:48:27 when you do X, this is kind of how the system
0:48:28 is going to respond.
0:48:31 If you destroy that, you have nothing.
0:48:33 And if you destroy that because of an individual,
0:48:36 you just have that individual.
0:48:39 Occasionally, you will get an individual,
0:48:40 I mean, very occasionally,
0:48:42 you will get an individual who creates something
0:48:46 that maybe isn’t even better, but is at least something.
0:48:49 Most of the time, the person who destroys this
0:48:52 not have the capacity to create.
0:48:54 And so you’re gonna replace something
0:48:57 that has governed just about every aspect
0:48:59 of your civic and personal lives
0:49:01 for your entire existence,
0:49:03 and probably in the United States,
0:49:06 for the existence of 10 generations
0:49:08 of your ancestors potentially.
0:49:12 If you throw that away for an individual,
0:49:15 you’re making a really significant bet.
0:49:16 And if that individual is somebody
0:49:19 that you don’t 100% trust is capable
0:49:22 of creating something different,
0:49:25 you are throwing away an incredibly valuable thing
0:49:26 for nothing.
0:49:30 And you’re not gonna have somebody miraculously
0:49:32 pop up to fix it.
0:49:35 – It is far easier to break than it is to build.
0:49:37 You shouldn’t forget that.
0:49:39 Edward Watts, this is great.
0:49:40 Thanks for doing it.
0:49:41 – Thank you.
0:49:46 – And if you’re listening and you haven’t read Ed’s 2018 book,
0:49:50 Moral Republic, do it immediately
0:49:53 and when is your next book gonna come out?
0:49:55 – It will come out in the fall of ’25.
0:49:56 – Okay, read that too.
0:50:09 All right, I hope you enjoyed that episode.
0:50:11 You know I did.
0:50:13 As always, you know, we wanna know what you think.
0:50:17 So drop us the line at the gray area at box.com.
0:50:18 And once you’ve done that,
0:50:21 go ahead, rate, review, and subscribe to the podcast.
0:50:24 All of that really helps our show reach more people.
0:50:28 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
0:50:30 and Travis Larchuk.
0:50:34 Today’s episode was engineered by Christian Ayala,
0:50:38 fact checked by Anouk Dusso, edited by Jorge Just
0:50:40 and Alex Overeington wrote our theme music.
0:50:43 New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays,
0:50:45 listen and subscribe.
0:50:46 This show is part of Vox,
0:50:49 support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program
0:50:50 today.
0:50:53 Go to box.com/members to sign up.
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0:50:56 let us know.
0:51:14 – Robinhood is introducing forecast contracts
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0:51:25 and watch as contract prices
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0:51:32 Each contract you own will pay $1 on January 8th, 2025,
0:51:33 if that candidate is confirmed
0:51:36 as the next US president by Congress.
0:51:38 Learn more about the presidential election contracts
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0:52:14 (upbeat music)
What can ancient Rome teach us about American democracy?
The Roman Republic fell for a lot of reasons: The state became too big and chaotic; the influence of money and private interests corrupted public institutions; and social and economic inequalities became so large that citizens lost faith in the system altogether and gradually fell into the arms of tyrants and demagogues. It sounds a lot like the problems America is facing today.
This week’s guest, historian Edward Watts, tells us what we can learn about America’s future by studying Rome’s past.
Host: Sean Illing, (@SeanIlling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Edward Watts, author, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome.
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