American Caesar: Trumpism in the Eternal Cycle of European Politics

1,341 words

The message has been drilled into our heads since 2016: “Our democracy” is at risk from the “fascism” of Donald Trump, an “authoritarian” who captivates the masses at “Nazi” rallies. But the central question in European government has always gone back further: to Julius Caesar vs. the Roman Republic. The 2024 presidential election rises beyond “just another election” because of its echoes, real or imagined, of this great cycle in European history.

Through the ages, many men have cast aside “democracy,” a system shrewdly run by the wealthy with pretensions of something more universal, for the rule of a monarch: Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, the Roman emperors, the Tsars, the Kaisers, and all the Christian kings of medieval Europe, just to name a few.

According to legend, Rome was founded by the brothers Romulus and Remus, with Romulus becoming its first king and namesake in 753 BC. The monarchy ended in 509 B.C. after the Roman Senate revolted against the last king, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, also known as Tarquin the Proud. A Roman Republic was established, and thereafter, generations of propaganda from the aristocratic political class denounced aspirations of kingship as the ultimate political crime. The repugnance for “tyranny” was thoroughly imbued in the Roman ethos of even the lowliest pleb.

No man better symbolized Republican “virtue” during its final crisis than the senator Marcus Porcius Cato. Cato’s career came to be epitomized by his war against the rise of Julius Caesar, an ambitious nobleman who rapidly accumulated power through successful military conquest and the loyalty of his soldiers. Every radical republican revolutionary since, from George Washington to Maximilien Robespierre has cited Cato as an inspiration.[1] And yet, when asked by Alexander Hamilton in 1790, “Who was the greatest man who ever lived?” the very framer of the American Constitution himself, Thomas Jefferson, could only reply, “Julius Caesar is the greatest man who ever lived.”[2]

You can buy Jason Kessler’s book Charlottesville & the Death of Free Speech here.

After all, what kind of red-blooded man hears the thrilling stories of Caesar vs. Pompey titanic struggle, the intransigence of the senatorial worm Cato, the ravishing of Cleopatra and pacification of Egypt… only to side with Cato and the Senate?! Men inherently long for the victory of heroes and despise the opaque machinations of politicians.

From birth, Americans are inundated with propaganda about the alleged sacral qualities of “our democracy.” Kings are portrayed in the same unflattering light today as they were in the Rome Republic: tyrants. The heads of today’s radicals are filled with propaganda of the kind that inspired the bloodletting of Revolutionary France, or even the radical religious fundamentalism of John Brown, which led to the deaths of dozens in Harper’s Ferry.

Liberal democracy has done a masterful job equating its regimes with values like freedom of speech, in letter of law, while contorting itself in practice to prosecute the nonviolent speech of alleged “fascists” and “racists” as violence. The trial and conviction of nonviolent Charlottesville rally protester Augustus Invictus in October 2024 for allegedly “intimidating” rhetoric, [3] shows that liberal democracy isn’t above the persecution of its own heretics.

The left’s fixation on comparisons of Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler is about more than just the neurosis of Jewish power brokers. Yes, there is some of that too. But how can Trump’s recent Madison Square Garden event be a “Nazi rally” when so many speakers effusively spoke of their love for Israel and the Jewish people? How can the left proclaim Jewish Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu a fascist, despite fascism’s historic skepticism of Jewry?

The answer is that “fascism” and “Nazism” aren’t really what we’re talking about here. These words are just the most emotionally loaded stand-ins available in modern politics. At heart, we are arguing the cycle of Caesar vs. the Republic which has endlessly repeated itself for millennia.

This does not presume that Trump himself aspires to become a dictator, a term originating from a magisterial position in the Roman Republic, whereby one man was given extraordinary autocratic powers during times of crisis. However his brash, shooting from the hip rhetoric (“You’d be in jail” to Hillary Clinton) inspires the fantasies of those who want a great modern hero to cut through red tape and set the order of the world back on solid footing again. Trump’s own rhetoric is redolent with praise for past American presidents, chief among them Abraham Lincoln. But then again, wasn’t Lincoln the only president to suspend Habeas Corpus, imprison his political enemies without trial and unleash the power of the U.S. military on his countrymen? Yet at the end of day, it was not Trump who used the power of the Department of Justice to lock Democrats up, but the other way around. Trump’s big talk was just that: talk.

Standing in the crowd at the Ellipse in Washington D.C. on January 6th 2021 was to hear the voices of counter-revolution against the power brokers controlling the machinery of “our democracy.”[4] Every pointed reiteration of the loaded propaganda term “our democracy” by exultant Democrats in the months following the election, felt like a knife prick to those who doubted its legitimacy. Speaker after speaker (Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump Jr., and the president himself) appeared on a massive Jumbotron issuing bold rhetoric about fighting, metaphorically at least, to take the country back. Republican men, patriots, screamed at the screen in impotent frustration, “Yeah, we know! Now what are we going to do about it?” Others shouted, “Storm the Capitol!”[5] But the event never gave them a clear call to action. That is until finally, at the end of the event, when Trump seemed to rally the faithful:

And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down, we’re going to walk down.

Anyone you want, but I think right here, we’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them.

Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.[6]

The crowd erupted in applause. This was Caesar’s call to cross the Rubicon and confront the decadent Senate, bloated and over-confident in the invincibility of its own sanctity.

Yet, “Caesar” never appeared. Trump later alleged that the Secret Service blocked him from participating in the march. [7] Without clear leadership, January 6th, far from the insurrection it was touted as in the leftist press, was merely a disorganized protest gone wrong. No more violent, certainly, than the deadly Black Lives Matter and Antifa riots which had consumed the country that summer and lead to dozens of deaths.

Even so, the convulsive fear from the Washington D.C. establishment was warranted. Much like the storming of the Bastille was not the ultimate downfall of the French monarchy in 1789 but a step in a process of revolution, much like the populist insurrections of the Gracchi brothers in 2nd century B.C. did not ultimately defeat the Roman Senate but paved the way for Caesar a generation later, January 6th appeared to be a seismic portent of future events.

Even if Trump never becomes the first American Caesar, and there are no indications he will be, the meta-narrative in the 2024 election demonstrates that despite radical republican indoctrination from birth, the blood and imagination of many Americans has reverted to their primordial yearning for a Good King. One blessed by the divine, to ride in on his white horse and dispatch with the byzantine legalism and lies of the corrupt political class in one fell swoop of his mighty sword. To right the wrongs our system has shown itself terminally incapable of solving.

Notes

[1] https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/cato

[2] https://www.curiosityu.com/videos/hamilton-vs-jefferson-the-rivalry-that-shaped-america/

[3] https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/crime-courts/torch-toting-unite-the-right-participant-convicted/article_b1c7280c-8824-11ef-8d09-8b76156f839f.html

[4] A 2022 Axios poll found that only a slim majority of the American public, 55%, believed Joseph Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election.

[5] https://x.com/FreeStateWill/status/1829547858850439223

[6] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/10/966396848/read-trumps-jan-6-speech-a-key-part-of-impeachment-trial

[7] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/07/trump-secret-service-capitol-riot-00023737

Jason Kessler is the author of Charlottesville and the Death of Free Speech, available now from Dissident Press. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter,Youtube, Odysee, and Gab. Also follow Dissident Press on Twitter/X.