The Daily Stoic - Stoicism for Turbulent Times (and Divisive Politics) | History of Rome Podcaster Mike Duncan on Political Parallels

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

After the recent assassination attempt of former President Trump and the heightening political divide, it’s important to learn from history and turn to what we can control amidst the chaos. There’s no better time to revisit Ryan Holiday’s conversation with Mike Duncan, author of Storm Before the Storm and podcast host of The History of Rome, to talk about the historical parallels between Roman history and today’s political turmoil. They debate the normalization of political violence and the consequences of ignoring systemic issues, as well as talk about how to use Stoicism to navigate today's political chaos and the need for introspection and corrective action within political systems.📚 Grab copies of Storm Before the Storm and Hero of Two Worlds  by Mike Duncan at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️Listen to Mike Duncan’s podcast, The History of RomeConnect with Mike Duncan on X |@MikeDuncan✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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on the show, wanting to know the lowdown on Teodoro's affair, the kidnapping, and how on earth there were two Phil Gaskins. In this episode, we answer all of those and more with two people who experienced the story unfolding firsthand. Listen to The Price of Paradise Exposed, and if you haven't yet listened to the full series, you can find all seven episodes on Wondry Plus or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to The Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So look, the good news is Rome doesn't just collapse after Marcus Aurelius. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire is grossly overstated. It not only endures for hundreds of years, you could argue it still stands, not just that the traditions are carried on in the West, but the Pontifist Maximus, the Pope, that's the job that Marcus Aurelius had.

Marcus Aurelius and Pope Francis held the same job. So the good news is, you know, when you read this sort of doom and gloom, when you follow current events and you get scared and you go, are we Rome? Is everything about to collapse? Like the reassuring thing is that that's not how it works. It goes oftentimes through many, many,

many people's lifetimes. The bad news is the Roman Republic, that fell pretty quickly, like in one man's lifetime. We have Julius Caesar, we have the clash between Caesar and Cato, and Pompey, Cicero, all the stuff I talk about in Lives of the Soul. So all this happens very quickly. And yet, even there, it takes longer than people think, longer in a bad way, in the sense that, you know, the

institutions of a Republic, a system of government doesn't just magically fall to the decisions of a singular person. Mike Duncan wrote this amazing book called The Storm Before the Storm, which I passed to so many people over the years were carrying the bookstore. It's an amazing book. You absolutely have to read it. He says, look, what Julius Caesar did, what happened in that lifetime is the epilogue to a story that stretches back almost 100 years. And he looks at the events which lead up to the collapse of the Republic,

the normalization of mob violence, the normalization of political violence, assassinations, people breaking the rules, people not following the norms, people thinking that they alone were the solution to the Republic's problems. And then also on the other end of the spectrum, people who had their head in the sand and thought that nothing needed to change,

Cato being a great example of this. And the dysfunction and the gridlock of the Roman system over not in one person's lifetime, but generations lead to a kind of a pent-up energy and a frustration, and then this thing goes very, very quickly. Now, of course, the other side of this, Stokes says everything has two handles, is that it endures for hundreds of years after that. We get to Marcus Aurelius and then hundreds of years after Marcus Aurelius, as I was saying.

What does this have to do with anything? As I was watching the events on Sunday unfold, I was at a birthday party for my children. And I thought of something that Mike Duncan had talked about when I interviewed him on the Daily Stoke website long before we even had a podcast. This was his answer. And I think about this a lot.

He says, anytime the world starts to feel like it's being engulfed by entropy, chaos, and noisy disunity, the mind naturally seeks out something He says, anytime the world starts to feel like it's being engulfed by entropy, chaos, and noisy disunity, the mind naturally seeks out something that offers cohesion, order, and quiet unity. We get carried away by events and certainly feel our passions leading us into behavior that we might upon reflection regret. Stoicism, he said, offers a solid place to plant your feet and says, the winds may howl, but I will not be swept away.

I think that's a fantastic and an inspiring definition of what stoicism seeks to cultivate. And also what desperately needs to happen now. The center has to hold, people have to calm down, and we have to see what we're teetering on the edge of. So for today's episode, I wanted to bring you an interview that I did with Mike Duncan about his amazing book, The Storm Before the Storm.

He also has another book that I love called Hero of Two Worlds about Lafayette. Carry both of those in the painted porch. I'll link to both of them. So look, this interview was done quite a while ago. So this is long before any of these events. But what you get when you study history, when you read about events from

2000 years ago, is that it helps you process what's happening here in the present because you've heard and seen it before. But also, it helps you predict what's going to happen, right? So that's part of the reason why you're not so surprised. Seneca talks about how, you know, anticipation takes the power of the events have over you away from them, because, you know, anticipation takes the power of the events have over you away from them, because, you know, it's something you've considered before, it's it's not shocking, it's not unprecedented, all this stuff is very, very precedent, good and bad, particularly bad, like the chaos that can can happen, we don't want to see any of this stuff. So I wanted to bring you

this episode, because I think it's important. And look, I still can't pretend that none of this exists, that this isn't happening there in the background. You can't just retreat to the Epicurean garden and live in your fantasy life. No, you need to be aware of what's happening, but you need to have the right perspective, the right understanding. And ultimately, I think this was a really important part

of the interview that Mike and I did. You have to know what your role is in it. You have to focus on what you control and you have to not get caught up in these passions, right? You have to say the winds may howl, but I will not be swept away. If you haven't listened to Mike's podcast, they're amazing. I'll link to those in the show notes. And of course, The Storm Before the Storm and Hero of Two Worlds are two must read books.

You know, I read your book, when did The Storm Before The Storm come out? 2017. So, I read it right when it came out and I thought, oh wow, this is relevant to where we are today. And you know, now three years have passed and And unfortunately, I'm talking to you when it could not be any more relevant. Correct. Is that what you thought or is it surprised even you? So I had the idea for the book

by the time the history of Rome was over, it was a period I knew I wanted to come back and revisit, mostly as a projected prescient look into a near distant future, but certainly not right around the corner. So when I was pitching it in, let's see, come out in 2017. So I was probably pitching the book to publishers in 2015. OK. In 2014.

And it was meant to be, yes. I am beginning to detect troubling signs inside the American body politic that seemed to me to be echoes of some of the things that the Roman Republic was facing, all caveats about historical parallels aside. And then I was writing it during the 2016 election is when I was actually drafting the final manuscript.

And all through that whole process, people are bombarding me on social media. It's like, you got to get this book out, man. And I was just like, I'm writing the book as fast as I can. And I was just watching things accelerate so much faster than I would have thought. If I was projecting mentally, I'd be like, oh, by 2030 or 2040, we'll be in a bad place. And then we really started accelerating

towards some things that then, yeah, especially the first couple chapters of the book are just extremely relevant to what we're facing right now, like as a country. Well, I've recommended your book to world leaders and senators and athletes and all. I do appreciate that, by the way. Oh, thank you.

No, I mean, because people ask me sort of what, you know, what are you reading or what do you think I should read or what's a way to sort of understand this stuff? And when I recommend the book, my sort of summary of it and I'd be curious if you think this is accurately depicts it and maybe we'll riff on this a bit but I sort of go people think that Julius Caesar just happened, that he just overthrew the Roman Republic out of, you know, force of personality or genius or necessity,

you know, sort of depending on where you come down, but that it was sort of in, he was an aberration, that it was a force of nature, essentially. But the argument of your book is like, no, history doesn't just happen. A hundred years of smaller events contributed to that happening. And you have to, you don't start at Julius Caesar if you want to understand why the Roman Republic fell. You have to look at the generation before and the generation before that

and the generation before that. And what the storm before the storm does, it sets the table to then understand what you heard about from Shakespeare or movies or anything like that. That's exactly what I was trying to do. And that is exactly, you know, sort of what I discovered for myself when I was writing the history of Rome

and going through all those episodes. And one of the things that I have said, you know, coming out of the history of Rome, and this remains true, is that if you talk to people just out in the general public, you know, what do they know about Roman history, start telling me things about Roman history, they will tell you things that are really confined to about a hundred year period of the sort of thousand years that at least the Western Roman Empire existed. And it usually starts around Julius Caesar. They know Julius Caesar, and they know Marc Antony

and Cleopatra because they've been in movies. And they know Caligula, and they know Nero because that stuff is like in I Claudius or another sort of like it's in pop culture. But yeah, when you talk about the quote, unquote, fall of the Roman Republic, you are talking about Julius Caesar, and you are talking about Cicero, and Cato the Younger, and Brutus.

And but where did those guys come from? Where did they get the idea to do the things that they were doing? Why was the entire Republican political culture in a place where these things could actually happen? And to understand that, you have to go back about 70 or 80 years in my estimation. You can backlog everything. You could say, well, ultimately, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic is like when

it wouldn't have happened if Romulus hadn't have founded Rome in the first place. If the wolf had been different. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. If that wolf had had a, you know, breastfed Romulus and Remus, you know, there never would have been a Roman Republic to fall. That's just fun. That's just fun with history.

But I do really think that it's true that something happened coming out of the Third Punic War, that the the republic itself was in such a place economically and politically that things did need to happen to correct some of the inequalities and correct some of the mental drift that happened inside of the senatorial aristocracy, that once that drift started to set in and once they started to get away from the things that

have bound them together politically up to that point, and we can talk specifics about this, is that that process started to build on itself like a snowball. And even more than a snowball, it was reactions to reactions to reactions. And the collapse of political norms becomes sort of like a Hatfield and McCoy style feud where people keep responding to whatever the last move on the board was and whatever the last breaking of the most recent norm was. And in that sort of reaction,

you always feel like you're responding to some bad thing that somebody else has done. And then you do something to that person then things, oh, well, you've done something bad and they respond to that. And then suddenly you go from people arguing in the forum to literal armies marching into Rome and literal civil war engulfing your entire political culture, all of which happened 40 years before Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The Roman Republic could have fallen multiple times during the civil wars, during the social war,

and during the fighting between Marius and Sulla. It's actually something of a miracle that the Republic even lasted for Caesar to take down a couple of decades later. Yeah, you know, this is sort of a stoic thing. Let's zoom way out, and then I want to get into the norm stuff for sure. But it's like, when you when you look at the Roman history, it feels like it happened over 1000 years, as you said, but it also feels like it happened over like 10 years. Like,

when I was just did this book lives of the stoics, which is a biography of all the the different stoics, but even to go like from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius is like 600 years. And yet, they all seemed to be just a generation or two away from each other. I mean, even this is a little bit after your book, but like, it struck me to go like, Seneca lived through five emperors. And so there is this like, there is this idea that history is really long, but it's also recent, like, I've talked about this too. But you know, I met a guy is unfortunately now past, but he was born when Theodore Roosevelt was president. And

you're just like, Oh, you think this is so long ago. But to a lot of these Romans in your book, it's like the the the thing that happened 40 years ago, they grew up with their father talking about or, you know, Cato is like, it's like the thing that happened 40 years ago, they grew up with their father talking about, or you know, Cato is like, he shares the name with his great-great-grandfather, so these things feel both distant and very current to all these figures.

Yeah, I mean, and if you look at Julius Caesar, as you know, a very specific example of this, I mean, who is he? He is, he's related to Marius. You know, his, his, his aunt is his great aunt, I'm now blanking which one it was, was married to Marius, you know, probably named Julia or something. Well, they're all they're all named Julia, which is, you know, I'm sorry, if you read the book, I'm sorry, they all had the same names, there's nothing I can do about it. Like, they're All the names are the same. I'm like, that's not my fault.

That's the Romans. They only had like 12 names. But yeah, he is, you know, Caesar pops up at the end of the storm before the storm as a teenager. He literally lived through this. And his, the normal environment that that quote unquote last generation of the Roman Republic was born into. Cicero and Cato, the younger and Caesar.

I mean, Cicero fought in the social war, which was a huge civil war that nobody ever really talks about anymore because again, sort of popular culture has confined itself to just this one very specific stretch of Roman history. But yeah, those guys were teenagers. Those guys were in their 20s. culture has confined itself to just this one very specific stretch of Roman history. But yeah, those guys were teenagers. Those guys were in their 20s. They were just embarking on their own careers as they watched what happens if somebody who is very bold and who refuses to be taken down by their political enemies and is willing

to push things to the absolute limit in order to win and not be taken down. That was the lesson they all learned. That last generation had already learned a lesson about how to wield and utilize power that generations before them, they were growing up in an environment where none of those things were done. None of those things were thought to be possible. None of those things were, you were not meant to act or behave in that way. And so the a lot of the bad things that happen when a political culture takes itself to that place is not the immediate

crisis. An immediate crisis can come and go. We can look just for example at what happened on January 6 at the Capitol and say, Oh, boy, boy, we really dod just for example at what happened on January 6th at the Capitol and say, oh boy, boy, we really dodged a bullet there. But who are the teenagers who are watching this kind of thing on TV or whatever they watch, whatever the kids are watching things on these days? And then we look forward to 2030 and 2040. And what are people who are being bathed in this version of American politics going to be like in 20 or 30 years? That was actually one of the things that I told a

congressman that I know when we were talking about what happened on January 6 is, you know, history does not judge poor responses to spontaneous violence or rebellion well. And I said, you know, might I remind you of a sort of inadequately punished attempted coup in Germany in 1920? You know, and that's what struck me about the book, there was all these moments where, you know, everyone thought, hey, things are breaking down a little bit, but things are weird. They've always been this way, we'll turn around. And then

like a mob would break into a building and tear someone to pieces or a mob would, you know, a mob would demand the execution of so and so. And it kind of felt like these leaders were just kicking the can down the road, hoping a problem would resolve itself. And really that was just ensuring that there would be an explosive outcome at some point in the future. Right. And I think I think part of that kicking of the can down the road is that we do get locked into forms of tribalism, right? And the Romans literally had tribal and family client patron networks that operated very differently from the way that

the street gangs. And yeah, yeah, yeah. And the way that those client patron networks were operated, they operated far more like, let's say, the mafia does than like an American political party, a modern democratic political party does. But one of the things that was really apparent all through the storm, before the storm,

as I was writing it and researching it, was that whenever those things happened, you were always right on the tip of everybody's tongue was why the last, why the people who were sort of the victims of everybody's tongue was why the last, why the people who were sort of the victims of this round of violence were actually the causes of it because of this thing that they had done five years earlier or 10 years earlier.

Right, and so when in chapter one, so the Grokai brothers are long associated with the introduction of political violence into the Roman system. And this is really true. You take the founding of the Republic around 500 BC, all the way through to the Grokai brothers, who now you're talking the 130s, 120s BC.

You're talking about centuries. There wasn't really a whole lot of political violence inside of the Roman Republican system. There were some stuff coming out of the conflict of the orders Republican system. There was, there were some, some stuff coming out of the conflict of the orders, sort of in the early days, but most of it was pretty subdued in terms of, you know, like knifing people or beating them over the head with table legs. If you didn't get your way, if you lost an election, let's say. And one of the actually, not to get off on a tangent, but one of the genius things about

the Roman system is, you know, the two consul ships every single year. We often talk about that being really smart because no one person could ever accumulate power, right? So there was no sort of, it was a guard against dictatorship. You got two guys in office and they're going to be out by the end of the year. And one of the benefits of that system though, in terms of political stability was that it also meant that everybody got their bite at the apple from the senatorial class. So everybody was always going to have another, always going to have another bite

at the consulship if they lost this election, right? So losing an election was not an apocalyptic event for these guys because they can always come back around next year and win. That's just a little thing. The Grakai are associated with the introduction of political violence. What people forget though is that they were not actually the ones who instigated the violence. They were doing things and pushing things beyond the normal limits of the republic, but at least Tiberius in the very first instance of this is a group of conservative senators who don't like what he's doing.

The Pontifex Maximus leading a mob of armed, like basically an armed gang, who's going to go up there and beat Tiberius to death and beat his supporters to death and push them off the Tarpan Rock. So that basically a reactionary violence attack on the Grok that happens there in 133, and then again to his brother a decade later, that rooted in the minds of more populist oriented Roman politicians and their supporters, that we have to take revenge on these people.

And then a lot of what happens in the one teens and like as you approach the turn of the century, like during the time of the Jagirtha war, a lot of what they were doing was a 15 years later getting their revenge on what had happened to the Gronk guy. And then once those guys start to take it out and have their revenge on the senatorial aristocracy to purge certain members, to bring them before various courts, to drive them out and exile them from Rome, now that creates a system where those guys feel like they need to respond to it. And you see this very long running tit for tat feud between these different families.

I see this a lot in American politics where Democrats will bring up the treatment of Merrick Garland and say, this is an example of a completely violated norm in terms of a president being allowed to appoint somebody to the Supreme Court and having the Senate basically be like, well, is he qualified? If he's qualified, and he's not a horrendous candidate, then the Senate should go along with it. And that's kind of the way it was always done, except then the Republicans will say, Well, what about Robert Bork?

Right? Isn't it amazing how sort of self serving and I think it was true in Rome, and it's true today, how self serving the rationalization is, you I think it's true in Rome and it's true today, how self-serving the rationalization is. It's like, hey, we're going to steal a Supreme Court seat, but you did it 30 or 40 years ago. By the way, the circumstances are totally different, and it didn't actually cost you a seat. We managed to find a way to root.

Nobody ever comes out and says, I am overthrowing a democratic norm. What we do is we find a way to root it in precedent. However, baldly preposterous that precedent is, I was appalled, for instance, in Ted Cruz trying to rationalize the failure to certify an election and the precedent of the 1876 election, which is one of the travesties of American democracy when we ended, you know, Reconstruction in the South and basically deprived black people of their rights and shoved them back into pseudo slavery

as a political bargain. That's the precedent he's using to rationalize a destruction of an important norm. And then, of course, what we're also watching is, I mean, and if you go from Bork, which is like, we don't like him. Et cetera. Yeah, there's then there was lots of reasons for the Democrats to oppose him. But then they did bring it to a vote and they voted him down, right. And that was the thing that happened, which then then you fast forward 20, I guess 25, 30 years, and you've got the Senate Majority Leader just refusing to even have hearings at all. And that's how that's

how these things can escalate, while still also being not really my fault. It's your fault that you started this like 30 years ago, and then Democrats will always be able to point to Merrick Garland as, you know, and wave the, you know, sort of the lost flag of Merrick Garland, I think justly. And this is how these things are just going to keep going. Hello, I'm Rob Brighton. When I looked out at the podcast landscape, I'm Rob Brydon. When I looked out at the podcast landscape, I thought to myself, you know, there just

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His music I grew up with, but I want to know more about what formed him. And how did he manage to fit so much into such a tragically short life? Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad free on Wondery+. Go deeper and get more to the story from Wondery's top history podcasts, including American Scandal, American History Tellers and Black History for Real. So how do you break that cycle, right? Because so it's like, it's like what happens with Merrick

Garland, and then you get the Republicans that go, hey, you know, Kavanaugh gets sort of jammed up with this me too thing that, you know, I think a reasonable person could agree or disagree with. And then, you know, now you have the Democrats saying, hey, if we take all branches of government, we're going to pack the Supreme Court. And you do see Biden saying, hey, that's not a good idea. It's both tempting, but then also, like almost from a game theory standpoint, rational to meet the breaking of one norm with the breaking of another norm. It feels like a sucker's payoff to be like, hey, I'm going to let the other people get

off scot-free with political violence or what have you or norm breaking, but I'm going to I'm going to follow the rules like to the letter. Only the Cato's do that. Right. And they lose. And so it is important to note that that underlying all of this is profound differences in in your vision for what the United States ought to be. And if you have profoundly different visions for how the country ought to be, then yeah, for one side to allow your political opponent to just sort of behave any way that they want without any repercussions, while you say,

well, we are going to adhere to these old traditional norms. And like, you know, if they retake the Senate to listen to what Republicans have to say about anything, which, you know, Mitch McConnell didn't listen to anything a Democrat wanted while he was in power. And so it would be, again, as you say, from sort of a game theory or a political strategy or simply advancing your own interests, what you think you want to have happen to the country, it would be madness to do anything but play as equally as hardball as you got played.

So your question, though, is the big one. I mean, it's the million dollar question. Once you have gotten into a feud like this, how do you ever extract yourself from it? And how do you pull out of the spin? OK, so I've obviously given this a lot of thought. And to my best guess, because partly, I got to tell you, I'm just incredibly pessimistic about not pulling out of it. Like it's a hard it's

a hard thing to do because these hurts are deep, these resentments that we feel about each other are really down in our core of our bounds. But I think that the correction has to come from inside the team, as it were, or inside your group, inside your tribe. We had a moment just now, and the moment got missed. The moment was pretty much blown, where we had something straight out of Roman history, which is early, you know, the bad bits of Roman history, which nobody ever likes to say we're living through the bad bits of Roman history, where the president of the United States and a clique of allied senators and representatives sort of whipped up and egged on through a really dedicated

mission of disinformation and lying about the results of the election. They whipped up a mob and that mob stormed the Capitol to disrupt the legal transfer of power. Right. And so now the United States can no longer say that we do peaceful transitions of power. Like we actually just on January 6th, we lost the right. It's like how many we've had 240 years of no workplace accidents and that's not the case anymore. Right. Well, yeah, the last workplace accident was like in 1860.

But since then, we always like to, like that's one of the things we do. We have these peaceful transitions of power, which we can't say anymore because we did not just have a peaceful transition of power, we had, there was violence associated with it. There was violence to try to stop the legal transition of power. So- And that's why it's fundamental for anyone listening.

That's why what happened on January 6th was fundamentally different than all of the violence during the Black Lives Matters protests over the summer combined. And it's fundamentally different than any violent protest or looting or disruption or even terrorism that's happened in the United States because the core purpose of what happened on January 6th, and I'm saying this because I do know I have some listeners who are not clear on this the fundamental purpose of what those protesters did on January 6th was to stop the certification of a democratic election it was effectively a coup

attempt and that has never happened in American history and God willing it never happens again yeah I hope so. The precedent is now there, which is part of what makes the storm before the storm so distressingly relevant. Because it didn't just happen once in Rome. Each time it escalated. There's no doubt in my mind that something like this is going to happen again. There's no doubt in my mind.

I hate to say it. What happened didn't even really surprise me. Because all the warning signs were there. They were doing this all right out in the open. Like, I mean, we, I don't know how many times you have to treat somebody like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, and take them at their word for what they say and do. People show you who they are as leaders, you got to believe them. Yeah, they constantly follow through on the wild ass things

that they were promising to do in public all the time for like two months. But again, the million dollar question is, OK, how do you stop this? And the response, to be clear, lots of Republicans, lots of conservatives expressed shock, horror, condemnation for what happened, right? Like this is disgusting, this is violent, this is not how we're supposed to do it.

All the people who were involved should be arrested. You know, it would be flagrantly dishonest to say that Republicans have not responded to what happened on January 6th with words of strong condemnation. I mean, George W. Bush is putting things out there as he rarely does to say that this is a bad and terrible thing. But then when it comes to what do we do about the leaders who stirred this up, who revved this up, who were planning to benefit politically from it? What do we do about those people who didn't just

aid and abet what happened, but actually started it in the first place for their own political advantage? What's going to happen to the representatives who gave tours to people who we would now, just as a political science, a piece of political science terminology called insurrectionists. What do we do about Ted Cruz?

What do we do about Holley? And what do we do about Trump? And unfortunately, at the moment, the response seems to be absolutely nothing, right? Or if something is gonna happen, it's gonna be entirely the Democrats who do it. And what they said was, you should not impeach Trump. You should not try to remove him from office because that will be an entirely partisan

response to what happened. And it is, in the grand scheme of things, not great to only have Democrats being the one responding to this because it will create a sense of grievance and a sense of resentment and a sense of. I think you're right. It's like some of the Republicans have said like, hey, we need to unify. We need to come together. And in a sense, they're completely correct.

We just need to come together and reestablish in some need to come together as both parties and impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office. The Senate needs to come together and vote 97 to 3 to remove Ted Cruz from the Senate, to remove Hawley from the Senate, right? There are lots of examples all through Roman history and all through the history of democracies across the world, that sometimes representatives, senators, delegates, peers, whatever, do things that are so heinous that they simply are forbidden henceforth from serving in government.

The problem though is that the Republicans are exactly right when they say that it will look bad and be bad for the political climate if only Democrats are the ones trying to impeach Donald Trump and remove him from office or remove Cruz from office. And I happen to agree with that, which is why I would implore all Republicans to get on board with the vote. The answer is then not to let's come together and do nothing about it. Right?

That's even worse. It's let's come together and do something about it together. Because if Republicans are not the ones saying our guys screwed up and we're going to punish them too, then the message is going to be this is still just a running political feud between two hyperpartisan factions. And we've moved beyond that. And so if you want to stop this, if you want to stop the descent into what ultimately becomes a civil war, like we are on a path right now to civil war, like just objectively and historically. If you want to arrest that, Republicans need to take care of what's happening in the ranks

of the Republicans. And to the extent that similar things are happening inside the Democratic Party, Democrats need to be the ones who are taking care of that. And so it becomes a bit of, we need to take care of our own tribes a little bit because we are already in a place where we all feel persecuted. We all feel persecuted by Democrats, feel persecuted by Republicans. Republicans feel persecuted by Democrats. And the fact that the Republicans just

let only the Democrats respond forcefully to what happened on January 6 will leave that persecution complex in place. And that stinks, man. That stinks. Right, yeah. It's like in the lead up to the Civil War, you have the beating of Charles Sumner

on the floor of the Senate. Senate as a Congress, I forget. But you can't you can't allow these things to happen because they escalate. And so let me I would say that one of the Republican responses, and this is probably true in Rome as well. And I think this segues into obviously what I write about is that they might go but to expel Trump or to have impeached him earlier this year, or I guess last year now, to expel Republican members from the Senate, to vote against something that not all of their base supports is to commit political suicide. Right? And so maybe what we're really also talking about, and the Stoics were there in the events of the books you're talking about, what you need beyond politics and beyond the sort of the compass of self-interest

is you need some sort of personal virtue or some philosophy that guides you. So when you say, hey, look, I'm choosing between committing political suicide and doing the right thing, it's very clear to you what the right choice is, right? That it would be better to not be in power or to have to go into the political wilderness for a while than it would be to stay relevant,

to maintain your party's hold on things and do it by tolerating or tacitly condoning something that is beyond the pale and a violation of one's democratic norms. Yeah, it has always been a bit astounding to me. The lengths, the things that people will let go on and the lengths people will go to and the things that people will let go on and the lengths people will go to and the things that they will accept simply in order to continue to be a congress

person in the United States House of Representatives for six years, you know, from 2012 to 2018. Or if you have somebody who's planning on running for office here coming up, you know, from 2012 to 2018, or if you have somebody who's planning on running for office here coming up, you know, the I don't know what the average 10 year of a congressperson is. Sometimes, sometimes you get these people that serve for 50 years, of course, and we know this. But sometimes it's just like, yeah, I do it for six years, and then I become a lobbyist. Right.

Go back to my law firm or like whatever. And it's, you know, it's a cool thing you get to put in your obituary. But there is a degree to which, as you say, what is the consequence of joining an effort to impeach Trump or doing something about Ted Cruz? The consequence, and we can talk about the physical threats that they do feel, which I think is a little bit true. It's very real. Yeah, it's very real. But in general,

what we're talking about is they might not get to keep that job anymore. As if they're privately, they all complain about not liking to be. Yeah, which, yeah, you can go back to being a lawyer, you can be a lobbyist, like I don't that maybe that's not that that's not a particularly frivolous thing either. But there are many things that you could do. It's not literal suicide. We're not saying if you do this, then you have to go home and light incense and candles

and you know, cut cut your stomach open with a sword. You know, you don't have to sit in a hot bath and open your veins because you voted to impeach Trump. Like that's not what we're talking about here, but the apocalyptic- Jeff Blake's doing fine. Yeah. The apocalyptic visions that people have, like, what are the consequence? I will lose an election if I do this.

And then what that does is, I firmly believe that many, many, many, many, many Republicans have done many, many, many, many, many Republicans have done many, many, many, many, many things over the past four years and over the past eight years and even before that in terms of their opposition to President Obama that doesn't actually align with their worldview, doesn't actually align with their ethics or their values, but they do because they feel driven to do it or they will lose their job. They will not get to be congresspeople anymore. They will not get a good seat at a restaurant.

They will not get to go on Morning Joe or whatever the perks of this job are. They're going to lose those and they find that to be for some reason the consequences so intolerable that they will tolerate all of this stuff. And at the moment, yeah, we're watching them be afraid of their own voting base, partly because they will lose an election. Of course, by now, we've let things get to the point where it's not just I'm afraid I'll lose my job.

It's I'm afraid somebody's going to murder me, which is like that's also like if anybody's listening and doesn't think that that's like a true fear that they have or truth that they have, of course it is. That was a lynch mob that we saw march into the Capitol. In the American experience, lynch mobs are very closely linked to racist violence in the South. And if you say lynch mob in the American context, I mean, there were many, many racists in that crowd. But a lynch mob happened in the French Revolution.

It happens in the Russian Revolution. It's a phenomenon that happens. A group of people who want to murder somebody, once their sort of bloodlust is up, this is a thing that has happened in human history many times. And it happened on January 6. You know, some of the people in that crowd were totally ready to kill Mike Pence, they were totally ready to kill Nancy Pelosi, they were totally

ready to kill Chuck Schumer, like they wanted those people dead. Not weird, not everybody, but enough of them. And it doesn't take many people in those circumstances, you only need a couple of people to actually start to start the killing. And there's, there's French revolutionary precedents for all this too, which is, which are always fun and troubling. But I think it's so fascinating how, how utterly indistinguishable the mob on January 6th is from the mobs

that you talk about in the storm before the storm. Like this is something human beings do when the systems break down or when they've been encouraged in such a way. And on the other side of the sort of the self-interest and the rationalization from the senators and the congressmen and women is also, I mean, you're also describing Seneca and Cato and countless other senators who

always, a little bit after your book, but sought to rationalize horrendous things, probably in part because they didn't want to lose their jobs and also because they told themselves they were so indispensable to the process that if they were not to be in power, things would be worse. Mm hmm. Yeah. And so you start, you get this weird mixture of this sort of very individual personal self interest and human beings are wonderfully gifted with the power of rationalization. I mean, we can take anything that we have done, anything that we

have said, anything that anybody else close to us has said or done, and take that raw material and turn it into a story where we are still the hero and other people are still the villain, and have it makes and just fit it right into our existing worldview, it is something that human beings can absolutely do. As you reference to, the easiest and most obvious comparison that we're talking about right now is what happened on January 6th versus the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer, which is instantly where many conservatives and many Republicans went feeling, as I said, there's just this mutual resentment and mutual persecution complex that is absolutely infected the United States of America at the moment, where it is impossible

to look at what happened on January 6th for a conservative or for a Republican and not say, why are these hypocritical Democrats so up in arms about some people taking selfies in the Capitol when they just cheered on mobs of people burning down America for three straight months? The hypocrisy is beyond comprehension. I hate these people with the heat of a thousand suns. They want to impeach Trump. They want to kick Cruz out.

They want to purge all these people from Twitter and from social media. I cannot believe how hypocritical this all is. But as you said, there are many, many profound differences between Black Lives Matter and what happened on January 6th, but more germane to what we're talking about right now is how quickly their minds shifted and how quickly their rhetoric shifted from actually confronting what happened on January 6th to re-litigating what happened last summer. They don't want to talk about what happened on January 6th because it's very bad for Republicans and it's very bad for conservatives. So't want to talk about what happened on January 6 because it's very

bad for Republicans and it's very bad for conservatives. So they want to keep the conversation on what happened over the summer because that they feel is bad for Democrats and bad for liberals. And so the conversation that we're having right now is like, you know, it continues to be persecution complex leading to a prosecutorial mentality aimed at Democrats and liberals over what happened during Black Lives Matter rather than actually confronting what happened just now, right now in front of everybody. And that too is a part of this system of dodging responsibility and not facing the things that are actually happening right in front of us and always making it the other side's fault

that anything has gone bad or wrong. When this is where I think also the sort of intellectual rigor and and and sort of self-discipline and accountability of the philosophy like stoicism, but really any religious code or any set of values is so important because what about ism is a plague on the mind and the spirit of a human being? You know, like I've joked about this, like, if I do something wrong, and my wife says, Ryan, don't do that. I don't like that.

I don't get to just bring up a bunch of other irrelevant shit that I don't like that she does. Like, that's a nice recipe for a toxic relationship that immediately is going to fall apart because no one ever has to be accountable for themselves and you can't have a discussion about what is right there in front of you. And so the fact that the other side is doing it is irrelevant. The fact that when the other side does stuff, they bring up how you do stuff is irrelevant. You have to have the intellectual and intestinal fortitude

to deal with the facts in front of you, regardless of what anyone else is doing. And take your lumps as they need to be taken. And I think that there are actually, personally, I think that there are many more people that probably ought to resign from office for having done so much since the election to build up and gin up. Not even just like the people who were really organizing what happened on January the 6th,

the final batch of ringleaders. But the rhetoric over the past two months has been apocalyptic about the consequences of Joe Biden becoming president of the United States, the consequences of Democrats potentially taking control of the Senate. They built it up into such, like it would be Armageddon. And this is what they're pumping out there. This is what they're feeding their voters. And it became a feedback loop. But there is a degree to which many, many people out there should probably take a good,

hard look at themselves and say, what am I actually a part of? What am I actually helping to promote here? What was my role in all of this? And should I take responsibility for my role in all of this? And my pessimism about what's happening in the United States right now comes from a place of not really believing these people have it in them to do that. And that the crop of leaders that we are currently

saddled with by our own choosing, because obviously, we still do have democracy. And these are still the people that are being elected to serve as our political leaders. The introspection and the desire to take responsibility is pretty much nowhere to be found. I wouldn't even know where to start looking for such a rare and extinct animal in the halls of government at the moment.

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now on Wondery Plus. And after you listen to American Scandal, go deeper and get more to the story with Wondery's other top history podcasts, including American History Tellers, Legacy, and even the Royals. The Stoics talk about, you know, sort of finding inspiration in your heroes, right? The exemplars, the people from the past who did, you know, sort of embody the traits that you want to embody or you need people to embody today. And one of the heroes of, he's a minor character in your book, but he's sort of become a hero to me having talked to you about him already. And then I

did a chapter on him and lies of the stoics. But but maybe tell the story of Rutilius Rufus real briefly, because I think, you know, there, there is this, there is this theme as bad as it's getting in Roman as bad it would get after the rise of Julius Caesar and after, there was always amidst the dregs of Romulus, as Cicero would say, some heroes, some bright spots. Well, if you want me to tell the story of Rutilius Rufus, you are out of luck because he is a minor character at the end of The Storm Before the Storm.

And I do not have his brief little bio sketch in front of me to remind me exactly what it is that I need to be saying about him at the moment, which he would be a good person to think about, because I mean, what you have there is someone who is indicted by the political corruption of his time, wrongly brought up on charges and and sort of insists on, hey, I'm going to be an honest man, despite all of the norm breaking around me.

And I do think that was common. Oh, right. He takes the exile and thumbs his nose at him on the way out the door. Right. That's right. That's right. There we go.

OK. And look, I think Cato and Cicero are two examples too. Everyone else is cheating in their elections, right? All the elections are bought and rigged at this time. And these two men say, I'm not gonna play the game that way. I'm gonna try to win honestly. And so there are people who say,

I'm not gonna be infected by what's happening. Yeah, but of course, Cato the younger, he spread his bribes around too when it actually came down to, you know, when it was, you know, if it's this or Caesar, you know, he too made his choices there at the end. And they all did, because as he said, you know, at a certain point from a game theory standpoint, if you have one side that is behaving and doing anything they want to

do like in the in the fall, the Republican context, Julius Caesar did not feel bound by any rules at all. Right? He seemed to have found all of that those old norms and rules, sort of so quaint, and so archaic. Of course, I'm going to bribe voters to vote for me. I want to win the election. You'd be a fool not to do this. Why wouldn't I do it?

And so the problem then becomes if one side is doing it, to try to not do it, you're really mostly setting yourself up to lose. One of the examples that's really easy to use, because everybody knows it, is what happens to the Washington generals every time they play the Harlem Globetrotters. They get their asses kicked because the Harlem Globetrotters do whatever they want and the Washington generals are out there playing by the rules. They're not traveling, they're making sure they dribble all the time, They don't go out of bounds. They don't pull the ref's pants down and then

just run up and do a slam dunk. And that's the problem. If you're going to actually have a sporting contest in that way, or you're actually going to try to win a sporting contest, which is what politics can be considered in certain ways, you you're actually going to try to win a sporting contest, which is what politics can be considered in certain ways. You have to be playing by the same set of rules. And if one side is going to chuck the rules overboard, then you are saying to yourself, either I sacrifice my principles, the things that I care about, and take the hit, or I don't. And so what I so what I mean when I say we need to self

police ourselves is that what you need to have happen is not the Washington generals decide that because the Harlem Globetrotters are flagrantly cheating, I mean, so flagrly. It's amazing the refs never catch it. But it's not about encouraging the Washington generals to stop playing by the rules. It's about encouraging the Globetrotters to play by the rules. And that's where it needs to come from. Now, obviously, that would make for crappy entertainment.

And nobody wants that to actually happen in fun exhibition basketball. But in terms of politics, that's where these things need to happen. And what you're talking about finding the honorable people who are willing to take their personal lumps and lose and accept the loss, that has to come from the people who have violated the rules and have violated the norms and have tossed them overboard. Because right now, the fear is not necessarily.

Because when I say we're going to see something like this in the future, I don't mean the Republican Party is uniquely on some dark path. Which I mean, I do think the Republican Party is on a uniquely dark path at the moment. But not the other side can rationalize to that's exactly what I'm saying is that when we get when's the next time it's going to happen? Is it going to be Democrats? Well, maybe, you know, and I've talked about this on social media. And

I, you know, everything is happening so fast that it's really hard to articulate everything that's going on. But there is a scenario where, okay, let's like, let's just run through this for a second. Let's say that on election day, Trump was very clearly losing the election. And then let's say, let's make up some crazy hypothetical, not like this would ever happen. But the president starts calling various secretaries of state and encouraging them to find votes however they can in order to, let's just say in Georgia, to turn the election that's going against him. Let's say that instead of saying no to the president as the secretary of state of Georgia

did because that all happened, we just pretend like Donald Trump didn't spend two months trying to steal this election. It's insane. But let's say he says yes, and then we got up one day and Georgia and Pennsylvania have suddenly found a bunch of votes, and now Trump has won the election. And what's the response of Democrats going to be to this and liberals to this who believe that Donald Trump is so fundamentally dishonest? Let's say we have evidence that he did this. We get the same phone call.

We get all the evidence that Donald Trump has actually successfully stolen the election. And now we're in sort of an alternate timeline where that certification process that's going to happen on January the 6th is a fraudulent certification of Donald Trump's fraudulent Re-election right so now who's out in front of the Capitol? It's a bunch of Democrats. It's a bunch of liberals. It's a bunch of leftists, right? They are the ones who are screaming and braying and Saying, you know, hey we have at all costs, we have to stop this because this is a fraudulent election.

I think that that is very, that is a very plausible scenario. Like everything I just outlined could have just, it could have happened so easily because Donald Trump did try to steal the election. He did try to find votes that didn't exist. Liberals and Democrats are so pissed at him already. And he was already he was already signaling many, many times that he was going to try to steal the election. He spent two months trying to steal the election. So what then is the difference between those two things? Would I be sitting here and encouraging protesters to storm the Capitol because this is the last gasp of American democracy.

If you don't overturn this, you know what, man? I don't know what I would say at that point because I don't know as we're talking right now where we're at politically, is it inherently bad to just charge into the Capitol and turn over and try to overturn the vote. What if we know for a stone cold fact that Donald Trump stole the election? What if it was actually proven beyond all shadow of a doubt? What do you do in that situation? And I can't answer that question because it never actually happened.

But I will say this about it is that one of the huge differences between that scenario that I just outlined, and what actually happened is that those people who charged in the Capitol did so fraudulently based on lies, not to secure American democracy, but to overturn it. But perhaps many of them or some of them, oh, they all believed it. Oh, they Oh, of course they right. I absolutely 100% believe that they believed it. But, you know, you know, and I know that there is something called empirical truth. And as and as much as it becomes a

very sort of lazy, cynical thing to say, which is, oh, well, perception is reality. Or we live in this digital world where people are allowed to choose their own realities and live in their own realities. And their belief that Donald Trump had the election stolen from him is equally valid to my, let's say, my Mike Duncan's belief that the election was not stolen, that Biden won the election, right? That's my belief. The people who stormed the Capitol had the belief that Joe Biden did not win the election. And some people will try to tell you that those two beliefs are equally valid because they're both earnestly believed. The problem is that one of them is actually empirically true and the other one is not. That's where this other virtue of wisdom comes in.

The ability to, I saw this meme the other day, it was like, what good is my college education? It's like not falling for a fake coup. To be able to discern fact from fiction is a skill that not everyone has. And I think when you want to look at the collapse of norms in Rome or today, it's probably rooted in the fact that, I mean, even I think some of the politicians we're talking about, we're not cravenly manipulating the masses, but we're themselves the manipulated masses.

Right, because I mean, that's the thing is like so I think that Ted Cruz, for example, knew that he was cynically manipulating people. I think that's really clear. He's a smart guy. He knows exactly what's going on. Now the question is, like, what about Trump? Because that dude's brain is pickled. And that dude's brain has been pickled by watching way too much TV and reading, you know, reading propaganda

that is fed to him either over the TV or on the internet, that it is impossible to understand whether or not he and I don't think I don't think it matters to him, right? Like he's a pure bullshit artist in the sense that he doesn't care what's true or not true. He is a liar, but he doesn't care, mostly. So does he actually believe that he won this election and that it was stolen from him? Is his narcissism so powerful? Is his delusional feedback loop that he lives in where he just watches Fox and Friends and tweets about it? What does he actually believe?

What was going through Nero's mind? Was Nero a Machiavellian murderer of his enemies or did he delude himself into thinking that this was the rational response to real threats? And I think Seneca talks about this in his plays, he's never sure talks about it overtly, but he goes empty fears earns one real fears, it creates your delusions in your insanity. It also contributes to the feedback loop that we're talking about. Yeah. And this is, this is actually something that happens a lot in, in all the work that I do on revolutions, which is most of the leaders that I'm talking about, I'm talking

about them because they get hit by a revolution, whether it's Tsar Nicholas or Louis XVI or Charles X. These people were living in delusional bubbles, right? And they were protected from, and I actually just said this about Nicholas, Tsar Nicholas, that he was living in a reality only slightly less manufactured than the Truman Show. He didn't know what was happening beyond the walls of the palace because there was an information bubble that he was trapped in. And for Trump, it's not like courtiers are, I mean, though he was protected. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, he was protected in exactly the same way that

they used to coddle the Habsburg rulers, right? Who wind up getting overthrown because they're know, they're printing out the good news for him and stuff. And so this guy has been living in a narcissistic reality bubble that is entirely possible that he believes that he won that last election by 20 million votes and that, you know, that it actually was stolen from him. But again, you go back to it, there is and I actually do believe this as a matter of philosophy that not all reality is strictly plastic and plastic in a way that what your

mind impresses upon it is as equally true as what somebody else impresses on their plastic reality in terms of what can be manipulated and what is not. I think that's true. But I think that people just out in the discourse do lose track of that. And they do say, well, they believed it. So it's the same. But it's not the same. Because it was lies.

It was disinformation. It was misinformation. Those people believed a delusional fantasy that was not true. And it drove them to violently attack the legal transfer of power. Cop got killed. You know, people died at because of what just happened. It's not and so it's not the same as saying, you know, I don't think that Trump won the election, which I don't for the record. I don't think Trump won the election. No, no, I think you're totally right. And you sort of but you get the you get it does start to make sense.

The dilemma you're talking about, OK, there is an illegal seizing of power. And this is a dilemma that the Stokes go through. Right. So so at the end of Julius Caesar's reign, short life, then there's the Second Civil War, and then Octavian becomes emperor. And now all these Stoics, all these students and peers and descendants of Cato are forced to reckon

with the new reality, right? Athena Doris and Arius become the advisors to Octavian. Seneca, you know, by the time he comes around and works under Nero, this dude has seen, this guy has seen five emperors, you know, the Republican days of Cato and Cicero are a distant memory and they have to adapt themselves to the environment they're in. So it's, you know, it's sort of what is the right thing? And then what's the reality of the moment you're in? These are all timeless, but very timely questions.

Yeah. And then I was reading, I'm reading this book on historiography at the moment and it was going through some of the... We're talking about... The book's talking about Polybius and this Collingwood in case anybody cares, but he was talking about Tacitus. And Tacitus' whole dilemma and one of the things that he was trying to convey to his

readers is how do you live in what is a fundamentally rotten system? Like he was writing from the perspective of the defeated sanitorial class, right? The people who had essentially lost those civil wars 150 years earlier. And yeah, I mean, he's writing for the Flavians, you know, a bit and he's, he's especially hard on the Julie O'Claudians to, you know, sort of, because it, because it sounds good for the Flavians. But how, how does one live inside of a fundamentally rotten system? And, you know, I was reading that and I was like, God, is that what I'm going to be doing with the rest of my life? Am I, you know, is it tacit is, is this tacit is time? Is it, you know, because I do have a hard time not being pessimistic about the course that we're on. Because I really don't see people

making the kind of corrections that need to be made. And I feel the same way about this that you know, I feel about that I felt about, let's say, climate change 20 years ago. When I was in university back in the late 90s and early 2000s, global warming and climate change was a big thing and everybody was beating the drum saying, like, we need to do something now. We need to do something now. And I can remember having conversations with people in 2003 and 2004, just being like, you know,

I don't see anything happening at the level of politics and industry that needs to happen right now to actually head this off. It's coming. I just don't think anybody... It's clearly nobody's doing anything to head this off. And now 20 years later, it's all happened. Climate change is here. It's a done deal. We're not.

We can manage it. We can try to work with it, or work around it, or mitigate it. But we're not. We didn't turn it back. We didn't avoid anything. And I feel the same feelings that I felt back then about the course of politics that we're on. I still don't see anywhere the political or moral will

to actually address what's going on head on because we're still too busy trying to blame each other for what's gone wrong. You and I are talking on Martin Luther King Day. The only thing that's given me hope recently is I just went through Taylor Branch's epic series on Martin Luther King, and really getting a sense of how horrendously awful it was. You know, I sort of had the high level understanding of the civil rights movement, but just the amount of extra political

violence and the destruction of norms and the there were you could murder someone and then you'd get off by a jury trial, you know, fake jury trial. And that was also how they could circumvent federal laws about elections. And these people controlled states with populations of millions of people. And when you look at where we were to where we are, it does make me think that it is possible. It just requires an incredible amount of will and luck and leadership. And I think at the core of it, and this goes to me, what your book is fundamentally about

and where we're struggling today as a society, what Martin Luther King did that very few leaders have done since, before or since, is he tried to get everyone on the same page about a set of ideal. He pointed us back to the Constitution and back to the Declaration of Independence and back to the founding myth. And that is partly what reestablished some of the norms that you and

I are talking about sorely missing today. And that's what Lincoln did. That's what Cato, I think, tried to do and failed to do. But you have to go back to your, is it the Moss Morium? You have to go back to the old ways, root it and then and then use that to justify a new way of being. Yeah, yeah, I think that that's all true. And also, I mean, since we're talking about it from that angle, like, let's be clear, too, is that like I so I wrote this book about the Roman Republic, you know, say 2000 years ago, and you know, their political system was different that their, their social system

was different from our social system. And a lot of what we're seeing happen right now, you know, when people talk about how, you know, America has never experienced political violence, you know, you would have to be pretty ignorant of American history. But the great yards still have people who would disagree. Yeah. Yeah, there's been a lot of political violence in American history.

Most of it top down. Most of it racially motivated. Not all of it racially motivated because, you know, the entire history of American labor is replete with murders and bombings on both sides. So yes, the fact of the violence is not actually unique in American history. But where are we going to find the will and the way to start drawing back from where we have taken ourselves? And I don't know where we find that will and that way because a lot because everything that you

just talked about with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, there are a lot of people who will tell you that what we're seeing right now is the end of second reconstruction. And second reconstruction really starts with the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s and then proceeded through to, let's say, the election of Barack Obama and is now being violently closed in the same way that we had after the first civil war. We may be calling it at some point in the near distant future, that that that first reconstruction was a period that existed and was then later closed. And I think that there is something to the idea that we've lived through second reconstruction and that we are seeing an attempt to close second reconstruction.

So that so we have so this is all to say that we can use Roman history to guide us because the Romans do lace us with a certain universal mode of thinking about things because of how much our culture directly or indirectly is related to Roman tradition and Roman history. Like we are the heirs of Rome, whether we like it or not. And so their history does actually matter to us. They're not Martians. They're not from another planet. The Romans are us and we are the Romans. But, you know, this all is taking place not in the context of the Roman Republic, but in the context of the United States through the 19th century and the 20th century and now the 21st century.

So it is always important to keep that in mind as we go forward. Well, I was trying to end on a hopeful note. And you twisted it back. Oh, I did. I did. I completely twisted back. No, let's end it on a hopeful note.

The decline and fall of Rome happened over hundreds of years. It did. It happened over over. oh, here we go. This is a good one. I have a great deal of confidence in the United States military. I think that there is a code of professionalism. And centrally, the pay stubs are centrally distributed

rather than by an individual general. Because I mean, one of the things that actually led to Marius and Sulla and those civil wars is that those guys, their pay and their prosperity was based entirely on how successful their general was. Right? And the United States doesn't, we don't have that same system and we don't have that same problem. We have a, we have a military apparatus that is far more based off of the post civil war Augustin model, which involves a great deal of stability and neutrality, rather than the personal armies

that were allowed to be revved up by Marius and Sella. So we don't, I don't see personal armies Revda by Marius and Sela. So we don't we I don't see personal armies In the in the near future so that can it cannot be helpful. It's not much Ray of sunshine, I love the book. I can't wait for the next one. Let's talk about that when it comes out. Okay, thanks You're the best man comes out. Okay, thanks. You're the best man. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. If you like The Daily Stoic and thanks for listening, you can listen early and ad free

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