Tag Archives: ancient-history

President Trump – a historical perspective

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Democrat historians outnumber Republican historians by somewhere between 8 to 1 and 19 to 1. The disparity is even worse than those ratios suggest, since many of the Democrat historians are not just Democrats, but hard-left ones, while virtually none of the few Republican historians are hard-right.

There’s a name for hard-left historians. They’re called “tenured professors” and we pay their salaries and give them summers off. There’s also a name for hard-right historians. They’re called “Uber drivers” and we pay their salaries, too, but they don’t get their summers off.

It’s no surprise that historians have not looked at Donald Trump in a historical context. They’re too busy simply bashing him as a “threat to democracy” along with whatever epithet du jour is dished out by the pseudo-academic establishment in concert with the Democratic National Committee.  

Admittedly, there are still one or two Republican historians in existence. Not all are Uber drivers. But they, too, have not done much to contextualize Donald Trump. They’re instead simply doing the polar opposite of what the army of leftist historians are doing. They’re cheerleading the Trump Presidency. You know who you are.

When a person is a history professor on the left, or less often on the right, maybe the lure of public grants and private clicks is just too strong to actually profess some history.

In any event, since the historians on both sides are busy practicing politics, your undersigned political junky will practice a little history. Someone has to.

Let’s start small. We could compare Trump to FDR, who bullied the Supreme Court into approving his welfare state even though it plainly ran afoul of the Constitution. He succeeded by threatening to expand the number of Supreme Court Justices to whatever number was necessary and packing it with his toadies.

Or we could compare Trump to the other Roosevelt – the one known as Teddy – because Teddy was a Rough Rider and, well, Trump is a rough rider.

Or we could compare Trump to Lincoln, who suspended habeas corpus (the Constitutional right of a prisoner to contest illegal imprisonment) and left it suspended even after the Supreme Court said the suspension was unconstitutional. (The matter was mooted only when Congress later passed legislation to ratify Lincoln’s suspension retroactively.)

Or we could compare Trump and his Greenlandic hegemony with Jefferson who doubled the size of the young nation by purchasing the Louisiana Territory without Congressional authorization.

Let’s go back a bit further.

Alexander the Great was the son of a Macedonian king who was publicly assassinated when Alexander was only 20. There’s disagreement about whether Alexander was behind the plot but, in view of his subsequent brutality and ambition, there’s no disagreement that such a plot was certainly within his character.

Alexander took the throne and immediately conquered much of the known world at a tender age when much of today’s youth is still on their parents’ health care insurance. He subjugated Athens. He put Persia out of business for about 2,400 years (until Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump had to perform another smack-down last summer).

He founded a city on the coast of Egypt that became one of the great cities of the age. He had the unmitigated self-centeredness to name it after himself, Alexandria. The towering lighthouse he commissioned for the Alexandria coast was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and stood for a thousand years.

Alexander himself stood for fewer than 33 years and was in power for only 12. But which do people remember, Alexander or the lighthouse?  

(Since we’re on the topic of namesake cities, I can imagine TrumpopolisTM as a city. Send royalty checks for that name, Mr. President, to TheAspenBeat.)

Historians who are still practicing history say Alexander was a thug. He burned down Persepolis, the great Persian city in present-day Iran. He enslaved hundreds of thousands. He was gay (as were many ancient Greeks on occasion) but evidently not happy.

Alexander’s empire didn’t last, but the Greek civilization did. He was a despot, not a democrat, but his worldwide influence permanently chiseled Greek culture into the Roman and Judaic worlds, and ultimately into our own. Alexander wasn’t good, but he was certainly great.

On to another despot, Julius Caesar. Forget about Greenland, this guy invaded France. Then he went home and declared himself dictator. Desperate times call for desperate measures which call for desperate men.

It didn’t end well for Caesar, but it did end well for Rome. The ensuing empire ruled the known world for the next 500 years, establishing the “Pax Romana” that was the most peaceful time in ancient history.

We’ve named things after Julius Caesar – a casino, a surgical procedure, a month in the calendar, and a salad. No battleships, yet.

Then there was Napoleon Bonaparte. The Corsican seized power in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution where a succession of bloodthirsty mobs had made ritual machine-beheading into a spectator sport. It was something like being canceled, but more so.

Napoleon’s reach exceeded his grasp, especially in the Russian winter where half his army was frozen, starved or shot.  

For that, Letitia James or some such person got Napoleon exiled. He came back for one last, brief round of glory, but met his Waterloo in 1815. He was then exiled again, and died on a remote island in the South Atlantic.

Like Alexander and Caesar before him, Napoleon wasn’t good but he was great.

America shows some parallels to the waning days of ancient Greece, the deteriorating Republic of Rome preceding the grandeur of the Empire, and post-Revolution France.

By some objective measures, our best days are behind us. National debt is far higher than ever before. Student achievement has plummeted.

A large portion of the population embraces socialism. Experiments over the years have proven socialism to be destructive and divisive, but the adherents are blissfully ignorant of those experiments, as are their teachers.

The basic competence of America’s governing elite is abysmal. Immigrants are allowed to defraud the people out of billions on the grounds that it would be racist to stop them. Trillions were spent on virtue-signaling in the guise of climate-change abatement.

For decades, the border was wide open – the government was even sending airplanes to pick up migrants for the express purpose of illegally plopping them into the country. They get commercial drivers’ licenses, welfare, college scholarships and voting rights, no questions asked.

Public discourse has deteriorated to yard signs, cable TV shouting matches, and internet drive-by commentary.

The democratic republic established by our Founders is nor equipped for this mob rule any better than post-monarchy France was.

Enter Donald Trump. He is not a good man and never will be, but he may prove to be a great man. As in the case of other historical figures, consider his timing, circumstances and luck – and sheer audacity.

What that greatness might mean for America will be revealed by history. But probably not by historians.

The West will be subsumed by China – or conquered by Islam

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Note to readers: This is the first of a three-part series. I’ve given this first installment the modest title “The Rise of Western Civilization.”

Western Civilization and its political systems are rooted in the Greek culture of about 2,500 years ago. Athens was famously a “democracy” (a Greek word) in its heyday, though only free men born of two Athenian parents were allowed to vote.

Most other Greek city-states, though not democracies, used political systems that recognized a role for the people and had a basic concept of individual rights and ethics.

Greek culture was similar to our own in other ways as well. The Greeks loved live entertainment. Actors, readers, musicians, singers and elaborate physical sets presented multimedia extravaganzas.

This passion for engagement extended to debating issues of the day, not unlike our online debates. They had a concept that speech was not exactly free, but somewhat protected. The death of Socrates for corrupting the youth with his orations might be an exception proving the rule.

Greek gods were depicted as having human forms. This was unusual for the time. In Egypt and Crete, for example, their gods were typically animals or part-animal/part-human. 

What defined Greek geopolitics were their long wars with the Persians. Hundreds of rival Greek city-states sometimes came together for alliances against Persia. Nothing establishes an identity for a group quite as well as a common adversary who threatens to enslave or exterminate them.

Those Persians were barbarians in both the Greek sense and the modern sense. In Greek, the word “barbaros” merely means “foreigners.” The Persians were certainly foreigners. They came from what is now Iran, which is across the Aegean Sea and nearly 2,000 miles from Athens.

In the modern sense, too, the Persians were barbarians. They subjected their defeated foes to a degree of cruelty and punishment that generally exceeded what the Greeks meted out.

In that regard, however, it should be mentioned that the first rule of history is not that it is written by the winners. The first rule is that it is written by the writers. Greek writing was sufficiently advanced to record history, while Persian writing was comparatively primitive. We thus have no Persian accounts of the Persian wars, only the Greek accounts.

The Greeks’ recordation of the Persian wars was only a small part of their writings. Better known today are their epic poems embodying much of their culture and beliefs, primarily the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The epic poems, originally oral traditions but reduced to writing early in Greek culture, are still considered some of the best literature in Western Civilization. They’ve influenced Western thought for over two millennia.

The Greeks were never conquered and exterminated. Rather, they were subsumed into the Roman empire.

Technologically, the Romans far surpassed the Greeks. In architecture and engineering, they invented the arch and its three-dimensional equivalent, the dome, which allow for loads to be suspended over a void using materials that are high in compressive strength but low in tensile strength, such as stone. They improved concrete with the use of aggregates and ash to build huge structures that still survive and in some cases are still used such as the Roman Pantheon. Their advances in metallurgy were applied effectively in weaponry, building materials, coins and tools.

They nearly conquered the world – or at least the part they could reach, from England to the Middle East.

When it came to art, however, the Romans never quite overcame their inferiority complex. They adopted much of Greek art, sometimes by slavishly copying it. Roman reproductions of Greek statues were common.

To some degree, the Romans adopted Greek ideas of government, as well. Rome never adopted the direct democracy of Athens but did use the representative democracy of a republic.

Yes, both the Greeks and Romans used slaves, but so did practically every other society in the ancient world, including the societies from which the Greeks and Romans sourced their slaves.

Even after the Roman republic gave way to an empire after Julius Caesar, the Romans retained ideas of individual rights and ethics inherited largely from the Greeks.

In Roman culture, Greek culture thus lived on.

The Romans, like the Greeks, were never really conquered and exterminated. Their culture and language were instead assimilated into the rest of Europe.

The Enlightenment, the Renaissance, the scientific method, and Western notions of ethics and individual rights are all rooted in Roman culture, which is, in turn, rooted in Greek culture.

In America in particular, this was very conscious. Just glance at the neoclassical architecture of the government buildings of Washington, D.C.

Let’s pause. What you’ve just read used to be common knowledge taught in high schools throughout America. You’re probably well aware of it all. Forgive me for boring you with my amateur synopsis.

But I suspect it’s no longer taught to youngsters. In today’s curriculum, Maya Angelou has replaced Homer, Richard Pryor has replaced Ovid, and climate change zealots have replaced Aristotle.

So, humor me – and yourselves. Inflict this synopsis onto some young unsuspecting victim of today’s bastardized school curriculum. Be a hit at Christmas dinner with a dramatic reading!

Note to readers: Watch for the second in this three-part series in a few days, called “The Fall of Western Civilization.”