Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
Strict comparisons between contemporary events and personalities and their historical analogues are compromised by the fact that every circumstance and individual is unique. Each moment has its unrepeatable combination of characteristics that defy a breezy 1:1 comparison.
Having said this, there are benefits in comparing past patterns and tendencies in order to gain perspective regarding controversies today. One of the most valid comparisons can be made between today’s United States and Ancient Rome.
As we in the Western World descend from Rome, it is not surprising to find many details that lend themselves to close comparison. The rise and fall of its Republic matters because our Founding Fathers closely imitated Rome. We inherited many of Rome’s strengths and weaknesses. We Americans must understand what destroyed the Roman Republic if we wish to avoid succumbing to the same loss of liberty.
The rise of Rome’s Empire and Christianity happened nearly side-by-side. As the United States broadly retains a Judeo-Christian mindset, we should understand how Christianity triumphed over three hundred years of intensifying persecution to ultimately become the Imperium’s official religion, transforming the Roman World and beyond.
Indeed, we have much to learn from the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, the rise of Christianity, and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. One such insight involves trying to intuit what epoch of Roman history is most closely comparable to our own. This exercise offers perspective on how modern trends interact by seeing how analogous factors played out to the benefit or detriment of Rome’s people, society, and stability.
To me, the Presidencies of Donald Trump most fully compare with the Imperium of Septimius Severus from A.D. 193–211. If this analogy has validity, it means that we Americans have entered a new and harsher phase of history.
Like our Golden Age from 1945 through 2001, Rome’s Empire had previously reached heights of peace, prosperity, and power from Augustus’ rise after his victory at Actium in 31 B.C. through the end of the great Roman Peace with Commodus’ assassination in A.D. 192. Like us, the Romans had known such profound success for so very long that they had begun to take the comfort and stability of their lives for granted.
Septimius Severus was unusual in that he was the first North African Roman Emperor. He had Carthaginian blood. Never before and rarely since did the scions of Rome’s ancient Punic enemy become its rulers.
Severus rose to power as an Army Officer, becoming commander of Rome’s most powerful Army Group on the eastern frontier. He acquired the Empire by winning the longest and bloodiest Civil War since the founding of Rome’s Empire more than two centuries before.
Donald Trump came to his first Presidency by a route so unconventional that pundits openly mocked the very possibility that he could be elected. As a real estate tycoon, entrepreneur, and media personality, Trump is still not seen as being legitimate by elites within the permanent government, media, and academe, both within and beyond the United States.
Severus had no illusions about the Senate and People of Rome being relevant to Rome’s ongoing governance. Since Augustus’ founding of the Roman Empire in 27 B.C., Rome’s Emperors had to varying degrees behaved as if the Roman Senate still ruled. Instead, Rome was, in fact, a monarchy with republican forms.
While retaining the symbolism of the Senate and People of Rome (SPQR) on legionary standards and allowing the Senate to go through the motions of convening, Severus made certain that they would decide nothing of significance.
Donald Trump does not even pretend to be faithful to the norms of modern American Presidents, going back to William Howard Taft in 1909. He is improvisational rather than restrained, brash rather than diplomatic, calculatedly coarse rather than refined, and bold rather than dignified. He behaves more like a political street fighter than as a Head of State. It is, indeed, shocking to those who expect conventionality. But, his exuberance does clarify his priorities.
Septimius’ rule derived from the application of naked military force. This clarity improved the Empire’s ability to defend itself from the Parthian Empire in what is now Iraq, as well as from a ring of barbarians from central Britain to the Carpathian Mountains, and from the Nile River to the Moroccan Desert.
He personally led in the defeat of the Parthian Empire in the East as well as of the Picts in today’s Scotland. In Asia, Africa, and Europe, Severus expanded Rome’s borders to maximize Roman military power and overawe its enemies.
Donald Trump leads a Free World that is deep in denial about the existential threats we all share. While China reaches for global supremacy, Western elites in Europe, Canada, and America obsess over “Man-Made Climate Change” as if its predictions since the first Earth Day back in 1970 had not been proven false. While China’s allies in Russia, Iran, North Korea, and elsewhere work to undermine American power, the international Left tries to reinvent everything from private property and freedom of expression to biological sex.
Septimius’ wife, Julia Domna, also came from an unusual background; a family of Sun Priests of Emesa (Homs), Syria. She was the most influential Empress in over 150 years, involving herself and her family more fully as a royal family than had been typical in Rome. After Septimius’ death, she and other Syrian female relatives dominated Roman affairs through flawed male Emperors for nearly two decades.
Our First Lady, Melania, hails from the former Yugoslavia. She understands the genuinely exceptional freedoms and opportunities inherent to our American Republic. As such, instead of the fashionable elite contempt for America and Americans, Melania Trump loves America and supports our cultural resurgence.
The Severan dynasty managed Rome’s transition from dominion over a vast Imperial territory towards the time when Rome would come to face an existential crisis. Without its military and territorial improvements, Rome might not have withstood the doubled danger on its northern frontier as Goths supplanted Germans. More critically, it might not have endured the quintupled danger eastward as Parthia was overthrown by a new Sassanid Persian Empire.
Septimius stabilized the Roman World after the shock of the Civil War that preceded him. His reforms were seen as crass and needlessly rude by the Empire’s Patrician elite, but he and his family preserved Roman preeminence during a critical forty years when Rome’s enemies grew conspicuously stronger.
Donald Trump is trying to prepare the United States, North America, and the wider Western World for the intensification of human conflict that is probably coming. His strategic initiatives in Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Europe, the Middle-East, South Asia, and East Asia are all intended to help protect free peoples from Chinese Communist aggression in a world situation that will likely descend into a perpetual state of anarchy and violence, somewhere between
war and peace.
No, Donald Trump is not an exact copy of Septimius Severus. He is an elected President, not a military Dictator. He acts within Constitutional limits, rather than as an Absolute Monarch. Today’s American Republic is not the Roman Empire between Pax Romana and Crisis; freedom, Judeo-Christian values, industry, and technology give us many more opportunities to restore ourselves.
But the world has been darkening since at least the Terrorist Atrocities of 9/11/01. Each year, our enemies seem stronger and we seem more divided. Like Septimius Severus, Donald Trump is a rough man of action determined to acquire the national power necessary to withstand the coming storm.
