As you may already know, there’s been a social media trend of saying what your Roman Empire is, because apparently someone said that most guys think about the Roman Empire at least once a day.
Now, I’m a history buff, and love me some Roman Empire, but I had to laugh when I heard about it because I truly don’t think I think of the Roman Empire all that often.
To be sure, there are absolutely huge lessons for us to learn from it though and apply to our current times, particularly as they relate to internal decline, overextension of the military, and the resulting fall of the empire.
I WAS thinking about it recently though when world events made me think about the term “Pax Romana”, so I decided to re-read about it and make it the subject of my March blog post because, well, the Ides of March and all that Et Tu Brute stuff.
When I was reading about the Pax Romana the following passage really struck me as so relevant to our modern American situation of perpetual hyperpartisan division….
“Augustus faced a problem making peace an acceptable mode of life for the Romans, who had been at war with one power or another continuously for 200 years. Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist. Augustus’ challenge was to persuade Romans that the prosperity they could achieve in the absence of warfare was better for the Empire than the potential wealth and honor acquired when fighting a risky war.”
Our political parties have been at war with each other for over two centuries. Do we Americans even know truly what peace between political parties even looks like?
Sure there have been fleeting and temporary moments of bipartisan cooperation over the years, but usually it has been because of an external threat or a problem so urgent and large that both parties found it more beneficial to work together in the short term than to just wait for the next election and hope they won more offices than the other party.
The reason those moments have been so fleeting and temporary is because our system of government and elections was designed to be adversarial instead of collaborative. Don’t blame The Founders though, they did the best they could with what they knew at the time and they truly did invent a better mouse trap for their time.
But modern times and modern problems demand modern solutions.
We know what the solution is….re-design our system of government and elections to encourage and incentivize parties, candidates, and branches of government to work together to solve problems and to do so proactively (when the problems are smaller and solutions less costly).
We know what that re-design looks like…nonpartisan reforms like ranked choice voting, open primaries, campaign finance reform, etc.
We know how to get that re-design implemented….citizen ballot initiatives in the 20+ states that allow them, and to get the other states’ legislatures to pass similar measures, as well as the US Congress.
We know that simple sentence above is an almost impossibility given how entrenched our current system is and how profitable it is for those in it, even when they themselves know it is broken.
What we don’t know is who will be our Octavian (Caesar Augustus) to rise up and have the ability and interest to make these deep and much needed changes to how our country operates?
And an even bigger question, should we even be waiting for a single savior to come along while DC flounders and the peoples’ problems suffer from neglect?
I would argue that this Ides of March, maybe the lesson from the soothsayer is to stop putting our hopes in single individuals, and instead each of us needs to do our part to rescue our future so that for the next 250 years America won’t continue to repeat the mistakes of the last 250 years.
A true Pax Americana is possible, both home and abroad, will you do your part?
Perry Waag 