We can trace so many of our institutions back to ancient Rome. In Rome, they had Senators and a Senate which stood on Capitoline Hill. Here in America, all these thousands of years later, we have Senators and a Senate that conducts business in The Capitol which sits at the center of the Capitol Hill. **There was also another institution in Rome’s day, one that loomed large in public life, that has stayed with us: The mob. The rabble. The riotous mass.
The insurrectionists that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, 2021–smearing the temple of democracy with feces and blood, wearing clothes that celebrated the Holocaust, waving the Confederate flag as they rushed to thwart the peaceful transfer of power–they were not an aberration. They weren’t an anomaly in the history of democracy. No, they were part of a tragic tradition that the Stoics have been warning about for centuries.
As Mike Duncan writes in his riveting book The Storm Before the Storm (and talks about in our podcast episode together), many events in the decades prior contributed to the fall of the Roman republic. There was the crisis of 133 BC over a land redistribution bill, which escalated into an armed attack and the first political murder in the republic’s history. In 100 BC, when it became clear that the praetor Glaucia was going to lose an election for consulship, his supporters stormed Capitoline Hill, murdered the man who won the consular vote, and barricaded themselves inside its chambers. Then in the 80s BC, troops formed factions and Rome’s first civil war broke out.
To the Romans, the mob symbolized the breakdown of their political system. Political violence was something to be abhorred, to be feared, never to be tolerated. Cicero’s greatest moment as a statesman came when he stared down the Catiline Conspiracy (we have a great podcast episode about this with Josiah Osgood). Just as 1800 years later, two of George Washington’s greatest moments were when he nipped the Newburgh Conspiracy in the bud and then put down Shays’ Rebellion. Lincoln would give one of his best speeches before the Civil War, warning against the rise of the “mobocratic spirit” which had infected both the South and the North alike. It should have been no surprise, at least to anyone paying attention, that Lincoln had no tolerance for the slave owners who, having lost a legitimate election, attempted to overthrow the U.S. government by force and violence.
Chryssipus, an early Stoic, said that the whole point of being a philosopher was to separate yourself from the mob. It was to be above chaos and destruction, to both appeal to and demonstrate, as Lincoln said, the better angels of our rational and civic nature. Cato worshiped, and even died protecting, the so-called mos maiorum, the traditions and the institutions of the Republic. The very same that were fractured in the decades leading up to Julius Caesar’s rise, and whose brittleness and precariousness were so easily exploited as the republic crumbled and tumbled into empire.
Today, all of us are threatened by this mob. Just weeks ago, more than two dozen people in Germany were arrested for plotting to storm the Reichstag (Germany’s parliament building) and seize power from what they deemed to be an illegitimate government. Much of the language they used to explain their motivation echoed directly the delusional, conspiratorial pronouncements of the seditious mob who perpetrated the events that unfolded in this country two years ago to this day.
The events of January 6, 2021 were not kabuki. They were not the simple exercise of free speech that got out of hand. They were not an aberration. They were not an abstraction. They were very real and they cannot be dismissed with ‘whataboutism’ or conspiracy theories.
Here’s one way to make them real if you have yet to accept the gravity of what occurred that day: One former Daily Stoic podcast guest, Congressman and former Marine Michael Gallager, was trapped in his office when the mob of insurrectionists broke through the barricades. The threat was real enough, conflict was imminent enough, that he prepared to use his ceremonial Marine sword to defend his staff. He had broadcast live on social media a plea to the then-president of the United States, Donald Trump, to call the goons off. As we know, the former-president declined to do so for hours, because he hoped desperately, pathetically, that the mob might win and restore him to power.
Those old ways that Cato fought for, the ones that ground us in a set of common laws and shared values, must remain sacred always and everywhere. The peaceful transition of political power is, today, both the most important of those old ways and the most under threat by the mob and by demagogues. As philosophers and citizens and politicians, it is our job to stand for the former and beat back the latter. As citizens, as decent human beings, as lovers of justice, we cannot tolerate, rationalize, excuse or accept any form of political violence. We cannot cater to or join with the mob. And anyone that violates this or any of its related principles deserves the most ancient of civil punishments—not cancellation, but permanent exile.
