#BigIrony
Conservatives with a historical bent, have, since the 1900s, imagined that America risked a great decline. They were thinking of ancient Rome, as it slid from Republic to dictatorship. Or more accurately, of the slide from enlightened Roman dictatorship to despotic rule. Philosophical Americans have long associated their country with Greece and Rome. They imagined a bridge between these ancient “republics” and a new territory where independent men would justly rule. In the 19th century such people were optimists. By the later 20th, this had become the the realm of conservative thought, which saw darkness ahead. Decline and fall.
Elites often fear the mob. As more and more people vote, conservatives worried they’d dilute and dismiss better wisdom. There was also a nostalgic moral angle. The growing legitimacy and respect for people who aren’t heterosexual, the questioning of tradition, the empowerment of women, reminded certain moralists of ancient Rome’s slide toward hedonism. Instead of strong, ethical leaders, immoral Roman emperors dissimulated with orgies and feasts. The sex revolution and women’s liberation were harbingers of this, to some conservatives.
Religious conservatives even refer to Christianity’s role in ancient Rome. Not the getting fed to lions part, but its purported bulwark against decline. Before he took on Clinton’s sins, Kenneth Starr wrote that American ideals of liberty were rooted in the Christian revolution in ancient Rome. After persecution under various emperors grew old, mainstream Christian philosophers gained a voice. According to Starr, these are the thinkers who made liberty, specifically religious liberty “a human right belonging to all people.”
Thus decline and fall is prevented by a strong dose of religious extremism.
Tertullian was the most powerful of these early Christian Romans. Tertullian severely condemned adultery, any form of wayward sexuality. He invented the Catholic notion that a second marriage, after a divorce, is still adultery. Starr may have considered himself a Tertullian, granting America religious freedom by going after Clinton’s extramarital affairs. In a worldview where America is like Rome, Starr was a neo-optimist.
Americans who worry about their nation’s decline and fall break into camps. Some are pessimists. They want to delay dissolution’s arrival, by gerrymandering, suppressing votes, denying immigration. The religious camp, primarily evangelicals, is optimistic. Their Plan A assumes the country becomes religious, which solves everything. (Plan B is Armageddon’s stairway to heaven).
It’s said one should watch out for what one wants, because you might get it. The same goes for what one fears. Ken Starr was so scandalized by Clinton’s behavior, he ripped aside the curtains to expose Clinton’s detailed seduction. Yet 20 years later Starr was Baylor’s President, and fought to cover up sexual abuse.
Some of Bill Clinton’s House and Senate tormentors were simply hypocrites, lascivious adulterers themselves. Starr seemed more serious, a real worrier, and his route led to perdition. He also set precedents that haunt Trump and today’s Republicans. He compelled Secret Service agents to testify what they might have seen guarding Clinton. Republicans tremble to use that example to make Trump’s translator testify. Starr pushed the Supreme Court to allow a sitting President to face a civil lawsuit. That doesn’t sound so great today.
Brett Kavanaugh, Starr’s right hand man, has backpedaled furiously from the moralist position. Republicans are frankly Machiavellian; they have no compunction about attacking the other side viciously, then doing the same thing or worse. Consider budget deficits, or Presidential executive orders, which were a reason to impeach Obama. Let them be done by a Republican, and nary a peep. So it’s not hard to imagine them denying Starr’s precedent completely.
They already have, concerning Presidential sexuality. Trump’s playboy ways are egregiously apparent, and apparently don’t bother the moralists.
Still, it’s time to recognize the Republican imagination for what it is: a big irony generator. It produces the things it says we should be terrified of. Their warning of American decline and fall was real, since they now produce it.
Republicans created the emperor they warned us about: a hedonistic traitor, a narcissist who cares nothing for tradition and the law. Big Irony. Republicans believed Democrats were slouching towards infamy, with blow-jobs from interns. Trump sleeps with porn stars, pays for their silence, alternately boasts and lies about it, and does it again.
Republicans, who imagined they were protecting America from its decline and fall future, have pushed the country down. Big Irony.
True, Reagan broke the law funding the Contras, with Iranian money no less. Bush Sr. was a throwback to Eisenhower Republicans. His son’s administration tortured. Serious stuff. Not Big Irony.
Trump has taken decadence and decay to a whole new level. The President is a Roman-style despot, who lusts after his daughter, and concerns with his own power and pleasure alone. With one election, America has suddenly become a satirical version of the Roman decline feared by social conservatives, with their acquiescence.
Big, Big Irony. #BigIrony
