Around 10,000 years ago, our ancestors discovered farming. Almost immediately, they discovered something else, too: That it is easier to plunder somebody else’s harvest than to spend all year tending your own crops. If you want the best ratio of effort to reward, though, you don’t just go marauding; you regularize your plunder through tithes, tolls and taxes. Thus was civilization born in tyranny.
Oligarchy and oppression, caste and exploitation, slavery and serfdom: These have been the lot of our species through recorded time. The slave empires mentioned in the Old Testament were not so different, politically, from a mediaeval European monarchy or, come to that, a modern African kleptocracy. The pattern is the same: A gang of people get into power, rig the rules so that they and their children will enjoy hereditary privilege and then systematically loot the territory under their control.
Then, between three and four centuries ago, a revolution occurred – and it occurred largely in the language in which you are reading these words. People hit on the notion that the law ought to be something more than the will of the king or the biggest guy in the tribe. They established a system where individuals could engage with each other voluntarily, rather than having their relationships mediated by birth, caste or tradition. Social organization moved, as the great Victorian jurist Sir Henry Maine put it, “from status to contract”.
The extraordinary thing, though, is not just that this breakthrough should have occurred; it’s that it should have endured. The English-speaking peoples saw a series of landmark transfers of power from state to citizen: The Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution. But, elsewhere, despotism tended to re-establish itself.
There’s a terrific new book out by Jay Nordlinger called Children of Monsters — a calm and matter-of-fact survey of the people who called Mussolini or Mao or Mobutu “Dad.” Nordlinger is too exact and measured to contrive a meta-narrative out of his varied biographies. Some of his subjects saw their fathers for what they were. Others lived in harmless, privileged, obscurity. Yet others became archetypal dictators’ sons, spoiled and sadistic: Nicu Ceausescu, Uday Hussein. Yet, as you finish the book, you can’t avoid two conclusions.
First, blood is thicker than water. Even Stalin’s descendants generally let their politics be defined by the old fiend’s. We are loyal to our ancestors as well as to our progeny, which is why nominally democratic states slip so easily into family businesses. The Duvaliers, Kims and Assads were, after their fashion, very like those Bronze Age slave emperors.
Second, constitutional government is a delicate plant. It grows organically over centuries, but can be hacked down in hours. Watch how abjectly the people’s representatives will simper as they vote away their prerogatives to a Bonaparte or a Gadhafi.
The reluctance of many Americans to have yet another Bush-Clinton contest next year is, in one sense, deeply unfair to Jeb and Hillary, who are contesting the primaries in an open and democratic way. Still, the Founders, Jefferson in particular, knew that a democratic constitution needed to be bolstered by an anti-aristocratic culture, a conscious skepticism of dynasty.
In particular, the Founders were haunted by the precedent of how the Caesars had become a ruling clan while retaining, on paper, the institutions of a free republic: The consulship, the tribunate and so on. That story is told in another terrific new book, Dynasty, by the historian Tom Holland. It’s an oddly modern narrative. Roman senators fawning on Caligula, Soviet apparatchiks demanding that a supposedly reluctant Stalin condemn some accused party member: It’s the same story over and over again.
Why hasn’t it happened in America? Partly because the Constitution was drawn up by men who had studied Tacitus and Suetonius almost as intently as Holland has, and who cleverly stacked the incentives so that leaders had to keep looking over their shoulders at the general population. Partly, too, because, habituated by centuries of English common law, Americans were genuinely outraged by anything that smacked of rule-breaking.
At least, they used to be. When I look at the reaction to some of the more obvious power-grabs by the Supreme Court, I wonder. Nothing is more depressing in contemporary politics than people’s disregard for due process when they happen to agree with the outcome. (“Who cares whether it’s a state prerogative? You got a problem with gay people?”) Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that such a mindset was the necessary precondition to autocracy. Was he wrong?
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.
