Vico, Rome, and the Rise of American Fascism with Julian Davis

Entitled Opinions, a radio show for those with a high tolerance for thinking.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, we come to you from KZSU today with a question.

Have you checked out the Great Seal of the United States lately?

Look, an eagle with outspread wings.

No, not a bald eagle, symbol of American freedom, but a Roman eagle, bird of the auspices, representing

Jove's divine providence.

In one of its talons, the eagle is clutching an olive branch, in the other a bundle of

arrows resembling the Roman fascis, from which comes the word fascism.

And look, a lot of words in Latin.

E pluribus unum.

Annuit ceptis, annuit ceptis, God favors our undertakings, a phrase from Virgil's Aeneid.

At the bottom, more Latin, novus ordo seculorum, a new order of the ages, another Virgilian

phrase from the fourth eclogue.

Why is the Great Seal of the United States speaking in Latin?

Why is it talking Virgil?

Is America living out a Roman destiny?

Do we need to turn to Rome's past to divine America's future?

A question for the prophet Tiresias.

One person who is looking back to Rome these days is vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.

In a recent interview, he spoke approvingly of Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing blogger and

self-proclaimed monarchist who calls for an American Caesar to take power and dismantle

the Republic.

And we know who that might be.

In the same interview, Vance declared, referring to the period preceding Caesar's dictatorship,

I quote him,

We are late Republic.

We're very clearly close to a point where the people don't have nearly as much power.

The oligarchy has seized most of it.

We are in the late Republican period.

If we're going to push back against it, we have to get pretty, pretty wild and pretty

far out there.

And go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.

What does Vance mean by getting wild?

Here's one elaboration from the same interview of 2021.

We should deconstruct the administrative state.

We should basically eliminate the administrative state.

And I'm sympathetic to that project.

But another option is that we should just seize the administrative state for our own

purposes.

I think that what Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice, fire

every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace

them with our people.

And then when the court stops you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say,

the Chief Justice has made his ruling.

Now let him enforce it.

Another elaboration Vance proposed is to go after universities, which he called very

hostile institutions, specifically the universities which control the knowledge in our society,

which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provide research that

gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.

We have to aggressively attack the universities in this country.

End quote.

I'm joined today by Julian Davis, someone who would be among the myriad under attack

if Vance's plan ever becomes a reality.

Julian Davis has thought a lot about the American political system and its connections with

Rome.

And with all due respect, he knows a lot more about Rome's late republic than the hillbilly

elegist.

Julian is a well-known activist and attorney in San Francisco with bachelor's and master's

degrees in philosophy.

He graduated magna cum laude from UC Law, San Francisco, where he served on the editorial

staff of the UC Law Journal.

He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Stanford, finishing a dissertation on

the philosophy of law.

We're delighted he could join us today.

Julian, welcome to Entitled Opinions.

Thank you so much, Robert.

As a fan of your show and beneficiary of the intellectual rights movement, I'm delighted

to be here with you today.

Thank you.

Well, congrats again for the leadership.

So much of the intellectual milieu that you cultivate, it's really an honor to be here,

so thank you so much for having me.

I'm looking forward to our conversation for sure.

So actually, I should tell our listeners that a couple of years ago, you followed

a course with me on Gian Batista Vico's new science, and that's a book that deals quite

a bit with Roman political history from its origins, to its decline, to its eventual collapse.

And I want to mention that because in our conversation today, we might be referring

frequently to Vico since he offers such a compelling theory about how forms of

government in general, but Rome's forms of government in particular, mutate and

evolve according to laws of social and historical development. And let me also

mention that I did an entitled opinions monologue on Giambattista's new science

in case there are some listeners out there who want more background on this

highly original 18th century thinker. In any case, on to our topic. I'm sure that

there's not much you agree with when it comes to J.D. Vance's politics, yet let me

ask you whether, like him, you believe that what's taking place in the American

Republic in our time in some ways resembles the period in Roman history

that not only Vance, but people like Curtis Yarvin, Jack Peshobik, and other

right-wing theorists call the late republic.

You know, those of us who study the interesting connections between Roman

political history and government and that of the American Republic are not very surprised

by J.D. Vance's comments or the machinations of these right-wing theorists. Before diving

into that, I think it's worth recalling one of the most iconic and actually one of

the most ironic images from the January 6th insurrection.

Of an intruder hanging by one hand from an architrave in the U.S. chamber, the Senate

chamber of the Capitol building with the Virgilian inscription, Anuit Coeptis. These images of

barbarians storming the Capitol and Vance's sort of self-reflective invocation of late

republic. It's very reminiscent of what Vico called the second barbarism or the barbarism

of reflection.

Yeah.

You know, there was a time when unbridled greed and sort of dissolute self-interest

of plutocrats like Trump in an unholy alliance with the desperate and abandoned underclasses

they primarily had a hand in creating. You know, people who grew up like J.D. Vance threatened

democratic republics with a crash into monarchic fascism. So more than any other early modern

or modern thinker, I think Vico's philologically infused …

みたい的方式.

philosophy of social institutions and jurisprudence offers a really inspiring

template to think about the relevance of Roman political history and constitutional

structure to our current American context. Of course, this isn't a matter of the dead

but sceptered sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns as Lord Byron had

it in Manfred …

Trevor Burrus That's a great verse, no? The dead but sceptered sovereigns who still

rule our spirits from their urns, yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: But the parallels are profound between the social conditions and

forces at play in American society with its self-consciously Roman constitutional structure

and the social conditions and forces that were at play in Roman society with its mixed

constitutional structure which we can talk a little bit about but which ultimately led

to the demise of the Roman Republic and the fascistic reestablishment of monarchy.

In particular, the sort of vastly unequal distributions of wealth, resources and power

that you saw in the affluent and dominant post-Punic War Roman society closely parallel

this vastly and unequal distributions of wealth, resources and power in our affluent and dominant

post-World War II American society.

So you know, time will only tell if we're in a –

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: … late Republican period.

It's a question for Tiresias indeed as you say but the Roman Republic lasted 500 years.

The American Republic has existed for half that stretch and if we're going to be more

accurate, we should probably speak as historian Harriet Flower does of the Roman Republics

plural because of the significant changes, stages in the form of Roman governance over

that 500-year period ending.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: … in the first century BC.

Now I myself have been sort of tracking parallels between first century BC Roman political history

and our 21st century American political scene since well before the 2016 election during

which time I unlike many others foresaw a Trump victory.

At that time, I even likened him to an American Caesar figure who posed a major threat.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: OK.

So there was his celebrity for sure.

That helped him a lot.

But did you have a sense that he was appealing to a really profound discontent in certain

segment of the American population that had similarities again?

We're going – trying to go back to Rome.

We want to get back to the – really what happened in the late Republican Rome because

I think that some of these right-wing bloggers who invoke Caesar and so forth, I'm not

sure how much they actually know about the late Republic.

I'm not making any assumptions.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: But did you think that the time was right in this country of

ours for someone with Trump's appeal to actually mobilize a lot of anger and resentment

among those as you mentioned had been disenfranchised by the very plutocrats of which Trump was

a representative?

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: I think that's right.

I mean if you kind of pay attention to some of the deep social conditions and social forces

at play.

In a society with these kind of deep kind of inequalities, especially within the context

of what I'm referring to as a Roman mixed constitution, we can talk a little bit about

that.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: But this was something that Polybius and Cicero for instance, how

they referred to the Roman constitution and that's because it had three main elements

that they identified, a kind of monarchic element, an aristocratic element and a democratic

element.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And they sort of correlate with elements of society as such.

So you can think of the monarchic element as sort of picking out a certain class of

noble patricians, typically your commander or executive types.

The aristocratic element of the constitution and of society is picking out this kind of

landed gentry, the senate of Rome, that kind of upper class of society.

The democratic element of the constitution and of society referring to the people, the

mass of the people at large.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And so the Roman context is that this mixed constitutional form of

government is sort of inherently instable when social inequality becomes really great

within society.

And you can see that you find ultimately a kind of desperate and abandoned underclass

that is ultimately willing to join hands with the monarchic element in society to overthrow

what's been a sort of democratic republic with balance of powers and representative

democracy.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And so there's this system, that system of balance of powers and

representative democracy that the American founders self-consciously adopted in terms

of modeling the American republic on the Roman style versus for instance Greek direct democracy.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Right.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And I think because of that, the American constitution then contains

a lot of the same and similar elements subject to the same sorts of social dynamics.

So when you look at the growing social inequality that remains unaddressed for a long time,

you can start to see –

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: By social inequality, you also mean economic inequality.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Yeah.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Economic inequality.

Yeah.

And I should – socioeconomic inequality should really stress that.

There's actually a quote from Vico I think is really on point in this regard and he's

talking about when popular states, democratic republics become really corrupt and the aristocratic

element in society, the oligarchy becomes excessively sort of plutocratic.

The way he puts it, providence provides a resolution in a strongman.

And so he says, at first, men desire to be free of subjection and attain equality.

Witness the plebs and the aristocratic commonwealths which finally turn popular.

Then they attempt to surpass their equals.

Witness the plebs and the popular commonwealths later corrupted into commonwealths of the

powerful, something like what we're seeing today.

Finally they wish to put themselves above the laws.

Witness the anarchies or unlimited popular commonwealths then which there is no greater

tyranny for in them there are as many tyrants as there are bold and dissolute men in the

cities.

That's the perfect picture of Trump.

At this juncture, the plebs, warned by the ills they suffer and casting about for a remedy,

seek shelter under monarchies.

And so if you're a little bit attentive to some of these kinds of social dynamics of

the – what Vico might even call the poetic logic of the Roman mixed constitution and

how that might play out with a similar template in the 21st century United States, you can

see some of the similar social forces at work and that's what I was picking up on in 2016.

And at that time, I mentioned this to folks and I got a lot of sort of blank stares or

disagreement or that I was blowing things out of proportion.

But I predicted he would be a persistent figure on the political scene for many years to come.

I even remember joking about Trump 2024 back in 2017 with the idea that this guy could

very well serve a couple of terms and then decide that he wasn't going to step down.

I foresaw – it went down January 6th, 2021.

And I think now that win or lose for Trump – I think that's going to be a big deal.

I think that's going to be a big deal.

That win or lose for Trump, we're in for a sort of wild and dangerous ride after this

November election as well.

So I think ultimately it's less interesting whether I agree or disagree with Vance than

to say that I'm not really surprised by his comments and find just further vindication

of this perspective and the fact that he and others are now cultivating a self-conscious

and self-reflective understanding of themselves as agents of certain trends of which they

are a part.

So there you have it, the barbarism of reflection.

So if we can talk a little bit about what happened in Rome prior to Augustus consolidating

the empire.

We have a lot of discontent among the plebeians and we have this figure of Caesar who really

annoys a lot of the plutocrats, I mean senators and others.

So can you reconstruct just very schematically what were the main things that took place?

What were the main things that took place in the late republic that led to Caesar's

sort of acclamation by the people and then his assassination?

Peter Van Doren Yeah, I mean I think really to get a better

sense of it, we need to go back to the generation or two before Caesar.

A lot of these trends were already brewing in Roman society.

So in the post-Punic War period, Rome burst onto the international scene, dominate the

Mediterranean, became a very affluent society and the words that John Kenneth Galbraith

used to describe the United States after World War II.

The thing is that affluence, that wealth was not evenly distributed.

So you had the poor underclasses of plebeians and even soldiers returning from fighting

that were really left out and there were movements and sort of progressive movements for land

reform, for agrarian reform to try and enfranchise the lower classes of Roman society.

And what you saw is – and some of the figures here were –

For instance, Tiberius Gracchus and his brother Gaius Gracchus, these were progressive tribunes

of the plebs.

We saw them brutally repressed, assassinated, these movements put down.

And I think what you can see as a kind of pattern is that when these movements for real

progressive reform are put down and repressed by this power elite that's hanging onto

power wealth and resources for itself, a populist demagogue type figure who's really more

interested in their own glory and triumph can capitalize on this politics, as it were,

and end up sweeping into power in a way on the wind of that kind of social force.

And that's what you see, I think, with Caesar.

So whereas people like Tiberius Gracchus and Gaius Gracchus in the generations before really

were progressive politicians of the people, you have somebody like Caesar who's more of

a populist, demagogic warlord who's able to capitalize on that social situation and

really grab power.

Trevor Burrus So you're not a fan of Caesar?

Peter Van Doren When you look back at history, you could

tell a positive, flattering story about Genghis Khan and the Mongol Empire being the largest

land empire in world history, the economic system that they set up.

But it comes down, Genghis Khan's a brutal, genocidal warlord.

And I think in a lot of ways...

Trevor Burrus Because we need to, you know, look at some

of the gory details to get a better sense of what's really going on than some of the

historical narratives might.

Peter Van Doren Yeah, no, I've always felt that any kind

of Caesar worship, and, you know, my own Dante thought of Caesar as a divine institution,

you know, of monarchy.

But as you say, when you look at the gory details, the guy goes into Gaul, and when

he leaves, there's hardly any Gaelic people left in that whole region.

Peter Van Doren He...

Trevor Burrus He enslaves a million of them, brings them...

I mean, we're talking about mass murder on a scale.

It's something that would call for crimes against humanity today, but which glorified

him as one of the great heroes of Rome.

Peter Van Doren And somebody who, you know, shattered and

violated Republican norms and laws to a point where, you know, his criminality was one of

the things that was really threatening his ability to remain a part of the power structure.

And his threatened prosecution was one of the reasons why he crossed the Rubicon and,

you know, entered Italy with his forces.

And we see a very similar figure...

Trevor Burrus And why did the people like him so much?

I mean, the plebs.

Peter Van Doren And I think, again, you know, here you have

somebody who was able to capitalize on this rhetoric of social inequality.

He was part of the Populares Party, which was the other party from the Optimates, which

were, you know, in the Senate, more conservative figures.

And he was able to barter in the rhetoric of land reform in the generation before he'd

been a part of the Marian camp.

And these were warlords, Marius and Sulla, who were battling it out in the generation

prior.

And as I was saying, sort of these progressive politicians were sort of assassinated, their

movements put down, and sort of it was more the populist warlords that took their place

as the champions of the people.

So Marius was a guy, he was a new man, you know, he'd grown up with plebeian parents,

but he rose to the heights of Roman society.

Ultimately, when he dies, Sulla comes in and just brutally, you know, suppresses his faction.

And Caesar's family, a wealthy family, survived the Sulla prescriptions.

And so in the next generation, here you have, again, a wealthy, foppish businessman who

has sort of failed in a lot of his business pursuits.

He was able to, though, leverage the political connections.

You're talking about Caesar.

I'm talking about Caesar.

It sounds like Trump.

It sounds like Trump, right?

To get a proconsulship in Gaul, and then he was able to leverage this into being a powerful

warlord and politician in a way.

But again, with the populist rhetoric of,

land reform that had been a part of that faction that he had been, his family had been

a part of for a couple of generations.

So you see a very similar figure in Trump in a lot of ways.

Of course, he's not a military commander, but in American society, you know, he kind

of epitomizes the kind of height of casino capitalism.

He's kind of this archetypal figure.

Again, foppish, wealthy businessman who, you know, not that successful, but able to leverage

entertainment and politics.

And somebody who's just as norm shattering in the sense that now his criminality and

the threat of prosecution.

He's an existential threat to his trying to remain in power.

So it's a very similar narrative.

So why do you think some of these right wing theorists are so high on, if not Caesar himself,

then the idea of an emperor, a la Trump, who has his own money, is not beholden to the

usual financial power elite in order to promote his own political career.

And that, and why do they think that institutionally speaking, that is the only

thing that will really be able to address the woes of the society and also come to the

rescue, as some of them claim to want, come to the rescue of the disenfranchised parts

of the American classes?

Well, looking at, again, at the kind of social conditions, you see this extreme wealth

inequality, see a whole class of people that are left behind and abandoned in the context

of great affluence and wealth.

And you see the grip.

The grip on power and the grip on our institutions that a powerful, wealthy oligarchy has come

to possess.

I think the thought from a lot of people who are, you know, in that dispossessed class

is they're the problem.

And somebody like Trump or Caesar is going to drain the swamp, going to get rid of those

players and will be able to achieve some kind of, you know, what they imagine is some system

of better, you know, or their needs are, basic needs are being addressed.

Whereas this current system is broken.

I think that's where a lot of it comes from.

There's certain aspects in the American context we can talk about a little bit later because

this movement in the United States towards this kind of fascism is also really connected

with white nationalism.

So we could talk a little bit about that, too.

Yeah, we can.

But first, let's address the question of whether, at a certain point, forms of government,

which are essentially republican in nature, whether it's mixed constitution or not, or

democracies.

I mean, Greek democracy.

Let's face it.

It was, you know, a high point of Western culture, but it seems not to be self-sustaining

for a long period.

There seems to be inner contradictions to a democratic form of government or a republican

form of government where, after a while, things get wobbly and kind of get out of hand.

And that even Vico says at that point when things become anarchical, either you're conquered

by a better nation without or you...

Propose a monarch from within or you undergo the fate of Rome at the very end of its political

existence, which is this kind of degeneration into a return to a barbarism of reflection,

as he calls it, right?

So do you think that what we should be doing and what Rome should have been doing is shoring

up the institutions of, in the case of Rome, like the Senate or the tribunes, or in our

case, shoring up the foundations of...

A democratic republic?

Or do you think we need more radical revolutionary measures?

Well, looking at, you know, the lifespan of democracies, Greece certainly had its life

and its style.

But the Roman Republic really lasted for five centuries.

I mean, it was an example of how you could establish, and this was an example, you know,

to the American founders of how you could establish a system of representative democracy

that might, you know, last for centuries.

There's actually a story, I don't know how true, of...

Benjamin Franklin coming out of the Constitutional Convention and being approached by some citizens

asking him what kind of, you know, government they created.

And he tells them, a republic, if you can keep it.

When you think about what destabilizes something like this kind of form of government, I think

we should really be paying attention to these issues of deep socioeconomic inequality.

We're talking a little bit about the Gracchi brothers and the movement for progressive

social democracy that was sort of squashed in Roman times.

But if you look to our own recent past, you'll see the Kennedy brothers.

They are a great example, or even Bernie Sanders in a closer time, where you see a

kind of assassination of the Kennedy brothers or repression of the Bernie Sanders kind of

social democracy movement by the power elite.

In the wake of the kind of repression...

The power elite is not just Republican bad guys.

It's also Democrats.

I mean, the DNC here in particular.

I mean, that was leaked in some of the documents that came out, the ways in which the DNC really

just tried to not really make a fair playing field, which, you know, Sanders...

Very likely could have won on.

But there you go.

The power elite of both parties in this country, Democrats no less than Republicans.

I mean, look on the Republican side.

You see they've almost lost control of the conservative, traditional conservatives lost

control of the Republican Party altogether.

There's a certain figure, a poetic character of Cicero that I think actually is very helpful

in that Vickian sense of a poetic character.

Think about, you know, this kind of triangulating moderate or something who really...

Speaks the rhetoric of constitutional normacy and a partnership with the people, but in

the end, lets the kind of social inequality fester and ends up facilitating the rise of

folks like Pompey and Caesar.

And in our time, I think we've seen the same thing where the kind of traditional power

elite, whether they're on the Democratic or Republican side of the aisle, have let

these kind of social inequalities fester to the point where, and the political style

fester to the point where...

Okay, now let me put you on the spot a little.

Someone like Trump.

Okay, but would you include people like the Clintons?

Would you include Obama?

Would you include Obama in that category?

I think, yes.

I mean, I think the Clintons are a perfect example of this.

I mean, it was Clinton, it was triangulation was the Clintonian political style back in

the 90s.

You remember that.

And I just think any successful Democratic politician today is going to be so beholden

to the massive amounts of money.

I mean, the real strings are pulled behind the scenes in our quote unquote democracy

by these very powerful oligarchs.

So you get a point where...

Like I say, the power elite lets these kinds of social inequalities fester to the point

where people don't see a solution within the current Democratic, Republican institutions

for their problems.

So what I think is that less than just focusing on our institutions, which we obviously need

to do, you hear a lot of that.

We should start thinking more about how institutions aren't just systems of rules and roles and

relationships between abstract roles.

Institutions are made up of people, of flesh and blood people.

We should be focusing on social inequality and really addressing those concerns head

on because my thought is, look, of course our aim should be something like substantive

equality of citizenship in a society without disparate social classes.

That's not just an aim of ideal political morality though.

To operate otherwise is sort of existential threat to our social self-governance, I think,

is what we start to understand.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So do you think Rome offers...

Peter Robinson, Jr.: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: ...any sort of examples or prescriptions how to go about that or are

we on our own here and we can't really appeal to precedent in Roman political history for

this?

Peter Robinson, Jr.: I think we can...

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They did give citizenship.

There were two movements to extend citizenship, a century or two B.C. to all the people on

the Italian peninsula and then I think with Caracalla in the second century A.D.

there was an extension of Roman citizenship to the provinces and things like that.

Peter Robinson, Jr.: To the Roman world, yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: These were quite progressive moves on the part of Rome.

Peter Robinson, Jr.: That's really interesting to think about a little bit and if you think

about that same period in history before the rise of Caesar, that period I was pointing

to you had what were called the social war, right?

In a way pitted the poor Roman plebeian class against some of the non-Roman Italian allies.

As I was saying, Roman plebeians were pushing for land reform and some of that land reform

would have meant settling Romans in the Italian peninsula and redistributing some wealth from

elite Italian allies.

Now these allies were pushing for Roman citizenship and you had the power elite, the Senate of

Rome kind of resisting both land reform and resisting expansion of citizenship.

Eventually the situation became unsustainable and the allies under sort of pressure for

land reform and not having their citizenship.

They were granted revolted.

This was brutally suppressed and the social war is so-called because the Italian allies

were the …

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: They were called the socii.

Peter Robinson, Jr.: Exactly.

So they were brutally repressed and the result of this ultimately was the grant of citizenship

to all the Italian allies on the Italian peninsula.

What wasn't addressed was these deep socioeconomic inequality.

Land reform was never addressed.

So you can have an expansive view of citizenship where people are allowed to live.

People are formally included.

But if there isn't a substantive notion of equal citizenship where social class is not

so disparate, you're going to see some of these things continue and I would point to

a really interesting parallel with the civil rights movement in this country mid last century

where this pitted white nationalists against black people, people of color.

Initially the power structure was pushing back.

Eventually the movement succeeds at expanding equal protection of citizenship to people

of all colors, races and creeds.

But yet the deep socioeconomic inequalities have not been addressed.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I know.

And Martin Luther King towards the end, he realized that it wasn't just enough to get

civil rights.

You needed economic justice too.

And I think this battle is going on in our own political system now where people mostly

on the right who are affirming equality as equality before the law, equal opportunity.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

And people on the left insisting on equity and that the difference between equality and

equity.

It sounds to me like you are saying that citizenship or equality before the law is not enough,

that you need something that redistributes wealth in a way that's more equitable.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Yeah.

And I mean that not just in a sense of an ideal of political morality, which we might

agree with, but also in the sense that to live otherwise, we can see historically, turns

out to be a kind of existential threat.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Yeah.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So I think there's an interesting difference between the aristocracy

and the masses of the people that is often overlooked by the aristocratic element of

society.

They let things sort of fester and get out of hand out of self-interest and then ultimately

end up with a form of government that they themselves find to be completely unacceptable.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Yeah.

But I'm wondering, Julian, how much it has to do with the will of a certain class where,

for example, you have a government that's not a political class.

You have a government that's not a political class.

Where I'm thinking of a lot of philanthropic billionaires and tycoons, plutocrats if you

want, who are very concerned about the issues that you're dealing with.

And of course, it takes a form of philanthropy and supporting the right candidates and the

causes.

And how much of it really is due to the inertia, almost autonomous inertia of a system that

we call capitalism, which is not really what Rome's economic foundations were built on.

Capitalism has its own inner dynamics.

Well, there's wealth accumulation.

That's the whole point of capital, no?

And do you think it would be enough just to do like what some of the more progressive

governments in Europe, Northern Europe especially, in Scandinavia that you socialize?

Is it a kind of economic socialism that you think will save democracy?

Julian Powell, Jr.: I think that's part of the picture.

I think we could probably go in more of a direction of Marx.

I think we could go in a direction of Marx than Vico if we wanted to for this conversation.

But I do think part of the American context is very much defined in terms of race relations

as well.

I mean, so I was talking a little bit about this, about the civil rights movement, et

cetera.

But I think today, you do have white nationalism as a major component of the rise of American

fascism.

And you can see that for that faction, right, if democracy is not working out for white

power, then they're willing to—

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Give up democracy.

Julian Powell, Jr.: Give up democracy with another form of government pretty clearly.

But attempts at getting real social democracy in this country, think of Johnson's Great

Society for instance, right, to really try and distribute wealth equitably regardless

of race.

There was a huge backlash against that.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: There was.

But it did go through.

It did go through.

So we've had triumphs.

Julian Powell, Jr.: And then it was dismantled during the Reagan era largely.

And part of it is there's a kind of a bit of the racist tail wagging the dog here.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Yeah.

Julian Powell, Jr.: Where, you know, there's a lot of folks in this country who they identify

as the true Americans, right?

Other folks who aren't part of their vision of the white nation of America, those folks

are considered alien in theory or a threat in some way.

And so that's part of this, unfortunately.

So I think some of our efforts at social democracy have been thwarted by some of our own sort

of history of racial intolerance.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, sure.

That's not a surprise.

We know from Roman history.

That there's fierce resistance on the part of the enfranchised.

And that if you've been there a long time and you're entrenched, you're very reluctantly

going to give up your privilege and your status and your wealth.

I think Vico's interesting in his analysis of class conflict in ancient Rome, pointing

out that, okay, the aristocrats made a concession here or there, and then they realized that

in making that what they thought was a small concession, it actually led to really poor

progressive populist transformations that were in favor of the people.

And that somehow there's this very clumsy way in which the arc of history bends towards

justice for a while.

And then it goes backwards and forwards.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: It's a struggle.

You know, I actually call it the psychotic accordion of race relations in the United

States where you see we fought a civil war over this stuff.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And we had reconstruction era.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And for about 10 years, the country was transformed.

And then there was a backlash.

And you had Jim Crow and then the civil rights movement.

And we had this great, you know, 100 years later, literally.

And then, you know, you see this new Jim Crow, this backlash.

Now we have mass incarceration, still vast socioeconomic inequality.

We're in the kind of down cycle of the accordion.

I mean, those of us who look at these cycles hope that by mid-century, this century, we're

going to be going into a different context.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think the election of Obama.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: Potentially a third reconstruction.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: I think the election of Obama.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: If we could achieve it.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Really created a backlash and that we're still living in the backlash

of some real deep racist anger that a black person was elected president.

Okay.

Let me ask you this question, Julian.

Is there any institutional legal means by which something like racism can be overcome

or eradicated?

It's something that doesn't seem to be amenable to legal persuasion or even political persuasion.

We have changed the laws of civil, all the victories of the civil rights movement have

been put in place and yet we see that the racism in America is still in certain segments

of the population, virulent as it ever was, although more underground.

I don't know if laws can change that.

Matthew Feeney, Jr.: And not even as underground anymore.

I mean, that's part of this rise of American fascism is a lot of it's bubbling up to the

surface and taking over a major American political party.

On the long view, I really think that humanity struggles with really embracing others as

human, as one of us, and I think once we really start to have a broader shared conception

of humanity, that's really the solution to this kind of stuff.

But I really do think some substantive notion of equal citizenship is important.

Sure, we've changed the laws, but then if you look at the way we've interpreted equal

protection, for instance, since the time of Brown v.

Board.

We saw students for fair admission last year.

Slowly over time, equal protection has been watered down, watered down, watered down to

the point where in the Sotomayor dissent, I thought it was really quite profound.

She points out in this dissent to students for fair admission that racial profiling has

been found to be constitutional, but not from revaction.

So you can be picked up and jailed on the basis of your race, but not let into college.

I mean, that's the state of our equal protection jurisprudence today.

So a lot of it, I think, about how we really commit to these principles, how we interpret

these principles.

Are these principles ones of empty, formal equality of opportunity, or are we gonna interpret

these principles in terms of a kind of substantive equal citizenship that I've been talking a

bit about?

I think that's also connected with a sense of a shared conception of humanity.

Those are the things we need to cultivate.

Do I think that we've done a great job of that historically as humans?

No.

But there have been times.

There are moments of inspiration.

I think that's, if we're gonna break out of some of these cycles, that's precisely where

we need to look.

Trevor Burrus Do you have anyone in the American government

that gives you hope that these kind of reforms or perhaps even revolutions are possible?

Peter Van Doren You know, I was mentioning some of the Bernie

Sanders type politics that really puts his finger on that.

I think Kassia Cortez, Alessandra Kassia Cortez is a great example of...but you find a fair

example.

Peter Van Doren You find a few politicians within our American

system.

There's not many of them, but you see them out there, really, they call them the squad

and Congress, etc.

Trevor Burrus Yeah, no, no.

Peter Van Doren Is that what you had in mind?

Peter Van Doren Yeah, I guess so, because I also believe,

and I think this might be a Vickian principle, is that I find it impossible to imagine that

America with its history would ever elect a Marxist.

And Bernie Sanders, let's face it, he's essentially as Marxist.

Trevor Burrus Yeah.

Peter Van Doren As Marxist as an American can get.

And he went, he took his wife to Moscow on a honeymoon at the time, that's before the

fall of the Berlin Wall.

He makes a lot of sense, he's right about equality, but just the history, the 200 years

history of America makes it, for me, completely unlikely that you would be able to install

someone in the presidency who would nationalize industries.

And do all these things that Marxist governments have done elsewhere.

It just would just go against the grain, I don't know, characterological or the kind

of what you call the mentality of a people.

I don't know if, I think that forms of government have a historicity that belong in certain

places and if you don't have, if you haven't had established foundations for something

like a Marxist revolution, you're not going to get it easily.

Trevor Burrus Yeah, I think it would be completely unheard

of.

I mean, I think in the post-McCarthy era, even by the 80s and 90s, that you'd have a

self-described socialist who almost wins a Democratic Party nomination, which Bernie

Sanders did.

So, I hear you.

And as much as I, in this conversation as well, as we've discussed the kind of cyclical

nature of history, I mean, Vico's whole theory about corso and recorso and these cycles,

he also had a non-deterministic, non-mechanistic view of how each culture evolves with its

own unique...

Trevor Burrus Right.

Trevor Burrus ...time, its own unique tempi and its own unique way.

And I think there's an essential flexibility and plasticity there as well.

So, what study of history and what study of these cycles and study of the sort of Vickian

ideas about Roman history and their relevance today can show us is, it can really show what

the genuine threats are, but our fate is still in our hands.

And I do think that things that were unthinkable a generation ago become thinkable in the next

generation.

Trevor Burrus Yeah.

Well said, Julian.

We've been speaking with Julian Davis.

He's a...

Julian Davis Yeah.

Trevor Burrus ...activist and attorney in San Francisco and also a PhD student finishing

a brilliant dissertation on the philosophy of law here at Stanford.

I want to thank you for coming on Entitled Opinions, sharing your knowledge of this

late Republican moment that we're in, if we're in such a moment at all.

Julian Davis Thank you so much, Robert.

Thank you so much for having me.

Trevor Burrus I'm Robert Harrison for Entitled Opinions.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time on Entitled Opinions.

Bye.

See Ya!

Aw, c'mon.

C'mon.

Nice song.

Yes!

Nice song.

Yeah!

I like that.

Awesome.

Do all you want

I was sinking, I was disappearing

I was slipping to the groove

And cut me off