Or Trump vs. Clinton, take your pick.

Several decades before the Senate got stabby with Caesar, there were Sulla and Marius.  Sulla is pictured on the left, and that’s Marius there on the right, looking like Lyndon Johnson.

I don’t have enough time to go into all the details here.  For those, you should go to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series on the Death Throes of the Roman Republic.  The title of that should give you some clue of where we’re headed with this post.

For our purposes, it’s enough to know this highly simplified version.  Gaius Marius was a populist general, hyper-ambitious, who managed to get himself elected Consul seven times, at a time when Consul was a strictly term-limited position: once in your lifetime, and that was it.  He posed as a champion of the people, while reworking the Roman command structure so that his legions were personally loyal to him, as opposed to the Senate as an institution.  In doing all of this, he severely upended Roman political institutions, which were having trouble enough functioning as it was, and mostly in the service of his own ambitions.

Sulla, among others, was displeased with this.  If Gaius was a corrupt, self-serving general, Sulla truly saw himself as a Roman patriot, but a particularly ruthless and brutal one.

In his effort to restore the traditional order, and traditional Roman virtues, reduce the powers of the Consul, restore the primacy of the Senate, and return politics to “normal” functioning, he engaged in a series of political and military battles with Marius, eventually ousting him.  Upon arriving in Rome, he addressed the Senate in the Forum, speaking over the screams of those his men were beheading just yards away.  In the need to sweep away the entrenched powers, he cleansed Roman politics in blood, so much so that when he eventually retired from public life, he was able to walk about Rome without a bodyguard, having killed everyone who could possible pose a threat.

I have been saying for several months now that the prospect of a Trump vs. Clinton matchup – which I frankly never thought would happen – would let me know exactly how a citizen of Rome, circa 80 BCE, would have felt, having to choose between Marius and Sulla.

The analogs aren’t perfect, but if forced to map one contest onto the other, I think I’d make Trump Sulla and Clinton Marius.  Clinton has Marius’s ambition and corruption.  Trump has Sulla’s brutality (though not his courage) and his appeal is largely nostalgic.  Marius had a party; while Sulla had followers, he was mostly a one-off.

None of this bodes well for us, but it should provide a particular object lesson for those conservatives and Republicans who, in their earnest and right-minded desire to have nothing to do with Trump, are in the process of convincing themselves that Clinton would be bad, but not all that bad.

Let’s be perfectly clear – a Clinton presidency would be a catastrophe for freedom and liberty, for actual traditional American values.

Clinton is not only personally corrupt and mendacious, she has managed to harness the institutions of government to her personal ambition.  She has never drawn, in her mind, a clear line between herself, her campaigns, and the public offices she has held.  It was the Clintons who put a price tag on the Lincoln Bedroom, and continued to run a likely illegal foundation while she was a Senator and Secretary of State, using the State Department to arrange thank yous to foreign governments who had contributed to the foundation.  In her zeal to conceal these activities from public scrutiny, she set up a home-brew email server so she could conveniently delete tens of thousands of emails, depriving investigators of the starting end of the thread when they tried to recover them.  In doing so, she put the nation’s most sensitive secrets into the hands of hostile foreign governments, likely getting overseas operatives killed.

This is not merely power for the sake of wealth, it’s wealth for the sake of more power.  Clinton is not, a some conservatives are telling themselves, a stable centrist.  She is a leftist ideologue leading an increasingly ideologically leftist party.  What would be her predecessor in office, the current president, has managed to weaponize the IRS and the Department of Justice against political opponents.  Clinton would revise and extend that abuse to any agency with police powers or powers of enforcement.

She would be relentless in her pursuit of a functional one-party state.  And she might well be able to achieve it.

Over the last several decades, as political power has shifted away from the states towards DC, and away from Congress towards the Presidency.  Democrats have been increasing their base in the Electoral College at the same time.  Which explains why, even as Republicans have been cleaning up at the state and local levels, and have been ascendant in Congress, those victories have seemed increasingly hollow.

And she would leave no respite at the state or local levels.  The are currently test-piloting the use of state Attorneys General in California, New York, and the Virgin Islands to criminalize political opposition.  Likewise, the flim-flam prosecution of Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the John Doe investigation in Wisconsin were designed to hamper leading Republican presidential candidacies at the local level.

Her Supreme Court picks, who see the Court not as a third branch of government but an enforcement mechanism for the Left, would do nothing to stop it.

In politics, it is organization above all that matters.  Those trying to organize opposition into cohesive, coherent, cross-state operations capable of resisting federal overreach or effectively winning electoral or legislative battles would find themselves on the receiving end of audits, OSHA visits, and Justice Department investigations.

Fortunes would be confiscated and distributed to leftist, Democrat-supporting political organizations.  Donor lists would be demanded and conveniently leaked.  This, too, has already been test-piloted by the current administration.

Hillary Clinton would use all of these tactics and more to pursue her political and ideological opponents to the ends of the earth.  After four or eight years of her, following eight years of Obama, that would mean an entire generation had grown up thinking this was how things were done.

In all of this, not one senior member of her party has objected.  Indeed, they have either denied that any such abuses took place, or denied that openly political prosecutions are abuses at all.

Make no mistake, Trump is a danger all his own.  He is more chaotic, less predictable, than Clinton.  If Clinton thinks the laws don’t apply to her, Trump sometimes seems to think no rules apply to him at all.  He might very well use all the same tools against his political opponents that Hillary would.  I strongly suspect that those who think they can control him once in office are in for a rude surprise.  His only saving graces appear to be that his patriotism can’t be in doubt, and that the Republican party is just a vehicle for him, rather than an ideological stronghold.

In Sulla’s immediate aftermath, all seemed to be returned to normal.  Of course, it wasn’t.  As Carlin points out, in using his army to forcibly restore a political order that Romans had lost the will to maintain, he didn’t really put things aright; he just provided a road map for the next strongman who wanted to seize power.  (Ironically, against his better judgment, he spared one of Marius’s party – one Julius Caesar.  “You fear Marius.  I tell you this one contains a thousand Mariuses.”  But he spared him anyway.)

Our salvation, if it comes, will not come from anyone we elect President.  Even a Ted Cruz, who despite his deep personality flaws, is plainly in love with the Constitution and confined his considerable ambition squarely within its constraints, even a Ted Cruz wouldn’t be able to restore Americans’ faith in a representative system of limited government all by himself.  Just as the Romans remained stuck with a fragile system that begged for a strong executive, our own Congress seems uninterested in governing, more interested in running against an executive it won’t rein in.

The choice, therefore, is simply this – which candidate provides the best chance for liberty and freedom, representative government, limited government, to survive as living political movements and ideas in 2020 or 2024?  I am, as well, perfectly willing to entertain as a strategy helping to elect one of them, and immediately setting about to undermine him or her, in order to give American more wriggle-room.

I’ll be damned if I know yet, but let’s not fool ourselves about what’s at stake.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley formally endorsed Sen. Marco Rubio for President this evening at a campaign rally.  As has been pointed out, without the political machines they once had at their disposal, elected officials’ endorsements mean less than they used to.  Still, this is not insignificant, and comes just a few days before South Carolina holds its primary.

Trump has been leading there and will probably win, but this gives Rubio the inside edge on the alleged “establishment lane” there, and could even push him past Cruz for 2^nd place.

The endorsement isn’t entirely unexpected.  Haley’s State of the Union response angered many of the Trump and Cruz persuasion, for its emphasis on talking about people rather than policies, and its perceived softness on immigration.  Personally, I thought the response was inspiring.  The tenor of it was very similar to Rubio’s at his most effective.  After she delivered it, I figured that she would be supporting Rubio, if not endorsing him.

[youtube width=”425″ height=”318″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS5zR7_7M5c[/youtube]

Guy Benson had a Facebook post earlier suggesting that Haley’s endorsement, and that of Sen. Tim Scott, a black Republican from that state, would send an important message to up-and-coming conservatives in the party.  I think that’s true, but I think it’s possible that Benson has the cause and effect reversed here.

Haley and Scott were already prominent non-White conservative Republicans.  The message of their endorsement for Rubio is not that conservative ideas know no color or sex, that they apply to everyone.  That’s the message of Haley and Scott being elected statewide officials in the birthplace of secession, that it’s all right for blacks and other minorities to identify as conservatives and as Republicans.

They could have endorsed anyone, with the exception of Trump, and that wouldn’t have changed.

They obviously have been sold on conservatism’s message and policies, and believe that those are sellable to other minorities and to women.  I’m sure that a large factor in their endorsement of Rubio is their belief that of the remaining candidates, he is the most effective communicator of those ideas to those groups.

[youtube width=”425″ height=”318″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLCgeRN_FAE[/youtube]

Bernie Sanders is once again tired of hearing about Hillary’s emails.

Hillary Clinton hasn’t even been elected President, and she’s already returned Clinton Fatigue to Washington.

Clinton Fatigue is that sense of exhaustion you get when trying to sort through the various lies, deceptions, evasions, inventions, and circumventions necessitated by various legal, ethical, and tangles, large and small, engaged in by the Clintons and their friends.

Clinton Fatigue was one of the major contributing factors to the election of George W. Bush in 2000.  People were exhausted by the sense that when they read the news coming out of Washington, they were forever walking in on a guilty child whose first reaction, like that of all guilty children, was to make something up.  They had rejected a second term for George H.W. Bush in the 1992 elections, putting these very same Clintons in charge.  Only eight years later, they elected his son of (nearly) the same name, so strong was the nostalgia for a time when the adults were in charge.

And now, with Madame Hillary holding no public office, only a candidate for President, it’s back.

It’s back in the lying about the lying about Benghazi.  In the emails that Bernie Sander is already impatient to move on from, and the classified information that was on them.  In the form that Hillary signed about the handling of classified info.  In the tax returns that the Clinton Foundation can’t seem to get quite right.  In the evidence that the Foundation had donors with business before the State Department.

It’s in the Hillary trying to turn herself into a hero of post-9/11 downtown reconstruction (where her daughter was not, in fact, jogging on that infamous day).  For the record, because we cling to the hope that the record still matters, was how Hillary was received by the families of the NYPD and FDNY just a few weeks after 9/11:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xa6BZXnGOQ[/youtube]

It’s in the lies she tells because she has to and the lies she tells because she wants to and the lies she tells because she just can’t help herself.

It’s in the “can’t remembers” when she doesn’t like the memory, or the lingering questions that never get answered but always have been.

It isn’t helped by the conspiricists who insist that Vince Foster was shot or that the MENA Airport was a major hub for drugs, murder, and mayhem all overseen by the then-governor but that doesn’t make the fatigue any less real.

The Clintons don’t just bring the Fatigue with them, they’re carriers.  This time, it’s Huma Abedin who was personally put on the State Department payroll, signed a separation agreement which included the handling of classified information.

These lies, shadings, convenient memory lapses don’t just appear of their own accord.  When someone compiles that kind of a record, it’s because of character.

She is, by turns, personally venal and politically vindictive.  Does anyone doubt that she was selling access and potentially contracts the way she and her husband sold the Lincoln Bedroom a decade earlier?  Does anyone think that she would shy away from using the IRS to punish political opponents?

She is contemptuous of the people she claimed to represent, and claims to want to lead.  That booing in the post-9/11 video above came after her motorcade ran down a New York police officer there to provide security, and Madame Hillary couldn’t be bothered to stop to see if here was all right.  Her first response, “Don’t worry, I’m ok.”  With respect, we didn’t really doubt you were.

Whatever political skills Bill may have had, it should by now be abundantly clear to anyone who isn’t a hopeless partisan hack that Madame Hillary has, quit literally, none of the personal characteristics necessary for the Oval Office.

Does anyone doubt that a decade and a half of this sort of thing would irreversibly damage and distort our political institutions?

Facebook friend of mine Ken Gardner is fond of saying that a fair number of people who think they’re dissatisfied with Boehner and McConnell are really dissatisfied with the separation of powers.  After all, any real change requires legislation, any legislation can be vetoed, and the Democrats in the Senate have proven that they won’t even let it come to that, with their abuse of the filibuster over the Iran deal.

However, federalism plays as big a role as separation of powers.  Our senators and representatives are from specific states and district, which can look very different from each other.  In this respect, we are strikingly different from parliamentary democracies, even those such as Canada and the UK, where national slates really rule roost.  In Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell?, William F. Buckley tells the story about a married couple, she from Massachusetts, he from Virginia.  They discussed politics often, but never party registration.  Turns out he was a Democrat, and she was a Republican, which came as a surprise to both of them.  He being so conservative, she had assumed he was a Republican.  She being so liberal, he had assumed she was a Democrat.  Lots of fighting over that, apparently.

Those regional differences persist, even after the Great Reshuffling that began in earnest with the 1994 Congressional elections.  The map that decorates this post, showing a broad swath of Republican legislative control across the country, masks a broad range of opinion and viewpoints.  The Michigan and Wisconsin governments are run by Republicans, but I will promise you they are very different from Alabama and Mississippi.

That’s fine when you’re dealing with state issues.  It comes into collision in Congress, where these regional Republicans have to sit in the same body.
When I was growing up, southern Congressional Democrats, who often voted conservatively, were referred to as “boll weevils,” while their northern liberal Republican counterparts were the “gypsy moths.”  And it’s worth remembering that while Jesse Helms couldn’t have gotten elected in Minnesota, or Rudy Boschwitz in North Carolina, they both voted for the Reagan tax cuts.

What made it different was the “Reagan” part.  Yes, the president has the veto power, but he also has the bully pulpit, and is the only office-holder elected by the entire country.  He can set the agenda and give the party focus and direction in a way that it’s almost impossible for Congressional leaders to do.

There’s no question that Obama has broken the basic political agreement between citizens and the government:

Barack Obama has become the transformational president he aspired to be. Among the things he has transformed is the nature of the political compact between the rulers and the ruled in our republic.

Before Obama, citizens hoped that their elected leaders would be wise, independent, and disinterested leaders—but they never really counted on utopian vision. What they banked on was that the people they elected would, at the very least, be self-interested vote-seekers—so that if voters started punishing politicians for a specific course of action, the politicians would abandon it.

The passage of Obamacare broke this arrangement. And the impending passage of the Iran nuclear deal, in the face of voter discontent will cement this new relationship as the norm. In both cases, Democratic law makers went along in processes that were highly irregular (the nuclear option for passage of Obamacare; no treaty ratification with Iran); with initiatives they largely disliked on the merits; that voters demonstrably disliked in polling; and that had (or are likely to have) negative outcomes not just in the real world, but in the political world, too. This sort of power dynamic is new in American politics.

There’s also no question that Boehner and McConnell have been slow to recognize this shift, even as their opposite numbers on the Democrat side conspired in the reduction of Congress to an adjunct of the executive branch.

Whatever Boehner and McConnell may have “let” happen, real change will not come through Congressional action.  It will have to wait for a Republican president, and even then, it will only happen with an energetic president committed to pushing legislation that devolves executive power back to Congress, reduces actual regulatory authority, and devolves federal power back to the states.  It’s why primaries matter.

Obama is more Marius than Augustus, and we will not find our way back with a Sulla of our own.  Sulla, of course, thought he was restoring the old order, but in the end, his lasting accomplishment was to establish a road map for future despots.