US President or American Caesar?

The prospect of a second Donald Trump victory in November’s US election has widely been seen – at least by liberal commentators –as an apocalyptic threat to democracy. Indeed, the coming election is sometimes framed as a binary clash between democracy and autocracy. Some have even cast Trump as a new Julius Caesar, whose re-election would strike a fatal blow to America’s republican institutions just as Caesar’s dictatorship paved the way for the autocracy of the emperors. As the Financial Times put it back in June: ‘Trump would resume office as an American Caesar with a ready-made toolkit of executive actions.’

Plenty of ink has been spilled on whether Trump is best described as Caesarist, populist, nationalist, fascist or something else. Yet this is often disconnected from American democracy’s own longue durée. The threat of the Caesarist leader has loomed in the American political imagination from the republic’s revolutionary beginnings, and only deepened as the US entered the age of industrial capitalism around the middle of the 19th century. A historical perspective can inform our grasp of contemporary political realities. While many Americans may be relieved at the nomination of Kamala Harris as Democratic candidate, a longer vantage suggests that American democracy will continue to wrestle with the problem that was once called Caesarism, at least until it goes further in resolving its staggering economic and social contradictions.

Original Caesar

George Washington – arguably the prototype of the American political leader – was never seen as a potential Caesar. Washington was instead a modern Cincinnatus, a war hero and patriot who surrendered his war commission (and refused a third presidential term) just as the Roman leader Cincinnatus had surrendered the office of dictatorship and returned to his plough in the fifth century BC. But despite Washington’s legendary example, anxieties about the prospect of an American Caesar soon crept into discussions about the future of America’s constitutional experiment.  For a revolutionary generation reared on the Greek and Roman classics, Julius Caesar’s supposed subversion of the Roman republic served as a kind of political barometer for the pressures facing the American system. For the Boston-based Federalist Fisher Ames, writing in 1805, the danger lay principally in an ill-advised expansion of democracy at the state level, which might forge a base for an American Caesar or a Virginian Bonaparte to dismantle the finely tuned constitutional system. Others located the problem in the sweeping executive powers vested in the presidency itself by the 1787 Constitutional Convention. As the Jeffersonian Republican John Taylor of Caroline announced in 1814:

Patronage, negociation, a negative upon laws, a paper system, render some of those talents which Caesar possessed, unnecessary to enable a president to perform what Caesar effected.

Had the Founding Fathers inadvertently left an opening to a new Caesar within the constitutional structure itself?

The clamour about an American Caesar hit a kind of crescendo during the Jacksonian era of the 1830s. The heirs of the Federalists saw the military hero-turned-president Andrew Jackson as an American Bonaparte, whose claim to represent the true voice of the American people illustrated the worst excesses of democratic politics. At the same time, though, Jackson’s onslaught against financial privilege and especially his ‘war’ upon the Second Bank of the United States won him genuine popularity among the population of white working men and migrant settlers who constituted Jackson’s principal support. It is this wielding of a claim to popular legitimacy against the ‘rich and powerful’ – especially the monied interest – that remains a core feature of Caesarist rhetoric, and it was this – along with Jackson’s tight personal grip on the emerging party machinery – that led one 19th-century historian to describe Jackson’s politics as a species of ‘constitutional Caesarism’. His contemporary critics made much the same point when they claimed that democracy was being used as camouflage for Jackson’s true purpose, a return to one-man rule or even monarchy. One such critic, Calvin Cotton, wrote in 1844:

They have justified and sustained the President of the United States in the use of monarchical powers, we might say absolute powers, which would have cost the Sovereign of Great Britain a throne and a crown, and which would have revolutionized almost any kingdom in Europe – all under the name of ‘Democracy’! 

Jackson’s harnessing of the language of democracy to the so-called ‘One-Man Power’ cast a long shadow over American political life throughout the 1840s and 1850s.

Et tu, Polk?

This was an era of increasingly fractious disputes over slavery, republican expansion and new theories of popular sovereignty. Some identified president James Polk, one of Jackson’s Democratic heirs during the 1840s, as another potential Caesar. The charge this time, however, stemmed less from Polk’s abuse of democracy than from his pursuit of a republican empire across Texas and Mexico (and potentially Cuba) that would transform the presidency into an instrument of military dictatorship. (The claim that distant wars and conquests fuelled executive tyranny resounded through many later periods of US history, most notably during the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars of the late 1890s.)

Another development in the argument came during the presidency of James Buchanan during the late 1850s, a time of intense debate over states’ rights and slavery. In this period the newly minted term Caesarism came, remarkably, to be applied to the expansion of the powers of federal government itself. As the Catholic publicist Orestes Brownson wrote in the late 1850s, the federal government’s violation of the Union’s states’ rights amounted to ‘an attempt to destroy our Republican system, and to introduce the old Caesarism of pagan Rome’. Such conservative onslaughts against expansive federal power continue to reverberate through the rhetoric of the libertarian right.

It is tempting to see the American Civil War (1861-65) as changing the terms of this American preoccupation. Lincoln’s assumption of emergency powers meant that he was accused – mainly by figures from the South – of both dictatorship and Caesarism. But his assassination did not end the debate. The charge of Caesarism was levelled at the war hero and later Republican president Ulysses S. Grant, whose second term (1873-77) witnessed a vicious and divisive controversy about Grant’s supposed abuse of presidential powers and desire for a third term of office. The respected Republican and abolitionist Charles Sumner led the charge against Grant’s ‘Caesarism or personalism’, accusing him of using the presidency ‘to advance his own family on a scale of nepotism dwarfing everything of the kind in our history and hardly equalled in the corrupt governments where this abuse has most prevailed’. Grant’s defenders accused Sumner of hyperbole. But there were deeper issues at play. As one of Grant’s critics alleged in the early 1880s, his presidency represented a new alliance between politics and ‘money power’ – a new type of Caesarism was on the horizon.

Money talks

As this reference to ‘money power’ suggests, what really transformed perceptions of the American Caesar in the second half of the century was not the Civil War, but the deeper structural changes in America’s political economy. The driving force was the country’s transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society, a move that made the US begin to look a lot like the old states of Europe, with their overcrowded cities, unemployed labourers, limited land and notorious ‘social questions’. It seemed as if the new Caesar would emerge from the uneasy combination of democratic politics and the new forces that characterised an industrial and capitalist economy. With the expansion of the franchise after the Civil War, many conservatives argued that America was now embarking on the path that had repeatedly destroyed republics in the Old World (most notably the Second French Republic after 1848), where demagogues had exploited the economic hardships and social resentments of the debt-laden urban and rural poor. By contrast, radical, socialist and populist critics of capitalism began to argue that the new Caesar would emerge from the circles of the rich, not the poor: from the concentrations of financial power and plutocratic privilege that were now the salient features of America’s society and economy.

By any other name

The language of American political debate has, of course, changed radically since the late 19th century. But the story of American democracy’s entanglements with Caesarism can help us recalibrate our sense of our own political moment. In the first place, it ought to warn us that our sense of apocalyptic crisis is not new. Framing the current election in terms of a fateful conflict between the forces of democracy and autocracy may be a useful rhetorical ploy, but it obscures the extent to which something like Caesarism – or whatever we choose to call it today – has been entangled with American democratic politics throughout long periods of the republic’s history. Furthermore, the late-19th-century debate about democracy’s future in an age of capitalism, imperialism, plutocracy and class conflict still seems eerily relevant. History tells us that the appeal of the modern Caesar is bound to increase as democratic societies fail to resolve the inequalities, tensions and resentments that seem inseparable from a capitalist economy. We may be closer to the 19th century than we like to think.

Iain McDaniel is Senior Lecturer in Intellectual History at the University of Sussex.