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In title opinions, a radio show for those with a high tolerance for thinking.
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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 without spread wings.
No, not a bald eagle, symbol of American freedom,
but a Roman eagle.
Bird of the auspices, representing Joe's divine providence.
In one of its talents, the eagle is clutching an olive branch.
In the other, a bundle of arrows resembling the Roman fashes,
from which comes the word fascism.
And look, a lot of words in Latin.
A pluribus unum.
An wheat keptis.
God favors our undertakings.
A phrase from Virgil's aneid.
At the bottom more Latin,
Novus Ordo Seculorum,
a new order of the ages,
another Virgilian phrase from the fourth egg clog.
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 Tyreseus.
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 hillbillyologist.
Julian is a well-known activist and attorney in San Francisco
with bachelor's and master's degrees in philosophy from Brown University.
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 PhD candidate in philosophy at Stanford,
finishing a dissertation on the philosophy of law,
where 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 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.
Actually, I should tell our listeners that a couple of years ago,
you followed a course with me on Jumbatista 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.
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.
Let me also mention that I did an entitled opinions monologue on Jumbatista'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 Pishobic,
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 6 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 co-optus.
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.
This for him represents a time when unbridled greed
or disalute self-interest of plutocrats, like Trump,
in an unholy alliance with the desperate and abandoned underclasses.
They primarily had a hand in creating 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 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.
And, of course, this isn't a matter of the dead but septured sovereigns
who still rule our spirits from their urns as Lord Byron had it in Manfred.
That's a great verse now.
The dead but septured sovereigns who still rule our spirits from their urns.
But the parallels are profound between the social conditions and forces at play an 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 re-establishment of monarchy
in particular, 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 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 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 republic's plural because of the significant changes, stages
in the form of Roman governance over that 500-year period ending 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.
Okay, 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 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 right wing.
We felt like I'm not making any assumptions.
But in any case, did you think that the time was right in this country of ours
for someone with Trump's appeal to actually, you know, 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?
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, 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 and aristocratic element and a democratic element.
And these elements of the constitutional structure also 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, you know, typically, you know, 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, you know,
the people, the mass of the people at large.
And what you can see in the Roman context is that this mixed constitutional form of government
is sort of inherently unstable 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.
So it was really that 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.
And I think because of that, the American constitution then contains a lot of the same similar element
subject to the same sort of social dynamics.
So when you look at the growing social inequality that remains unaddressed for a long time,
you can start to see and these were social inequality, you also mean economic inequality.
Economic inequality, yeah, and I should so see economic inequality, you 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 strong man.
And so he says, at first, men desire to be free of subjection and attain equality.
Witness the plebs in the aristocratic commonwealths, which finally turn popular.
Then they attempt to surpass their equals, witness the plebs in the popular commonwealths,
later corrupted into commonwealths of the powerful, something like what we're saying today.
Finally, they wish to put themselves above the laws.
Witness the anarchy's or unlimited popular commonwealths,
then which there is no greater tyranny for in them, there are as many tyrants as there are bold and
disalute men in the cities.
This is just a 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 remembered 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 winter lose for Trump,
we're in for a sort of wild and dangerous ride after a business 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 in the late Republic that led to Caesar's sort of
acclimation by the people and then his assassination?
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, you know, 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.
There 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 Grockus and his brother, Gaius Grockus.
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,
the hanging on to, you know, 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 Grockus and Gaius Grockus and 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.
And so you're not a fan of Caesar. When you look back at history, you could tell a positive flattering story about Genghis Khan and, you know, the Mongol empire being the largest, you know, land empire and world history, the economic system that they set up, but comes down Genghis Khan's brutal genocidal warlord.
And I think in a lot of ways 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.
Yeah, no, 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.
And he enslave some billion of them, bring some, I mean, we're talking about mass murder on a scale of something that would call for crimes against humanity today, but which glorified him as one of the great heroes of.
Yeah, 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.
And why did the people like him so much? I mean, the plebs.
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 papillaries party, which was the other party from the optimates, which were, you know, in the Senate more conservative figures.
Figured that 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 Selah were battling it out of 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 pulby and parents, but he rose to the heights of Roman society.
Ultimately, when he dies, Selah comes in and just brutally, you know, suppresses his faction.
Caesar's family, a wealthy family, survived the selen prescriptions.
And so in the next generation, here you have, again, a wealthy, boppish businessman who was sort of failed in a lot of his business pursuits.
It was able to, though leverage the political connection to talk about Caesar sounds like Trump, right?
To get a pro consulship in goal 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, this family had been a part of for a couple 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 hide 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 in the threat of prosecution is 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 Trump, who has his own money,
it's not beholden to the usual financial power elite in order to promote his own political career in 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, 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 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 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 as current systems broken.
I think that's where a lot of it comes from another thing, 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.
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 inter-contradictions to a democratic foreign government or a Republican foreign 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 an article, 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 government.
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, and 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 him 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 socio-economic inequality.
I mean, 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 feel, which, you know, Sanders very likely could have won on.
But there you go, the power lead 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 veeky and sense of a poetic character to 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,
let's the kind of social inequality, fester and ends up facilitating the rise of folks like Pompeii 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 public inside of the aisle, have let these kind of social inequalities fester to the point where in the political style, fester.
Okay, now let me put you on someone like him.
Okay, but would you include people like the Clintons, 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 by the scenes in our quote unquote democracy by these very powerful oligarchs.
So you get a point where, like I say, that power elite lets these kinds of social inequalities fester to the point where people don't see a solution within the current Democratic or public institutions for their problem.
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.
Relationships between abstract roles that institutions are made up of people, 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 and a society without disparate social classes.
That's not just an aim of ideal political morality, though.
In other way, to operate otherwise is sort of existential threat to our social self governance, I think is what we start to understand.
So do you think Rome offers 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?
I think we can, they did get citizenship. There were two movements to extend citizenship, a century or two BC to all the people on the Italian peninsula, and then I think with Caracada and the second century AD, there was an extension of Roman citizenship to the provinces and things like these were quite progressive moves on the part of Rome.
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 called the social war.
In a way pitted the poor Roman plebeian class against some of the non-Roman Italian allies, and as I was saying, Roman plebeians were pushing for land reform and some of that land reform would have met settling Romans in the time 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 on the allies under sort of pressure for land reform and not having their citizenship granted revolted. This was brutally suppressed, and the social war is so called because the Italian allies were...
We're called the social issue. Exactly. And so they were brutally repressing 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 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.
And so now the 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, and people on the left insisting on equity, and that the difference between equality.
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.
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 to democratic or public reforms of government.
So I think there's actually an interest convergence 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.
Yeah, but I'm wondering, Julian, how much it has to do with the will of a certain class where I'm thinking of a lot of philanthropic billionaires and tycoon's brutal crats if you want to 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 dynamic where the wealthy, well, there's wealth accumulation, that's the whole point of capital now.
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?
I think that's part of the picture. I think we could probably go in more of 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 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...
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 tale wagging.
The dog here 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 are threatened 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.
Well sure, that's not a surprise. We know from Roman history that there's fierce resistance on the part of the in franchise, 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 is 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 progressive populist transformations that were in favor of the people.
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.
It's a struggle, 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 and we had reconstruction era 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 100 years later, literally.
And then you see this new Jim Crow, this backlash, now we've mass incarceration still vases economic 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.
I think a third reconstruction of Obama 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, you know, the racism in America is still in certain segments of the population virulent as it, as it ever was, although more underground.
I don't know if laws can change that. And not even as it's 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 till students for fair admission last year, slowly over time equal protection has been watered down,
water down, water down to the point where, you know, in the soda my order descent, I thought it was
really quite profound. She points out in the descent to students for fair admission that racial
profiling has been found to be constitutional, but not from rev action. So you can be picked up
and jailed on the basis of your race, but not led into college. I mean, that's the state of our
equal protection jurisprudence today. So a lot of it to 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 going to 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 know, but there have been times, and there
are moments of inspiration. I think that's if we're going to break out of some of these cycles
that's precisely where we need to look. Do you have anyone in the American government that you
gives you hope that these kind of reforms or perhaps even revolutions?
You know, I was I was mentioning some of the for Bernie Sanders type politics that really
puts his finger on that. I think Cassia Cortez, the Zondra Cassia Cortez is a great example of
about 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. Yeah, no, no, no. Is that what you
had in mind? Like, yeah, I guess so because I also believe and I think this might be a
vicky in 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 as an American can get. And he went, he took his wife to Moscow on a honeymoon at the
time that says before the fall of the Berlin Mall. 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 like and do
all these things that Marxist governments have done elsewhere. It just would just go against the
great, I don't know, characterological or the kind of what you call the multi-day, you know, 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.
And I think it would have completely unheard of 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 course,
so on record, so, and the cycles. He also had a non-deterministic, non-mechanistic view of how
each culture evolves with its own unique time, its own unique temping and its own unique way.
And I think there's an essential flexibility and plasticity there as well. So what study of history,
what study of these cycles and study of this sort of Vicky and ideas about Roman history and
the 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.
Yeah. Well said, Julian. We've been speaking with Julian Davis. He's a 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 in title opinions, sharing your
knowledge of this late Republican moment that we're in if we're in such a moment at all.
Thank you so much Robert. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Robert Harrison for
in title opinions. Thanks for listening.
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