My Take | Why ancient Rome is haunting contemporary America’s far right
They welcome Trump’s imperial presidency and unchecked executive power, seeing parallels with a transition from republicanism to empire
The Roman empire looms large in the imagination of American men, and the world should worry.
In 2023, TikTok’s algorithm uncovered a hitherto unsuspected trend emerging among Americans, mostly men, who seem to spend a lot of time thinking about ancient Rome. A more detailed analysis of TikTok data reveals they tend to favour the Roman empire over the republic, mostly because of its expanse, power and gladiators. Do they prefer imperialism over republicanism? Interestingly, for the American founders, it was the reverse. How times have changed.
So it should surprise no one that powerful leaders of the American far right fret more than most about Rome.
Steve Bannon, Trump’s top White House adviser in his first term, has a bust of Caesar on his studio desk from where he airs his hugely influential podcast. He has read Edward Gibbon’s entire History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which numbers more than 2,000 pages in the modern Penguin edition.
Elon Musk once tweeted while Joe Biden was still president: “Anyone feeling late stage empire vibes?”
The self-styled “Imperator of Mars” once used an AI generator to picture himself either as a Roman gladiator or soldier; it was hard to tell. He has named his latest son Romulus. And, fancying himself an original historical thinker, he posed a question which he probably thought had eluded scholars over centuries: “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy. It’s not completely out of the question. At some point in antiquity, a few ships of very competent soldiers … landed on the coast of Italy. Where did they come from?”
Didn’t a certain Roman poet named Virgil write something called the Aeneid in which the hero Aeneas fled the destroyed Troy, wandered around a bit, ended up in Italy and became the ancestor of Rome? There is even the opera Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell. But perhaps Musk preferred pop music, considering his dalliance with Canadian pop star Grimes.