Illustration by Edward Sorel.
President and emperor, America and Rome: the matchup
is by now so familiar, so natural, that you just can't help yourself—it comes
to mind unbidden, in the reflexive way that the behavior of chimps reminds you
of the behavior of people. Everyone gets it whenever a comparison of Rome and
America is drawn—for instance, the offhand allusion to welfare and televised sports
as "bread and circuses," or to illegal immigrants as "barbarian
hordes." If reference is made to an "imperial presidency," or to
the deployment abroad of "American legions," no one raises an eyebrow
and wonders what you could possibly be talking about. Invoke the phrase
"decline and fall" and thoughts turn simultaneously to the Roman past
and the American present.
To be sure, a lot of Rome-and-America comparisons are glib, and if you're
looking for reasons to brush parallels aside, it's easy enough to find them.
The two entities, Rome and America, are dissimilar in countless ways. But some
parallels really do hold up, though maybe not the ones that have been most in
the public eye. Think less about decadence, less about military might—and think
more about the parochial way these two societies view the outside world, and
more about the slow decay of homegrown institutions. Think less about threats
from unwelcome barbarians, and more about the powerful dynamics of a
multi-ethnic society. Think less about the ability of a superpower to influence
everything on earth, and more about how everything on earth affects a
superpower.
One core similarity is almost always overlooked—it has to do with
"privatization," which sometimes means "corruption," though
it's actually a far broader phenomenon. Rome had trouble maintaining a
distinction between public and private responsibilities—and between public and
private resources. The line between these is never fixed, anywhere. But when it
becomes too hazy, or fades altogether, central government becomes impossible to
steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between
imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient
Rome. America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no
other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities that
once were thought to be public tasks—overseeing the nation's highways,
patrolling its neighborhoods, inspecting its food, protecting its borders. This
may make sense in the short term—and sometimes, like Rome, we may have no
choice in the matter. But how will the consequences play out over decades, or
centuries? In all likelihood, very badly.
A little more than 50 years ago, the Oxford historian
Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a radical thinker and formidable classicist, decided to
take a close look at the change in connotation over five centuries of the Latin
word suffragium, which originally meant "voting tablet" or
"ballot." That change, he concluded, illustrated something
fundamental about Roman society and its "inner political evolution."
The original meaning went back to the days of the Roman Republic, which had
possessed modest elements of democracy. The citizens of Rome, by means of the suffragium,
could exercise their influence in electing people to certain offices. In
practice, the great men of Rome controlled large blocs of votes, corresponding
to their patronage networks. Over time Rome's republican forms of government
calcified into empty ritual or withered away entirely. Suffragium
meaning "ballot" no longer served any real political function. But
the web of patrons and clients was still the Roman system's substructure, and
in this context suffragium came to mean the pressure that could be
exerted on one's behalf by a powerful man, whether to obtain a job or to
influence a court case or to secure a contract. To ask a patron for this form
of intervention and to exert suffragium on behalf of a client would have
been a routine social interaction.
Now stir large amounts of money into this system. It is not a great
conceptual distance, Ste. Croix observes, to move from the idea of exercising suffragium
because of an age-old sense of reciprocal duty to that of exercising it because
doing so could be lucrative. And this, indeed, is where the future lies, the
idea of quid pro quo eventually becoming so accepted and ingrained that
emperors stop trying to halt the practice and instead seek to contain it by
codifying it. Thus, in the fourth century, decrees are promulgated to ensure
that the person seeking the quid actually delivers the quo.
Before long, suffragium has changed its meaning once again. Now it
refers not to the influence brought to bear but to the money being paid for it:
"a gift, payment or bribe." By empire's end, all public transactions
require the payment of money, and the pursuit of money and personal advancement
has become the purpose of all public jobs.
Looking back at the change, from ballot box to cash box, Ste. Croix composes
this epitaph: "Here, in miniature, is the political history of Rome."
The arc traced by suffragium covers not just the political history of
Rome but its social and military history. It goes to the heart of a question
that is only just starting to be asked in America: Where is the boundary
between public good and private advantage, between "ours" and
"mine"? From this question others follow: What happens when public
and private interests are not aligned? Which outsiders, if any, should be
allowed to put their hands on the machinery of government? How can governments
exert collective power if the levers and winches and cogs lie increasingly
outside public control?
The phenomenon with which all these questions intersect was called the
"privatization of power," or sometimes just "privatization,"
by the historian Ramsay MacMullen in his classic study Corruption and the
Decline of Rome (1988). MacMullen's subject is "the diverting of
governmental force, its misdirection." In other words, how does
it come about that the word and writ of a powerful central government lose all
vector and force? Serious challenges to any society can come from outside
factors—environmental catastrophe, foreign invasion. Privatization is
fundamentally an internal factor. Such deflection of purpose occurs in any number
of ways. It occurs whenever official positions are bought and sold. It occurs
when people must pay before officials will act, and it occurs if payment also
determines how they will act. And it can occur anytime public tasks
(the collecting of taxes, the quartering of troops, the management of projects)
are lodged in private hands, no matter how honest the intention or efficient
the arrangement, because private and public interests tend to diverge over
time.
Let's start with how the Roman system worked during
the many centuries when it actually did. By modern standards there were not a
great many officials or bureaucrats in Rome until late in the empire; the
administration and well-being of the capital and all the other cities and towns
depended on the talents and the largesse of the upper classes. A memorable
passage in Jérôme Carcopino's Daily Life in Ancient Rome describes what
happened every morning soon after Romans woke up, when all around the city
clients visited their patrons, and each was alert to the other's needs. On
those rare mornings when I've found myself sipping $15 orange juice at the Four
Seasons, I've enjoyed imagining the breakfast convergences at tables all around
me as an elite remnant of the old Roman dynamic. But to get Rome right you'd
have to extend the scene to every suburban Hyatt, every neighborhood diner;
you'd have to see these relationships governing every business transaction,
every trip to the doctor's office, every college application.
The patron-client relationship was so pervasive that it helps illuminate not
only Rome's social architecture but also, frequently, its way of conducting
foreign affairs. The term "client state" came into being for a
reason. As Julius Caesar fought his way through Gaul, he brought tribal
chieftains over to his side and described their professions of loyalty to
him—and thus to Rome—as those of clients to a patron. The relationships of the
Bush family with various world leaders have often been essentially personal.
The longtime Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin
Abdulaziz, spent so much time at Bush family gatherings that he came to be
known as Bandar Bush.
Patronage spilled over into communal adornment; it was in fact inseparable
from it. The Roman magnates competed with one another to endow the capital with
improvements. Rome's wealthiest class, the senatorial aristocracy, constituted
by one estimate two-thousandths of 1 percent of the population; then came the
equestrian class, with perhaps a tenth of a percent. Collectively these people
owned almost everything. Americans are well aware of the nation's worsening
income inequality, with those in the top 1 percent earning nearly 50 times more
a year than those in the bottom 20 percent. The average C.E.O. earns more than
400 times as much as a typical worker. In Rome, the gap between the elite and
everyone else was on the order of 5,000 or 10,000 to 1. ("Nothing is more
unfair than equality," observed a very comfortable Pliny the Younger, who
would have felt at home in many Washington circles.) The expectation in Rome
was that affluent citizens, as individuals rather than as taxpayers, should
provide for community needs. Did the city require another aqueduct? New roads?
A stadium? Some magnate would surely provide it—in return, implicitly, for a
measure of public power, and, of course, for ample public recognition.
Inscriptions on countless marble fragments attest to such generosity—an early
version of "Brought to you by … "
On Rome's edifice of private giving—whether with the seemliness of an Andrew
Carnegie or the vulgarity of a Donald Trump—an empire was built. The Roman
system was a remarkable contrivance. But it contained the seeds of its own
destruction. For one thing, it fostered an expectation that "others"
would always provide. If public amenities came into being through private
munificence—and if these in turn served to enhance private glory—then why
should the public pay for their upkeep? This way of doing business "did
not work for the common benefit of the overall urban fabric," writes one
historian, much less nurture a sense of common purpose and shared
responsibility. I've seen the same mind-set at work within my state,
Massachusetts, in hardscrabble mill towns whose philanthropic founding families
have departed, where local taxpayers resist the idea that support of libraries
and hospitals must now rest with the community as a whole. Moreover, even at
its most uncorrupted, the patronage system was greased by small considerations:
"It was a genial, oily, present-giving world," Ramsay MacMullen
writes.
Now gradually remove from all this any sense of public
spirit or public obligation and replace it at every level of government—in the
barracks, the courts, the city councils, the provincial prefectures—with an
attitude of "What's in it for me?" To see this transition in starkly
American terms, first consider the idealistic sensibility of a letter of
introduction written from France by Benjamin Franklin to George Washington in
1777, on a matter of public business: "The Gentleman who will have the
Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben He goes to
America with a true Zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and
rendring it all the Service in his Power. He is recommended to us by two of the
best Judges of military Merit in this Country."
For comparison, consider the more contemporary sentiments in proposals and
e-mails from Jack Abramoff's lobbying team, also on a matter of public
business: in this instance, mounting a political operation to reopen the
Speaking Rock Casino, in Texas, in return for millions of dollars in fees and
political contributions. In 2002, the Abramoff team explained to its clients
the Tigua Indian tribe: "This political operation will result in a
Majority of both federal chambers either becoming close friends of the tribe or
fearing the tribe in a very short period of time. Simply put, you need 218
friends in the U.S. House and 51 Senators on your side very quickly, and we
will do that through both love and fear." Abramoff, who would eventually
plead guilty to corruption charges, explained to his clients that favors might
need to be topped off: "Our friend … asked if you could help (as in cover)
a Scotland golf trip for him and some staff (his committee chief of staff) for
August. The trip will be quite expensive … (we did this for another member—you
know who) 2 years ago. Let me know if you guys could do $50 K."
This is the story MacMullen traces, as throughout the empire a lubricious
glaze of venality came to coat every governmental surface. I don't know how it
would be phrased in Latin, but one of Jack Abramoff's e-mails ("Da man!
You iz da man! Do you hear me?! You da man!! How much $$ coming tomorrow? Did
we get some more $$ in?") captures some of the spirit of public service in
the late empire. What accounts for the change? No one factor but a combination
of many, including the sheer growth in the government's administrative reach
and the resultant transformation of "public service" from the
rotating duty of the upper class into a lifelong career for a larger group. A
bronze plaque was affixed to a public building in Timgad, in Numidia (now
Algeria), a city built as a bastion against the Berbers, which literally
provided a recommended price list for payments to ensure the prosecution and
success of various kinds of litigation. We don't have anything exactly like
that now, I suppose, but have you ever received a fund-raising solicitation
from one of the political parties, with degrees of access and other perquisites
tied to specific contribution levels? Here's the Republican contribution
hierarchy for the 2004 elections, which I can't help visualizing as a Numidian
bronze plaque:
$300,000 Super Ranger
$250,000 Republican Regent
$200,000 Ranger
$100,000 Pioneer
Time and again imperial decrees throughout the later empire attempt to put a
stop to skimming, extortion, and the illicit use of office—or, failing that, to
codify what may be permissible. But the emperors are standing athwart the tide,
and the imperial pronouncements have a doomed, forlorn, ritual feel to them.
Modern newspaper headlines along the lines of congress votes new
curbs on lobbyists convey something of the same formulaic quality.
How does the buying and selling of influence hollow out government? Some
make the argument that, whatever its moral shortcomings, the profit motive,
including its corrupt dimension, is in fact an efficient economic mechanism: it
gets things done. As one character argues in the movie Syriana, corruption
is why we win. But as MacMullen points out, for a government to be
effective on a national or an imperial scale, there needs to be a presumption
that information is traveling accurately up and down the administrative chain
of command, and that every link in the chain between a command and its
execution is reliable and strong. Putting power into private hands frequently
ends up breaking that link. Making the exercise of power contingent on payment
by definition breaks the link.
Privatization today often makes itself felt in ways
that would have turned no heads in ancient Rome. Naturally, it still includes
influence peddling and bribery and the buying and selling of public office.
Former California representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now in
jail, infamously drafted a "bribe menu" on official stationery,
linking the size of defense contracts he would deliver with the size of
payments he received. Representative Bob Ney, implicated in the Abramoff
scandals, resigned his congressional seat, having been reportedly warned by his
majority leader that if he stayed and lost his seat for his party, he
"could not expect a lucrative career on K Street"—that is, he would
jeopardize any future as an influence peddler, what the Romans called a suffragator.
(All for naught in Ney's case: he's now in jail.) And as in Rome, privatization
still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies,
empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions. The Federal
Emergency Management Agency, staffed by inexperienced political appointees and
unable to cope with the Hurricane Katrina disaster, is only the most prominent
instance.
But the dominant form of privatization today is something relatively new, at
least in its dimensions. Government on its stupendous modern scale—regulating
every industry; re-distributing treasure from one sector of society to another;
forecasting the weather and mapping the human genome—simply did not exist in
ancient Rome. Because the extent of government is larger, privatization has
more scope. Its most pervasive form is perfectly legal: the hiring of
profit-making companies by the thousands to do government jobs. The ostensible
motives may be pure, but the result is to diminish government's capacity. For
one thing, government loses the ability to perform certain functions; it's hard
to un-privatize. Moreover, the effect in every case is to insert an
independent agent, with its own interests to consider and protect, into the
space between public will and public outcome—a dynamic that represents a
potential "diverting of governmental force" far more systemic and
insidious than outright venality.
Privatization along these lines has occurred most decisively in America and
Britain. In 1976 a book was published in the United States called The Shadow
Government, written by Daniel Guttman and Barry Willner; its subtitle spoke
ominously of "the government's multi-billion-dollar giveaway" of
decision-making authority. Government agencies, the authors warned, were
farming out various functions to high-priced consultants, secretive think
tanks, and corporate vested interests—accountable to no one! And
"outsourcing" was not the only issue. Some parts of the government,
they went on, might even be sold off completely—turned into private businesses!
The process was "cloaked in contractual and other formal approvals by the
various executive departments," but make no mistake: it amounted to
nothing less than a "drive to merge Government and business power to the
advantage of the latter."
A little more than a decade later, the shadow government was out of the
shadow. There is a plausible rationale for privatization—one that often makes
sense in the short run and for specific tasks. Private contractors may be able
to operate more efficiently than government agencies do. Marketplace signals
may prove to be more direct and powerful than bureaucratic ones. And why
shouldn't the government hire outside specialists for help with certain chores,
the way any household or business does? In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan created a
presidential commission on privatization to study not how the boundary between
public and private might be bolstered but how it could be pushed out of the way
even further, to give private interests more opportunity to move in. The same
idea surfaces in the "re-inventing government" movement taken up by
the Clinton administration: "We would do well," one proponent wrote,
"to glory in the blurring of public and private and not keep trying to
draw a disappearing line in the water." Since then privatization has
affected every aspect of American public life.
The most visible surge in government outsourcing has
come in the realm of the military. Rome hired barbarian soldiers to make up for
its acute manpower shortages (not a good long-run solution, history would
show). America is hiring private military companies for the very same
reason—not the Visigothi or the Ostrogothi but the Halliburtoni and Wackenhuti.
Conan the Barbarian has become Conan the Contractor. But in fact every facet of
"personal security" is increasingly in the hands of private business.
It was not until the mid–19th century that America's urban governments, by
setting up local police forces, managed to make an ordinary person's safety a
matter of real public responsibility. This was a major advance, though perhaps
only temporary. No one with money relies on such guarantees any longer (nor did
they in Rome, where police forces as we know them were virtually nonexistent).
More and more people have withdrawn into protected enclaves. Private security
is a major growth industry; in 1960 there were more police officers than hired
security guards in America, whereas today private guards outnumber the police
by a margin of 50 percent. Individuals may owe nominal allegiance to a town or
a state, but their true oath of fealty is to Securitas or Guardsmark.
One of the chief obligations of any government is simply to dispense
justice—to resolve disputes, oversee legal business, mete out punishment. These
functions were once held in private hands. After a stint as a public
responsibility, they are now migrating back. Lawyers and clients increasingly
shun the civil courts—congested, expensive, fickle—and instead buy themselves
some private arbitration, provided by a growing cadre of profitable
"rent-a-judge" companies. As for the criminal-justice system, those
sentenced to prison may very well do their time in a private facility, run on
behalf of state and federal governments and operated by a company with some
former public official in its management to grease the wheels. Faced with
rising numbers of inmates, and unwilling to raise taxes to build more public
prisons, governments at all levels have found that the easy, cost-effective way
is to turn the prison industry over to the private sector: to a behemoth such
as the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, or to one of many
smaller companies.
America's public colleges and universities are fast
losing their public character. These institutions were created under the terms
of an act signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, providing federal land grants to
the states as a basis for public financing of higher education. But state
support is diminishing. Nationwide, state legislatures are picking up only
about two-thirds of the annual cost of public higher education. For the
University of Illinois, the figure is 25 percent. For the University of
Michigan, it's 18 percent. What makes up the difference in funding? To a large
degree it's money from private donors and private corporations, creating an
incipient "academic-industrial complex" at public and private
institutions alike. You can't escape the signs. At the University of California
at Berkeley, one administrator is officially known as the Bank of America Dean
of the Haas School of Business. But for a conviction or two, Rice University
would have had a Ken Lay Center for the Study of Markets in Transition, endowed
by the late former chairman of Enron. Much money for universities comes with
strings attached—for instance, the power to push research in certain directions
and perhaps away from others, and the ownership of patents deriving from
sponsored research.
Sociologists have a term for what is occurring: they call it the
"externalization of state functions." Water and sewage systems are
being privatized, as are airports and highways and public hospitals. Voucher
programs and charter schools are a way of shifting education toward the private
sector. The protection of nuclear waste is in private hands. Meat inspection is
done largely by the meatpacking companies themselves. Americans were up in arms
last year when they learned that DP World, a company in the United Arab
Emirates, would soon be in control of the terminals at half a dozen major U.S.
seaports—only to discover that the privatization of terminal operations at
American ports had begun three decades ago, and that 80 percent of them were
already operated by foreign companies, the largest of which is Chinese. Serious
proposals to privatize portions of Social Security have been on the table, and
the new Medicare prescription-drug plan effectively puts an enormous government
program into the hands of private insurance and drug companies.
Many services that used to be provided free of charge
now must be paid for—government by user fee. Detailed statistical data from the
Census Bureau and other agencies were once available to everyone; now they're
being sold, mainly for marketing purposes, and often at prices that only
private corporations can afford. The vaults of the Smithsonian were once open
to documentary-film makers regardless of provenance and financing. Now an
agreement between the Smithsonian and the cable company Showtime has created
something called the Smithsonian Networks, which has jurisdiction over, and
priority access to, certain kinds of material.
Is there any government function that can't be transferred to some private
party? A considerable amount of tax collection is now done, in effect, by
casinos; rather than raise taxes to pay for services, legislatures legalize
gambling and then take a rake-off from the profits earned by private casino
companies. It's "tax farming" for the modern age, recalling the hated
Roman practice of selling the right to collect taxes to private individuals
(including the apostle Matthew in the Gospels), who were then allowed to keep
anything over what they had agreed to collect for the government. As the recent
revelations about torture have made clear, even official interrogations for
national-security purposes have been outsourced—in this instance to other
countries through the process known as "extraordinary rendition." The
sale of naming rights for public facilities and other amenities attracts notice
mostly for the ungainly nomenclature that results—mutants such as the
Mitsubishi Wild Wetland Trail, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx,
and Whataburger Field, in Corpus Christi. To attract more corporate
underwriting, the Department of the Interior has proposed that America's
national parks be liberally opened up to the sale of naming rights. No one is
suggesting that there will soon be a J. Crew Cape Cod National Seashore. But
might there be a Sherwin-Williams Painted Desert Trailhead?
An analyst at Johns Hopkins observes,
"Contractors have become so big and entrenched that it's a fiction that
the government maintains any control." One obvious recent example is the
rebuilding effort in Iraq. To supply the army or provide other services,
traders and contractors often traveled with Roman legions; Julius Caesar had
such a person with him during the Gallic Wars, explicitly "for the sake of
business." There may have been no alternative to giving the reconstruction
job in Iraq to private corporations, including giant combines such as Bechtel
and Halliburton, but the result has been an effort that defies management or
accountability. The evidence of widespread corruption in the Iraq rebuilding
effort is beyond dispute. Corruption aside, private companies are exempt from
many regulations that would apply to government agencies. The records of private
companies can't be obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They can
use foreign subsidiaries to avoid laws meant to restrain American companies.
Before the war, Halliburton itself used subsidiaries to do business with Iran,
Iraq, and Libya, despite official American trade sanctions against all three
countries.
More and more secret intelligence work—translation, airborne surveillance,
computing, interrogation, analysis, reporting, briefing—is being farmed out to
private entities. Not only is the intelligence community becoming further
fragmented, but, because the new jobs pay so well, a "spy drain" is
drawing officers out of the public sector and into the private market. And the
drain isn't restricted to spies: at least 90 former top officials at the
Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Homeland Security
are now working for private companies in the domestic-security business.
Meanwhile, the government seems poised to turn the job of border police over to
multi-national contractors, a task that will in turn be subcontracted out to
dozens of smaller companies. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrop
Grumman were among the corporations that indicated they would submit bids to
build a high-tech "virtual fence" along the Mexican border, with an
array of motion detectors, satellite monitors, and aerial drones. (Boeing
eventually won.) A Homeland Security official conceded the abdication of
government leadership, saying to the companies, "We're asking you to come
back and tell us how to do our business."
One study from the late 1990s suggests that the "privatization
rate"—the rate at which public functions are being outsourced—is roughly
doubling every year. On paper the federal workforce nationwide, leaving the
military aside, appears to total about two million people. But if you add in
all the people in the private sector doing essentially government jobs with
federal grants and contracts, then the figure rises by 10.5 million. The
commercialization of government probably explains why so many Washington
entities are now referred to as shops: "lobby shop,"
"counterterrorism shop." There's no question that in certain ways the
private sector can outperform the public sector. Users of Federal Express, U.P.S.,
and DHL would sooner renounce citizenship than go back to relying only on the
U.S. Postal Service. The problem is the cumulative effect of privatization
across the board—projected out over decades, over a century, over two—and the
leaching of management capacity from government. This is the same "misdirection"
of government force that MacMullen discerns in Rome: easier to observe in
retrospect, when the whole film is available, than in the brief, real-time clip
any of us is allowed to see.
The activities of government are, in effect, being
franchised out. You can't help lingering over the concept of
"franchise," wondering what a latter-day Geoffrey de Ste. Croix would
make of it. Like suffragium, the word originally had to do with notions
of political freedom and civic responsibility. Derived from the Old French word
franc, meaning "free," it later came to be associated with the
most fundamental political freedom of all: to exercise your franchise meant to
exercise your right to vote. Only much later, in the mid–20th century, did the
idea of being granted "certain rights" acquire its commercial
connotation: the right to market a company's services or products, such as
fried chicken or Tupperware. Today, to have a franchise on something is in
effect to have control over it.
Looking at the history of the word, it's tempting to write this epitaph:
Here, in miniature, is the political history of America.
Buy
Are We Rome? on Amazon.com.
Cullen Murphy is Vanity Fair's
editor-at-large.