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.