Why did the chickens cross the road? Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon?
First answer: to come home to roost. Second answer: to have his army with him to fight the aforementioned chickens, i.e., those in the Roman Senate who were about to throw the book at him.
Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar, but he finds himself in a similar predicament. Caesar was immune from prosecution so long as he was proconsul in Gaul. Once he was out of office, he was going to get slammed. So it was either prison or start a civil war. It's getting clearer every day that Trump will get slammed once he's out of office, and so it's also clear that he's a desperate man who will do anything to keep those chickens on the other side of the road. The only way to do that is to stay in office, and if he does so, it will trigger civil war.
His survival requires that he do something desperate. If all his and the Russians' attempts to disrupt the election fail, his Rubicon will be his refusal to leave office. He doesn't have the army on his side, so we can take some comfort in that. But he has a lot of desperate people ready to do some crazy, delusional stuff on his behalf. It won't end well for him and them, but it neither will it end well for the rest of us.
It did not end well for the Romans. Civil Wars ravaged their empire for the next twenty years. But it didn't start when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The collapse of the Roman Republic was years in the making, and so it has been with us. For us, it traces back to the Vietnam War–to the arrogance, vanity, and delusions of American power that possessed Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and later Brzezinski, the Iran-contra conspirators, the neocons in the Bush administrations.
But they are not completely to blame. There was also the toxic political cynicism of Republicans from Gingrich to McConnell, from Limbaugh to Fox News, the venality, hubris, and shortsightedness of our financial elites, the nihilistic materialism of our cultural elites, the ignorance and gullibility of the bread-and-circuses Americans on their couches and in their conspiratorial chat rooms. All delusional in a peculiarly American way.
Historians will write about the trajectory from Vietnam to Trump as the the arc of American decline. It all could have played out so much differently. But the American character is essentially that of a headstrong adolescent. It leads Americans–from its best and brightest to its cranks in chat rooms–to think they know better when they haven't a clue, and they mistake foolishness for boldness, groupthink for loyalty, credulity for sincerity, wealth for intelligence, fanaticism for faith.
It's fitting that they elected a guy who in the most clownish, exaggerated way mirrors that in them. It sums us up as a nation so well. So it makes sense that he should be the guy who brings brings the post-Vietnam arc of American destruction to its logical end.
Maybe we survive this, maybe I'm underestimating the capacity of the American character to learn from its mistakes and to grow up. But it seems pretty clear to me that there are too many Americans who are so desperately invested in their delusions that they will not leave the scene quietly but will insist on having it their way or blow things up.
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