How Not to Save Democracy

Nicolas Guilhot

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How Not to Save Democracy

Nicolas Guilhot

Last spring, the Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin, a member of the January 6 Committee, was spotted with a copy of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae. It was the new Princeton edition, translated by Josiah Osgood, which comes with a new title, How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic. ‘I’m getting ideas from wherever I can,’ Raskin said.

According to Sallust’s account, Lucius Sergius Catilina was a morally corrupt yet charismatic figure who refused to concede defeat at the ballot box. A member of the Roman oligarchy burdened with debt, he surrounded himself with a crew of louche characters; he fomented riots and assembled an armed mob to march on the Capitol and burn the Senate. The coup was thwarted in extremis but the republic was in danger.

Will the January 6 Committee’s report help save the American republic? In 63 BC the Roman senators took exceptional measures to ensure their enemies were politically (and militarily) defeated. Today, their counterparts seem less interested in political victory than in taking the (ostensibly) neutral stance of a historian. Their model isn’t even Cicero – who as consul led the efforts to suppress the Catiline conspiracy – so much as Sallust.

Sallust claimed to write with ‘a mind free of political partisanship’. The chairman of the select committee, the Democratic congressman Bennie Thompson, has repeatedly said that the investigation ‘is not about politics. It’s not about party. It’s about the facts, plain and simple.’ The committee’s Republican vice-chair, Liz Cheney, warned her audience not to be ‘distracted by politics’.

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How Not to Save Democracy