Donald Trump and the Establishment's Ides of March

The Ides of March are here. Over two millennia ago, on this day, Julius Caesar was struck down in the forum of Rome by his inveterate enemies.

Well, it was fairly clear they weren’t fans. Stabbing knives are a bit of a giveaway.

Since that time, commentators have tended to see the event in one of two ways. There are those to whom the assassins were making a last-gasp stand in defence of the republican virtues and time-honoured freedoms of Rome against a would-be military dictator. Others instead see the conspirators as reactionaries trying to defend an old and outdated dispensation that needed a hero to overthrow it.

My own view is of the “plague on both your houses” variety. Brutus, Cassius and their mates were aristocrats of the old elite that had run, and indeed owned, Rome for centuries. They weren’t there to defend ancient liberties, or at least ancient liberties for anyone but themselves and their class. The common man? He was of interest to them only insofar as he could further or resist their plans for themselves.

As for Caesar, he was a megalomaniac with all sorts of weird delusions – I mean, what kind of man writes his autobiography in the third person? An aristocrat himself, he won an enviable reputation – for those who envy military reputations – by waging bloodthirsty war on the inhabitants of Gaul, who’d done him no harm at all but provided him with a good ladder towards power.

Then he’d used his military might to seize that power back in Rome.

Isn’t that so like what’s happening on the Ides of March in 2016?

The primary elections in the US today are pretty much the last gasp for the old American elite – the people we tend to refer to as the Republican Establishment – to try to block the road to power of a megalomaniac who, like Caesar, is convinced that only he can save his nation from itself. Unlike Caesar, Donald Trump is no military leader. On the other hand, to be a military leader Caesar had to raise millions to fund his legions; Trump too has raised colossal financial power to fund his legions of foot soldiers. Not all that different.

Are the Republicans heading off into a long dark night?
And will they drag the rest of us with them?

Caesar’s violence was of a different order. But Trump’s movement is dipping that way now, with increasing violence at his rallies. And isn’t it interesting that they are rallies? These aren’t forums for debate, they are mass adoration sessions where the providential man tells his followers what to believe, and they reward him with their worship in return.

A major difference is that the freedoms at stake aren’t merely those of an elite. One of the most striking, and admirable, characteristics of the United States is that it has a remarkable Constitution. A mere 7000 words long, it laid the foundation for a system in which no one could exert excessive power, because another body would counterbalance theirs and keep it under control.

I’m not aware of any time in history where that admirable state of affairs has ever been under greater threat than today. Sam Brownback, who is to the state of Kansas what Trump is to the entire nation (but with the additional flaw of actually being in office), has signed into effect legislation that would allow him to impeach any judge that struck down a law that he favoured. The chances are that such a step, which denies the possibility of an independent judiciary, would be thrown out by the Supreme Court in any government led by a president committed to upholding the Constitution; but would even the Supreme Court be able to resist the bullying of a President Trump, with his contempt for the Constitution?

You don’t believe he has contempt for the Constitution? Look at what he has been saying about the media. He hates journalists, he says. If elected, he claims, he will bring in legislation that would make it considerably easier to sue media outlets for libel. In other words, this keen supporter of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms, wants to circumscribe the effects of the First, which upholds the right to freedom of speech.

Sadly, aligned against him are only the tired old figures of the Republican establishment, as weirdly Conservative as he is. They are unlikely to succeed tonight in defeating Trump. In that respect, they are once more not unlike the conspirators against Caesar: although they did assassinate him, the act only rebounded on them, as Caesar’s party rallied its forces and crushed the assassins in war, thus ending the Republic anyway and ushering in the autocratic rule of the Roman Empire.

When it comes to Trump, there really is only one hope left of stopping him. A diminutive, not particularly trustworthy or popular woman, Hillary Clinton. An unlikely and uninspiring figure to be the last best hope of American liberty.

But, hey, we don’t always choose the weapons to defend ourselves. We just have to reach for the best we can find when we’re up against an urgent threat. That’s likely to be Hillary, and boy do we need her. 

Because being Trumped is about as threatening, and as urgent, as it gets.

In praise of praise for a place called home. However flat.

A journalist doing a piece about a village lost in the back of beyond is said to have interviewed, amongst others, the oldest inhabitant.

“Have you been here all your life?” he asked.

“Not yet,” replied the old man.

Since this morning I’ve been inspired by a book by a FaceBook friend, Cheryl Unruh, Flyover People. It’s an edited compilation of pieces she wrote for The Emporia Gazette and celebrates the joys of living a life in Kansas, which Unruh is clearly well on the way to doing (but hasn’t yet).

The title itself is appealing. When my (French) stepson came to live in England, kids at school started calling him “Frog”, displaying the innate kindness that children like to show to newcomers everywhere. Fortunately, he took to the name and started using it of himself, at which point it stopped being a weapon to tease him with. There's nothing better, when faced with a term of disparagement, than to adopt it and wear it with pride, as Unruh has done with the notion of a flyover state, a place one leaves mercifully below oneself as one travels by plane from one place of considerably more interest, to another.

It was an attitude I used to share at a time when, having made a number of visits to the US, I realised that I had only once set foot in a state without a seaboard. But then I visited St Paul, Minnesota, and fell in love with it. That made me realise that some of those in-between places deserve a better reputation than they enjoy. Unruh certainly gives me that feeling about Kansas.

“We know home when we see it,” she tells us, and as well as being charmed by the pen portraits she paints, I was amused by the sentiment. It’s hard to imagine a life that contrasts more strongly with my own. My grandmother once accused me of having completely filled the letter “B” pages of her address book, I’d moved so much; and though I’ve lived principally in Western Europe, the places I’ve called home have wandered across four language communities.

So it’s fascinating to read someone who displays a true rootedness. And that rootedness goes deep, is expressed in a boundless love for her rectangular state. I have to confess, but then I have a nasty sceptical mind, that sometimes I feel she protests too much, making a virtue of the sheer lack of what outsiders would see as features in her state. But there’s no doubting the sincerity of affection with which she takes us deep into the finest details, describing her husband taking photos of the pinpoints of light made by insects feeding on plant leaves. Nor can one be anything but inspired by the descriptions at the other end of the scale, of the immensities of skies of every shade of blue, forming a bowl over the vast swaths of varied greens on the plains beneath them.

The plains. That surely is the hallmark of Kansas, known even to people who know as little about the state as I do. It’s flat.

Members of the Kansas flatness research team at work

Its flatness was put to the test by a group of geographers from Texas and Arizona, Mark Fonstad, William Pugatch and Brandon Vogt. They set up a definition of flatness based on the ratio between the major and minor axes of an ellipse, as many surfaces can be approximated by ellipses or parts of them. 

This is true, in particular, of the surface of Kansas, and that of a pancake.

Since, sadly, they couldn’t gain access to “either a Kansas-sized pancake or a pancake-sized Kansas”, they had to resort to mathematical techniques to compare the two. I quote without comment the authors’ own words at this point, as they seem self-explanatory: “for both Kansas and the pancake, we approximated the local ellipsoid with a second-order polynomial line fit to the cross-sections.”

Who could disagree that this was an eminently satisfactory approach?

“We purchased a well-cooked pancake,” they inform us, “from a local restaurant,” and proceeded to microscopical analysis. 

“The importance of this research dictated that we not be daunted by the 'No Food or Drink' sign posted in the microscopy room,” a sentiment we can only applaud, as it granted us insight into a matter that might otherwise have remained a mystery. 

The mathematical index of flatness they used would give a value of 1.000 for perfect flatness. On this basis, the pancake scored 0.957, “which is pretty flat, but far from perfectly flat.”

What about Kansas? The state’s cross-section presented a problem.

“The state is so flat that the off-the-shelf software produced a flatness value for it of 1,” the authors point out. “This value was, as they say, too good to be true, so we did a more complex analysis, and after many hours of programming work, we were able to estimate that Kansas’s flatness is approximately 0.9997.”

There are results of scientific experiment that are ambiguous or uncertain. This is not one of them. This is conclusive.

“That degree of flatness might be described, mathematically, as ‘damn flat.’”

The conclusion? “Simply put, our results show that Kansas is considerably flatter than a pancake.”

The proof

There's nothing flat about Uruh’s writing, though. I haven’t finished the book yet, though I shall soon. And I’ve no doubt about her claim that the sheer flatness of the landscape makes the Kansas skyscapes all the more breathtaking.

The upside of flatness