Is the Time of the Caesars Upon Us?

Only time will tell if Oswald Spengler’s philosophy of history is a predictive model for the lifecycle of civilizations, or merely an elegantly enunciated portrayal of all the world’s cultures. With the election of Donald Trump and the involvement of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, along with other billionaires, we have reason to continue to use Spengler’s model as a way to understand the present, and formulate an idea of what the future may hold. To understand our current era in Spenglerian terms, we must see it as passing into the next “phase” of history, rather than the accumulation of political forces bringing us to our current reality visa-à-vis the American regime.

Spengler does not just assert the trite platitude that “history repeats itself,” but that civilizations follow a predictable trajectory from birth, through maturation, and into a protracted period of decline. While he neatly fits Classical, Chinese, Indian, Western, and Middle-Eastern civilizations into his model, making long and intricately argued digressions to account for contingencies and idiosyncrasies of history, his concept doesn’t “work” unless history continues to play out accordingly. Thus far, it more or less has. In particular, mostly everything he predicted in The Hour Of Decision has come true, but those predictions were more generalized and not along a strict timeline like those he made in The Decline Of the West.

Specifically, Spengler referred to the 21st century as the time of the Caesars, and he situated Cecil Rhodes as the halfway point between Napoleon and the next great Caesar, comparing him to Flaminius of Rome, who was halfway between Alexander and Julius Caesar. What this means is that civilization is on a timeline in which certain developments happen necessarily, developing a culture through stages of growth exactly like a human being passing from infancy to toddlerhood to adolescence, etc. This is not to be likened to psychological development, which is subject to a great number of factors, but biological development, which is genetic and immutable. So according to Spengler’s model, the development of a culture is itself “genetic.” If Western Civilization does not progress according to his predictions, either it is not genetic and therefore merely contingent, or Spengler misapprehended the stages of maturation and, as a result, needs to be overhauled.

A philosopher of history then is much like a physician assessing civilization for markers of health and signs and symptoms of deterioration. Flaminius and Cecil Rhodes appearing in history when they did must therefore be considered as developmental milestones like speech, walking, or bowel and bladder control, and further milestones should be expected within a certain timeframe after these are reached. Spengler, as the Hippocrates of this philosophy, very specifically cited the “next century” — ours — as the time of the Caesars. In this 100-year period, great changes will occur in the political order of the West that will shape our civilization for at least several more centuries, if not a millennium. About this time, nearly a century in the future for Spengler, he says this:

Rhodes is to be regarded as the first precursor of a Western type of Caesar whose day is to come yet distant…the prelude of a future which is still in store for us and with which the history of West-European mankind will be definitely closed. He who does not understand that this outcome is obligatory and insusceptible of modification, that our choice is between willing this and willing nothing at all, between cleaving to this destiny or despairing of the future and of life itself…must forego all desire to comprehend history, to live through history or to make history.

Spengler elaborates on what the time of the Caesars might look like and the attributes necessary to make a Caesar. He emphasizes two indispensable components: money and personality. This needs to be understood in contrast to the components of leaders from a bygone era, namely: stock. Leaders were once bred, receiving a specific education and upbringing reserved for royalty and future leadership or, in other cases, honed their martial abilities through war and conquest. In the latter case, this often came with ingratiation into the good graces of the aristocracy and nobility, who were likewise bred for their positions and, in most cases, inherited their roles through blood. Not so for a Caesar, who mixed opportunism in with vast financial backing and a cult of personality that won them popularity with the masses, and not the nobility. In fact, usually their personality won the people over in spite of the elite. The opportunism, to be sure, is an effect of their personality. However, opportunism cannot bring one such history-striding accomplishments in an early stage of development, but only when civilization has reached a point of expansive hegemony. Furthermore, without significant development, which Spengler calls the era of the megalopolis, the wealth and mass of citizenry simply isn’t there to produce a Caesar.

America in 2024 has the ingredients necessary for a Caesar. Not only is America itself a megalopolitan nation, with LA, San Francisco, DC, and New York harboring many millions of people but, more importantly, they are and have been the dictators of politics and culture for at least 80 years. Equally as significant, America has amassed and continues to generate the most wealth in human history, within it residing the most billionaires of any nation. Though billionaires are politically important around the world for a number of rather obvious reasons, America has the important ones: Peter Thiel, Timothy Mellon, Elon Musk and, of course, Donald Trump. There are other billionaires doing economically important things, but these four matter to Spengler’s predictions.

We can think of these men as equivalent to the first Roman Triumvirate, though they form a Tetrarchy. Still, the “form,” as Spengler would say, is the same (the two biggest donors in 2016 were Robert Mercer and Vince McMahon, so perhaps we even have a first and second triumvirate). Four men with political interests of their own against the state. This does not mean they are in opposition to the state strategically, but rather that their interests are their own and not the prescribed interests of the state. Their goals, in other words, are not simply to work the inner mechanisms of state functioning, but rather to direct state functioning to their goals, whatever they may be. These men are highly politicized self-interested money-men whose operations have brought them, probably inadvertently, in direct conflict with the state. So while we have the right concoction, according to Spengler’s characterization of the Caesar, some crucial elements seem to be missing. This could mean a number of important things, but one of them might be that Spengler was wrong. The destiny of individual civilizations may not all be the same, they may not all follow the same morphology, and we may not be on an analogous timeline with Rome or any other civilization.

Trump wields a similar popularity to Caesar, perhaps even a greater popularity, and Musk too is a popular figure. However, Trump’s rise in popularity came through economics and television, and not warfare. Every other Caesar figure was a great general and conqueror, and some seem to think this is a fundamental component of Caesarism. I’m not totally convinced, for the end result — the stardom — and not how it was achieved may be the important thing here. Trumps admirers seem to be ravenous for him, some of them sitting in jail to this day on his behalf. Still, even the most die-hard Trump fan is light-years away from what the other Caesars’ adherents did for them: march, fight, kill, and die, some over the course of decades and some, in the case of Augustus and Marc Antony, even in his name after his death. We are not here to parse definitions, however, or strategize whether or not we are on the same trajectory as Greece, Rome, or France. Rather, I am pointing this out because these factors or the lack thereof may be decisive as to whether or not we are on the brink of great political change. If Trump or Musk’s lack of military bona-fides means they aren’t potential Caesar figures, then this is just another pointless election.

But it also means either we aren’t on Spengler’s timeline, or that America is in for the most tumultuous time in its history or, at the very least, since the Civil War. It’s hard to imagine America is currently on the brink of war, and the American system of government is specifically constructed to prevent the rise of a Caesar. The founding fathers were explicitly aware of how the Roman Republic fell, and they were admirers of Cicero and Cato, not Caesar and Augustus. And how did those two to men die? Cicero was killed during one of the many proscriptions, and Cato committed suicide as he watched the events of the Triumvirate unfold. Those events, for those who don’t know, were assassination and civil war.

So the founding fathers were very well aware that America may come to this position. All of the ancient political philosophers that they, and Spengler, read warned that democracy evolves into tyranny. So what this means for us today is that the state harbors a great deal of legal and lethal power to protect itself from being taken over, especially by more or less independent actors like Trump and Musk and the rest. The American Tetrarchy does not have an army, any intelligence agencies, or a taxpayer-funded legal organ to enforce their will. The state has all of these things, and they have been working overtime since 2016. In fact, because of Trump, the “deep state” has surfaced and bared its ugly face. Trump has been subjected to endless legal proceedings, having been both impeached and convicted of a felony. A biological agent was released to cause an economic and even public shutdown during the 2020 election, and they also tried to assassinate him at least once, possibly twice. This can mean at least two important things.

Either the state has no move now, and these were all acts of desperation, or else the state is willing and capable of doing anything to prevent him from becoming a true Caesar. Remember, Caesar was murdered — probably the most famous murder in history — by his political peers. But the Roman state was much different than ours. Only a short historical time before the Ides of March, the senate murdered one of the Gracchi brothers in a riot that involved senators breaking the legs off tables and chairs to use as clubs. Caesar was murdered by a conspiracy of senators who hid daggers in their cloaks. The US equivalent of this is much more subtle and sophisticated — we use assassins provoked and coached by the FBI or CIA and guard the president with a secret service that is in on the plan. It all looks like the random act of a lone gunman on television, and the media works at the behest of the state repeating the official story.

Augustus marched into the Senate under armed guard precisely because of the murder of Julius Caesar, and one way — unprecedented in American history — for Trump to assert his personal power over the state would be to appear both publicly and at state functions under private guard. As we’ve noted, the ingredients for a Caesar are currently in place. Trump already has the support of Erik Prince, who owns a private military contracting company, and he’s even hired a former British Special Air Services soldier as his personal bodyguard for the inauguration.

Still, there seem to be major problems that might make one worry Spengler was wrong. Worry because we need a Caesar, we need a strongman to bend the state to his will and liquidate the bad, corrupt actors. There are, however, reasons to believe we aren’t going to get one. It is yet to be seen whether the state is weak enough, or any single actor is strong enough, to supplant the current order with the rule of one man (or a small group) alone. Can they take this power peacefully? Or will it cause a civil war, with violence equal or similar to the French Revolution, two rounds of proscriptions, and the battle of Actium? Nothing about the current political climate or factionalism in America today, no matter how contentious, gives one reason to anticipate impending historic violence of this level. The question to ask here is if we can make the transition to Caesarism without this sort of violence or, if one believes otherwise, a case would have to be made for why in the next four years waves of blood equal to those preceding Augustus and Napoleon should be expected.

The state may be weak and unpopular to a degree, but it isn’t collapsing. It is still firmly in control of every single corner of the territorial US, it still has the police force of every county in the country carrying out its state-appointed duties, it still has complete control over the military. There are no fiefdoms within the US carved out by a rogue police force, there is no Colonel Kurtz with a fiercely loyal band of irregulars hiding out in some remote part of the Pacific Northwest. No US institutions are crumbling for lack of a budget.

More specific to the analogy of the Caesar figure, no one in the Tetrarchy has mobilized tens or hundreds of thousands of hardened veterans into his own personal force. No divisions from Iraq or Afghanistan are standing at attention at Trump’s rallies, armed and in full uniform, ready to protect him against opposing state forces. There was no revolution that recently liquidated our aristocracy, which in turn produced masses of bloodthirsty new recruits to Trump’s Grande Armée. We haven’t mentioned Hitler yet, and he deserves an analysis as a possible Caesar figure, but he had his own army of sorts who had been fighting in the streets for him for a decade before he came to power. Not only were these men veterans of the most brutal war in human history, many of them — including the fucking high commander — knew his name for his bravery and sacrifice in battle before he ever became a public figure.

We mentioned earlier that perhaps the fame and stardom is what is important, not how it was won. But when one becomes famous as a military general or soldier, it tends to give you a certain gravitas with men willing to kill and die for you based purely on the size of your balls. And as much as the way Trump confronting people in politics takes balls, it isn’t the same kind of balls. Mouthing off to someone is historically less prone to making legions of hardened killers want to die for you. Killing people, however, seems to do just that. And none of these guys have killed anyone, nor does it seem they’d like to.

You see, Caesar, Hitler and Napoleon didn’t just have legions of battle-hardened veterans ready to die for them. They had a teeming mass of disenfranchised citizens who’d lost everything looking for a strong man to give them back what was once theirs. And it wasn’t just theirs because they had paid for it by the sweat of their brow, it was theirs because their ancestors had worked and died for it for generations, building it up from nothing. For all of our problems, for all of the reasons we deserve to be angry, things haven’t gotten as economically bad for us as it was for them. This would be like putting everything together in a pan to make a Caesar, only to undercook it. In Rome, men returned from decades on campaign in foreign lands to find their estates sold off and occupied by landlords with whom they had no legal recourse to reclaim their property. These men formed into mobs who roamed the streets of Rome and got into partisan political brawls with factions representing the state. We’ve already mentioned the Germans fighting in the streets. The poverty and inflation of Weimar is world-famous, as is the French Revolution.

So either Spengler was wrong, or America is about to enter a period so tumultuous and violent it will be remembered as one of the most significant time-periods in world history. Still, this is enough to give us reason to continue to interpret the near-term via Spengler’s model. If Trump’s election does in fact indicate the time of Caesar, then we are passing from what Spengler called “Culture” into what he termed “Civilization.” Civilization is defined by rule of the Caesars, Imperialism, and cultural and artistic ossification. Next, we will elaborate on these and other terms and concepts, and discuss more the rise of the Caesars.