The authors of a new anthology argue that we can understand and counter authoritarianism’s rapid expansion today by looking at culture in the time of Julius Caesar.

Authoritarianism is on the rise across the globe, including in the United States. In April 2025, NPR reported that in a survey of over 500 political scientists, the majority believed that the United States was moving from a liberal democracy toward authoritarianism. And that was before June, when regular Americans took to the streets in record numbers to oppose it. Over 5 million turned out to support the “No Kings” marches across the country on June 14 to protest Trump’s policies and a “military parade” on his birthday, budgeted at $45 million. But where can we turn to for resistance strategies? Might the historical rise of authoritarianism in the ancient world help us understand its rapid expansion today? A freely downloadable book by top ancient historians across the globe, How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (De Gruyter, 2025), argues that it can.

In the new anthology, edited by Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, David Rafferty, and Christopher J. Dart, the authors collectively claim that readers can use Ancient Roman history to make sense of the rapid descent into fascism in the United States. A key reason for choosing Rome as a parallel to America is the extraordinary nature of the moment we are living in.

“Before now, no long-established democracy has fallen to internal causes except Rome,” the editors told Hyperallergic in a statement. “Several of the old, consolidated democracies around the world are in trouble, and political science has only recently started to confront that as a problem; they are used to thinking of consolidated democracies as pretty safe.”
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What is the value of history and art history as disciplines in this conversation? Over the last 100 years, dictators and oligarchs have often recycled the aesthetics of power from the art and archaeology of Ancient Rome. Benito Mussolini seized upon the art, archaeology, and recognizable semiotics of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, as well as the fasces and the SPQR symbol, in order to visually legitimize his own fascist rule from 1922 to 1945. Trump has similarly praised Fascist Italy and Ancient Rome for their contributions “to civilization and human progress,” and in January resuscitated an executive order encouraging the use of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture to promote “beautiful federal civic architecture.” Neoclassicism is back in, and the revival is being used to once again signal the supremacy of Western ideals.

https://hyperallergic.com/1037152/an-ancient-roman-guide-to-donald-trump-authoritarian-playbook/