The beginning of the end for the Roman Republic, in common memory, occurred when Julius Caesar led his legions from their colonization of Gaul back to Rome and on January 10, 49 BCE, crossed the small Rubicon River, a legal boundary beyond which a general could not lead his military followers.
Legend has it that as Caesar urged his horse into the river he said alea iacta est! – “The Die is Cast!” The result of his crossing the river was civil war, then his assassination, then another civil war and then the replacement of the Republic with an empire.
So, the phrase “to cross the Rubicon” has come to mean to trigger a tipping point of lawlessness from which the society cannot recover.
Yesterday, another American thought leader, a young Charlie Kirk, was assassinated for speaking his beliefs, for his politics, for acting on his rights. He was censored – silenced – for saying the wrong things in the mind of his assassin.
In my state of Minnesota, the other month, a civic minded politician elected to our state House of Representatives, a Democrat and her husband, were assassinated in their home by a man, whom we can only consider deranged. His beliefs and motivations, the nature of his psychosis most likely, we don’t know and may never know, as he has a right under our constitution not to speak at his forthcoming trial.
We also more recently here in Minnesota were existentially victimized by what should be considered an assassination – in this case, the intentional murder of children during a worship service as an expression of self-serving rage and hatred by their dysphoric murderer.
Donald Trump was shot by one would-be assassin and was targeted by another.
Luigi Mangione assassinated the CEO of United Healthcare, most likely out of political opposition to the company’s practices, lawful practices, generating a hatred and a self-righteousness that murder is justified when the life taken is evil incarnate.
Has the U.S. crossed a Rubicon protecting its republican virtue from violence? A crossing that has opened for us an historic new era of factional fratricide, where citizenship is replaced by a vindictive tribalism?
Is American civilization at risk?
Where there is no social contract or accepted constitution, providing for a social capital of peace, mutual assistance, goodwill, preservation and comity, then there is no common standard of right and justice, no common rule of what must not be attempted. Then, too, there is no authority to judge among people who is right and who is wrong and have that judgment accepted by the community as lawful. Then, rule by personal diktat – “my” truth – enforced by repression replaces social justice with the law of the jungle – eat or be eaten; kill or be killed. Or as Thomas Hobbes wisely predicted: “The life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Is that what Americans subconsciously want for their grandchildren? Taking revenge on those who offend us with their thoughts and words?
As John Locke wrote, when there is a state of enmity, malice, violence and mutual destruction and when there is the design or use of force upon the person of another, there is no common judge to adjudicate between aggressor and victim. There is only “an appeal to the God of Heaven” and war.
Locke affirmed: “Where there is no judge on earth, the appeal lies to God in Heaven.” And we might add, an appeal to force and violence – to war – here on earth.
May the Lord – and all his saints – deliver America from such evil.