Following in the Footsteps of the Gracchi
Most of the problems we face are ones we have seen before. Whether the ravages of free trade, the ravages of rule by bureaucracy, leftist terrorism aided and abetted by the regime and oligarchs, many of our present woes have antecedents in history.
Amongst the most spiritually important of those is the tale of the Gracchi. In the late Roman Republic, it was the Gracchi brothers who had the courage to stand up to the decayed and avaricious optimates as those elites stole the land out from under the feet of Rome’s yeoman legionnaires. It was they—particularly Tiberius Gracchus—who paired the time horizons of the old aristocracy with the real populist’s love of the commons. Yes, they failed, in the end. The rapacious elites killed them. But not before they stood up for what is right, and tried doing so in the correct way.
America is now decidedly in need of a similar force. We need to chart a path forward that is neither plutocratic nor democratic, but rather of the sort our Founders wanted: one that combines the best qualities of an aristocracy and a republic, one that has long-term horizons and general civic participation amongst the capable and excellent.
Such is what I aim to use this Substack to achieve. Through writing about the key lessons of the Anglosphere—from Rhodesia to Virginia, McKinley to South Africa—I hope to show how oligarchy and democracy have led to most of our past woes, and how those can be avoided as we chart a bright path into the future.
To do so, I write free-to-read articles on general subjects, particularly on the history of colonialism and what it means for us, paid articles on specific subjects like the Brooke dynasty, or book reviews, and do a podcast called The Old World that comes out every Wednesday. If you are a free subscriber, you will get access to the podcast and most written articles. Paid subscribers get access to audio versions of each written article, and the ~1/3 new, written articles that are paywalled.
NOTE: Many of the book reviews we do require finding either old and out-of-print books or a large number of books. To help pay for that, we are an Amazon Associate, and so links to books are generally Amazon Associate links, and we receive a small commission, at no cost to you.
