Tiberius Gracchus and Aristocratic Populism
Why the Present Focus
Plutarch, in his "Life of Romulus," outlines how Romulus organized Roman society with the first patricians at the pinnacle, serving the state, while placing plebeians beneath them, carrying out the state's work, ranging from agricultural labor to the upper echelons of commerce. Explaining the intent of Romulus, Plutarch said, “Romulus thought it the duty of the foremost and most influential citizens to watch over the more lowly with fatherly care and concern, while he taught the multitude not to fear their superiors nor be vexed at their honours, but to exercise goodwill towards them, considering them and addressing them as fathers[.]”
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Tiberius Gracchus
Key in that passage is the focus on duty. The patricians were expected not just to be wealthy and atop the societal pyramid, but also to fulfill their duties to the lower orders by standing up for them and treating them with the respect and care a father would his children; in other words, to engage in paternalistic behavior. Similarly, the plebians had a duty to the patricians, being expected to not envy their honors but rather understand each had his place in society and should fulfill it honorably and to the best of his abilities rather than lusting after the position of another.
Despite the change from monarchy to republic a few generations after Romulus, a tale best told by Livy, the same basic structure lasted for at least seven centuries. The patrician class was, even in Caesar’s day, generally committed to doing its duty to Rome by striving in the cursus honorum1 and serving the Republic’s empire,2 generally eschewing business in favor of service to the state,3 though by that point “service” had become highly remunerative. Similarly, the plebeians were still largely organized around business and commerce, with the best-of plebeians, the equites, engaging in shipping and highly lucrative tax farming, while the worst off labored in the fields much as the plebeians of Romulus’ day had done centuries before.
But what had fallen apart by then was the concept of duty between and across the social orders. In fact, by the time of Caesar, the Roman nobility had been replaced with something of a plutocracy. The ruling elite included not just the old families like the Julii of Caesar, but rapacious plebeian plutocrats like Crassus who were in a position of power merely because of wealth, not good breeding and bravery on the battlefield. There was no nobility of spirit in Crassus, nothing like the fatherly sense of duty Plutarch describes. Similarly, the poor of Rome were by that time an urban rabble, not a sturdy yeomanry. What politicians and policies it advocated for were generally rooted not in the noble desire for betterment of the res publica but in the mob’s lust for the wealth of others paired with the welfare-demanding mindset so common to the urban poor today.
So, though the basic structure of society remained the same, the good qualities of that structure had faded. Whereas once the Roman state was, theoretically, composed of mutually reinforcing duties between noble and common, top and bottom, it was quite different by the time of Caesar, instead being led largely by plutocrats who ruled over a vast territory of maltreated imperial subjects and slave-farmed plantations, while an urban rabble agitated for a more generous grain dole.
But though Caesar’s time is the best-known period of republican decay, given that it is what led to the Caesars, the decay had set in long before, during the time of Tiberius Gracchus.
Gracchus, as a reminder, was a member of one of Rome’s oldest families and also a tribune. I have written much about him before,4 and so needn’t tell his full history here, but what is important about Tiberius Gracchus is that he took his twin roles seriously.5 On one hand, he was an old stock Roman and so did care deeply about the state’s continuance and survival. Unlike Caesar, another patrician who sided with the common man, he wasn’t going to cross the Rubicon and burn it down out of a sense of personal advantage and honor.6 But, unlike most of his noble compatriots, Tiberius also took his Romulus-derived responsibilities to the people of Rome seriously. So, when he saw former yeoman legionnaires homeless and starving because they had served for years away from their farms in the Punic Wars, with the plutocrats then buying up their neglected farms and staffing them with foreign slaves rather than Romans, he used his powers as a tribune to fight against that trend.7
Hence his land bill, about which I have written before. As Plutarch describes, it was a moderate attempt at restoring the fortunes of the unfairly dispossessed yeomen of Rome while also not unjustly confiscating the wealth of his rich political enemies, as both Marius and Sulla were to do in the next generation, and Antony and Octavian were then to do in the generation after that. Instead, his land bill would simply have enforced the law and reclaimed public lands being illegally trespassed upon by the estates of the wealthy, and provided small farms composed of those lands to the yeomen of Rome. In short, Tiberius understood he had a duty to the commoners as a noble and acted upon that duty instead of ignoring it for the sake of personal gain.
Unfortunately for Rome, Tiberius was, by that point, one of the last flowerings of Romulus’ vision. The others of his class were less focused on duty to the commons, or even on honorable service to the state, and instead on personal wealth and honor.8 So, they killed him and his supporters in the street, and did the same to his brother Gaius when he tried enforcing a vision like that of Tiberius. Rome then became a boiling kettle that first sounded under Marius and then exploded under Caesar, in the end bringing down nearly all of the patrician families who had been so unyielding for generations.9
Aristocratic Populism
Though Tiberius failed, his memory matters because he shows what republics often need to remain vital and avoid the descent into mob rule or plutocratic wealth extraction, both of which Rome experienced following his murder. To function, they need that combination of care for the long-term health of the state with a willingness to fight for the common man when the nobility begins its slide into oligarchy and plutocracy.
Tiberius best represented that sense of duty to the future and the people, something I call aristocratic populism. Because it is sorely missing in our present, much to the misfortune of our republic, he graces our masthead, and the tribunate is after what we named this publication. It is also why I have focused so much on the rise, decline, and fall of the aristocracy in England and the gentry in America: we in the Anglosphere have a long tradition of nobility and duty between the classes,10 one that existed when we were great and has died with our decline, and I think it is important to bring it back for the same reason Tiberius matters.
We in the West struggle with two main issues, issues which are obviated by an aristocratic populist outlook.
High Time Preference
One issue is that we have a bevy of problems of having a high-time preference. Or, in other words, the mob’s tendency to care much more about the present than the future.
Generally, this tends to take the form of various programs the government once embarked upon but can no longer afford or has no legitimate purpose in doing other than that there would be an unpleasant outcry were it terminated. In Rome, they had the grain and wine doles; in America, we have WiC, Social Security,11 and billions spent on homeless drug addicts, all of which are some variation of too expensive and pointless. Further, in both places, the programs were continued far past the point at which they were sustainable, not because anyone in charge thought it a good idea, but because the mob would be angry if they ended.
The other way this crops up is best represented by the corporate focus on quarterly earnings. As I spoke about with Dmitri in a recent podcast,12 and many others have noted, corporate management and the stock market tend to judge success not on the basis of multi-year time horizons but on the basis of quarterly earnings. Whether those earnings grew via a sustainable method or were boosted by stock buybacks, financial engineering, and “clever” (semi-fraudulent) accounting tends to not matter much.13 Instead, what matters is if they bounced up or down.
As could be expected, this leads to long-term disaster, as a corporation that theoretically can last forever can’t succeed if it’s only ever looking at the next three months. Re-investment is put off, innovation first defunded and then stifled, talent acquisition and cultivation shunned, and all sorts of irresponsibly dangerous cost-cutting measures engaged in so that those quarterly earnings can be boosted.
Boeing is the best example of this: what was once an engineering-first corporation known for its excellence is now a laughingstock that produces death traps, with the blame lying firmly at the feet of playing the earnings game rather than building and working for the long term.14 Similarly, former GE CEO Jack Welch is known as an incredible CEO, but it was his M&A spree paired with downplaying internal talent cultivation in favor of cost-cutting that fatally weakened one of America’s oldest companies.15
Of course, it’s not just Social Security and earnings reports where this high-time preference shows up. DEI, affirmative action, soft-on-crime policing that turns cities into unlivable hellholes, and all the other aspects of our unserious age are as well, being clear desires to feel good and appease the mob in the present rather than build something for the long-term. It is, in short, the South Africanization of our world through a mix of fecklessness and self-hate.16
A Rapacious Plutocracy
The other issue is that we have seen the transition from an at least somewhat virtuous wealth elite to a plutocracy that focuses on personal gain via wealth extraction above all else.
While this applies across pretty much every aspect of life, from Congressional stock trading amongst members of both parties17 to private equity funds buying up children’s sports teams and dramatically raising prices,18 the best example comes from the medical sector. There, as I have written about before,19 hospitals, medical practices, and medical supply/device makers and retailers have been bought up en masse by private equity funds that seek only to squeeze every last drop of profit out of them. As a result, worse outcomes tend to skyrocket alongside prices, and the public is left embittered, unhealthy, and broke.20 A sick and poor population filled with rage against its rulers and the wealth elite typically isn’t the basis of a steady and sure society; instead, it looks like the Roman state of Tiberius’ day, as it readied for generations of civil war.
That rape and looting of the medical industry, an industry originally built around the “first, do no harm” oath and now generally regarded as intentionally peddling poison, shows the trend. Everywhere, social, financial, and human capital alike are being shredded so that a very few of the worst sort who lie atop the pyramid can grow wealthy.
Recently, this took the form of oligarchs on X (formerly Twitter) demanding that Americans be willing to work 80-hour workweeks for minimum wage21 like the wage slaves imported into the UAE do (they even made this comparison),22 ignoring that even the worst years of the Industrial Revolution saw “only” ~60-hour workweeks.23 No sane wealth elite would openly demand that their countrymen accept being treated as slaves so that a stock price could go up for a quarter. But our plutocracy does, as it sees no higher good than the profit motive, and certainly has no sense of duty to those below it.
Escaping Plutocratic Perdition
Too Much Can Be Too Much
History rhymes, and things have been like this before.
In 1848, Europe saw attempts at mob rule brought on by elite misbehavior; it defeated them, reformed internally, and saw the magnificence of the belle epoque just decades later. America saw horrific oligarchic behavior in the late 1800s that, paired with the scarcity of gold, saw a proto-socialist populist movement led by William Jennings Bryan; McKinley defeated him at the ballot box, used tariffs to allow a detente between labor and capital, and ushered America into a magnificent age of wealth creation.
But, while there is much ruin in a nation that can be overcome, to paraphrase Adam Smith, there is still a point at which too much is too much.
A great example of this is provided by Steven Runciman in the first volume of his history of the Crusades. For centuries, the Byzantine army was composed nearly entirely of hardy Anatolian peasants ruled over by dukes. After centuries of long-running fighting and hardship, they finally stabilized the Byzantine Empire’s eastern borders, fighting valiantly against some of that era’s deadliest enemies. But they were betrayed by their rulers. After all that fighting and suffering, when peace came and brought with it wealth, the wealth elite, mainly “new men,” bought up their Anatolian farms and turned them off the land so that the grain farms could be converted to more profitable sheep pasture. That made economic sense at the moment, as it was indeed more profitable, but it also meant that the former villages of peasants dotting Anatolia, villages which had provided the men for the armies that created the profitable peace, were no more. So, when trouble came again, which it did relatively shortly, the empire was relying on unreliable mercenaries that performed poorly, and no longer had its domestic stock of hardy, loyal, and brave fighters to rely upon. From that point forward, the empire was in a decline from which it could not recover.
So, too much was too much for the Byzantines, thanks to the rapacious elite, which behaved much as it had in the days of Tiberius Gracchus, caring more about profit than long-term stability, success, and cultivation of human capital. The empire fell because of the medieval equivalent of quarterly earnings reporting.
That’s all to say that time does matter, and if a fix is to be found it must be found before implosion. While Europe is on the verge of being too late, if not already past that point, America at least has more capital on which to rely and, thus, a larger margin of error. But, still, the hour is late and the skies dark.
Fixing Our Woes
But a fix is possible. That is, we can move away from ever-corrosive mass democracy and toward something more in tune with and part of the history of the spirit of the West: Tiberius Gracchus-style aristocratic populism.
On one hand, America needs her tribunes. The private equity jackals who are liquidating every form of capital in their quest to make the next quarter’s return,24 corporate ne’er-do-wells who have financialized everything so that they can financially manipulate every detail, and billionaires who want to treat American citizens like the UAE treats its slaves from Pakistan must be stopped. The “grooming gangs” must be eradicated against the wishes of our abominable rulers,25 the economic assault on white men and human capital must be stopped, and the general predation must be brought to a rapid end. Further, the sense of duty that is so obviously and sorely lacking in the case of our wealthy, must be restored.26
There’s no reason a PE fund should own kids’ sports teams, as currently happens. There’s no reason mom-and-pop stores should be put out of business by corporate behemoths selling foreign goods. There’s no reason the food should be full of poison, the farmland owned by communist Chinese, and spam callers so prevalent. All of those schemes can and should be stopped. But they are not because there are no tribunes who care for the fate of those harmed by them.
But on the other hand, the long-term must be thought about as well for the good of the republic, whatever the mob’s opinion. Entitlement programs are bankrupting the country and must be stopped, whatever public opinion is. Riots are unacceptable. Congressmen are elected despite being of particularly poor quality, and Senators are somehow even worse. Thus, there’s no reason to say more democracy is the solution; rather, the high-time preference of democracy, its tendency to choose Barabbas, is most of the problem.27
The only way to thread the needle and reverse those dire trends is Tiberius Gracchus-style aristocratic populism. It is aristocratic in that it combines the focus on the long-term health and stability of the state for which aristocracy is known28 with a care for the common man’s plight that is attendant to populism, fusing the good aspects of both and avoiding the trend to rapaciousness or mob-rule otherwise present.
The predations must be stopped, with a sense of duty restored and the long-term health of the country must be thought of: as Rome should have been composed of noble estates and yeoman farms instead of vast, oligarch-owned latifundia plantations worked by foreign slaves, America can and should be full of successful small businesses and locally owned companies providing good jobs. Such was long the case in America, being about as true at the time of the Founding as it was after McKinley. Policy ended that, particularly globalism paired with the free trade disaster and overregulation. That policy can and should be reversed. Doing so would, like the land bill of Tiberius Gracchus, be unpleasant to the wealth elite in that it would be a bit of a financial haircut for them. But it wouldn’t be proscription, wouldn’t be communism, and would enhance rather than detract from the prosperity and success of the nation in the long term.
Of course, actually cultivating the culture that produces men of the quality and character of Gracchus is easier said than done. In Rome’s case, it took Romulus creating such a system and focusing on duties from the start, paired with centuries thereafter of men living up to those duties and expectations. It failed by the end, of course, and had many a trial and tribulation along the way, but was generally successful.
Here, we of course have no aristocracy and have had, outside of parts of the Old South and New York, mainly a plutocratic rather than aristocratic wealth elite for most of our history.29 But, still, we did have men who acted like Gracchus. Andrew Jackson, poor by birth and landed gentry by life experience, saved America from Biddle’s corrupt bank and kept the nation together as tariff fights and slavery debates picked at her seams. McKinley managed to remain on good terms with the wealth elite and working men, and so could find a path that aided both and led to hugely important compromise. Trump, now, is the closest we have to a Gracchus, particularly in how the oligarchy has responded to him, but is lacking in many of Tiberius’ characteristics.30
Still, we must focus on how to cultivate such men, which is what I hope and aim to use this project to achieve. The history of death taxes,31 free trade,32 and genteel service to the state33 are interesting in their own right, but important because they show what conditions are needed for the material side of the aristocratic populist equation. Focusing on the abuses of this present regime, from its many connections to Epstein34 to its turning of the medical industry into a squeezed lemon,35 is important because it shows how bad our rulers are and why the populism part is necessary. The focus on great men and nations of the past, particularly the Rhodesian fight36 against the Zimbabwean telos of modernity,37 is critical because it captures the spiritual side of the aristocratic populist equation.
So, such is about what I have written and will continue to write, as together they will hopefully help those of us who aim to demolish and escape from the prison of the present, one that combines all the worst aspects of plutocracy and mob rule, do so. Happy 2025, and thank you for embarking upon this war for the old Occidental spirit alongside us!
Alex Petkas, from the Cost of Glory, and I discussed this here:
Some might disagree, as the Roman patricians of the day painted him as a rabble rouser who would end the republic. What is clear from Plutarch’s biography of him, however, is that he did care about the republic, its people, and the state, and only became somewhat more radical in his final efforts because of the obstinacy of his opponents. Still, he remained unarmed rather than fight, much unlike Caesar.
I included some of Plutarch’s best quotes about what Tiberius saw here: https://x.com/Will_Tanner_1/status/1874823833095418269
Mike Duncan describes this well in “The Storm Before the Storm”
See above book
This is of course not always present, but the expectation that British aristocratic and genteel landlords would be generous toward their tenants was around, for example, and tended to increase with the wealth of the landlord. Whether lower rents generally, forgiven rents in bad seasons, or (often) both, this did play out in real life rather than just theory, whereas it is far from present today.
This is one of my favorite shows I have done so far. Listen here:
This is a good example of an article to this effect: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-jack-welch-got-wrong-just-everything-david-gelles/
