#1543 Are We Rome?
Listening to America
Listening to America
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2023
⏱️ 58 minutes
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Summary
This week, Clay Jenkinson's conversation with Dr. Edward Watts, professor of history at the University of California San Diego. Watts, the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, is a historian of the classical world or more than 2000 years ago, but his work inevitably asks the question, is the American republic in the kind of chaos and decline that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic about the time of Christ? Was the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a harbinger of greater and more purposeful uses of political violence in our future? How much public corruption can a republic endure? We have a sense of who the Caesar might be, but where is the Cato in modern American life, or even the Cicero?
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Thomas Jefferson is interpreted and portrayed by Clay S. Jenkinson.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this week's Thomas Jefferson |
| 0:06.8 | Hour, which is my interview with Dr. Ed Watts of the University of California at San Diego, |
| 0:11.8 | the author of a really important book, Mortal Republic, and when I interviewed him, I think |
| 0:18.6 | three and a half years ago, he was cautious about drawing analogies between the Roman Republic |
| 0:25.3 | of the first century BCE and the first century CE. But this time when I contacted him about |
| 0:32.6 | six weeks ago and said, you know, do you think the Republic is surviving, thriving, hanging |
| 0:38.8 | on, deteriorating or dying? He wrote back and said, lots to talk about here, lots to talk |
| 0:44.8 | about. And I was surprised, I must tell you, that he was so willing to talk about us when |
| 0:51.4 | you know, his work is to talk about something that happened 2000 years ago and believe |
| 0:56.8 | me, he knows as much about it as anyone that I've ever encountered. But he also said some |
| 1:02.4 | really stark things, especially towards the end of this interview. I hope you will listen |
| 1:07.2 | to it all the way through and tell everyone you know. It's something that I think that |
| 1:11.6 | every American should hear. And he said, among other things, that he feels less confident |
| 1:16.9 | about the status of our Republic today than he did five years ago. And even though we |
| 1:21.9 | seem to have passed the high water mark on January 6, 2021 and the sacking of the U.S. |
| 1:28.0 | Capitol, that he's not certain that that's the end of it, that the pendulum has swung |
| 1:33.4 | back that we've calmed down in some way. And he said, you know, this is really not about |
| 1:38.7 | politics in the sense of Republican and Democrat. It's really looking at the dynamics of our |
| 1:44.3 | political situation from a deep classical perspective. And so I hope you don't take |
| 1:49.0 | offense if you're if you're a mega sort of person or of the right. He said that if Donald |
| 1:54.6 | Trump is reelected in 2024, keep in mind, this is a extraordinarily deeply well-educated |
| 2:01.4 | classical historian who's very mo is caution and intellectual scrupulousness. No offhand |
... |
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