Krugman identifies the many parallels between the American Republic and the Roman. In both cases, slaveowning landholders and merchants, with the help of the administrative/bureaucratic class of the time (lawyers, politicians, and the clergy) got fed up with paying taxes to the King and chose to seize power for themselves--a Senate dominated by them, but with checks and balances so no one of them could seize power permanently and totally. They didn't trust the King, but they certainly didn't trust each other. Still, they were determined to keep power in their hands.

This wasn't a founding father plot, I don't believe in conspiracies, remember? But this is the system that evolved over time naturally, organically, in a process similar to natural selection. These were educated men, intellectuals but men of action, too, lawyers, soldiers and planters, products of the Enlightenment. They understood the English Revolution, Cromwell and the Protectorate, the parliament and they knew their classical history and that of the Dutch Republic and the Republican city-states of the Italian Renaissance.

America was a Republic in the Roman model, not a Democracy in the Greek way. Like the Roman patricians before them, they distrusted the mob, or the rabble, as they thought of them. The slaves, the natives, women, those who owned no property, the indentured servants, sharecroppers, the pioneers and homesteaders and hardscrabble farmers, those who could not vote, and the appointment of the President was insulated from the popular vote by electors. Even the self-serving phrase "the tyranny of the majority" survives to this day; only a small proportion of Americans actually participated in the government at all. The Gentlemen of Property were the government.

The system was a model of liberal philosophy and freedom for the eighteenth century, no Monarchy, nobility or landed aristocracy, the end of the last vestiges of the Middle Ages, but by today's standards, it was an oligarchy pure and simple. There was even a Latin word for it, Latifundism. They still call it that in South America; government by the great landholders and exploiters of human labor, although the great plantations are now gone, replaced first by massive industries and then the contemporary financial and retail corporate colossi. Over the centuries, both the Roman and American governments liberalized and dispersed political power to the lower classes, but the essential structure remained the same. And when the system was threatened from within, a nostalgia returned for the old ways of doing things: the Gilded Age, La Belle Epoch.

In Rome, the independent small farmer, artisan, and merchant was gobbled up by the big outfits with their cheap, foreign labor (slaves). They could not compete against the economies of scale of the big boys. Sound familiar? Imports and technology. Does it sound familiar now?

Gaius Julius Caesar tried to break the stranglehold of the patricians, but you saw what happened to him. And in the chaos and civil wars that followed, only an Empire could restore stability and peace--although it still called itself a Republic and maintained a Senate for a long, long time. In America, a wave of democratization, coinciding roughly with the 20th century, emerged and flourished. But the forces of reaction are now doing their best to stop it and then roll it back, and I fear they are succeeding.

It is dangerous to use past history to predict the future, conditions are different today, but repeating patterns can still be recognized. And we have other models we can apply to create a more modern synthesis, Fascism came to Europe in the 20th century, both to Germany, Italy and Spain, and in a different form, to Russia. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco and Stalin were just little Emperors. The institutions of the State prove too cumbersome when they attempt to disperse power and wealth equitably. A strong man takes over. Trump as the new Octavian. Now the question is, how long can he stay in power? Is he Caesar or is he Augustus?