During the gloom of winter evenings, I’ve been reading A Short History of Byzantium, John Julius Norwich’s 1997 popular summary of his earlier three-volume work intended for professional historians. This is the repetitious and truly discouraging story of the chaotic city/kingdom which for more than a millennium dominated the geographical chokepoint between Europe and Asia.

Despite roots in Greek cultures, Byzantium developed no interest in democracy. It was a harsh, absolutist theocracy and determined to stay that way, with power passing back-and-forth between the armies, wealthy families, more-or-less hereditary dictators, and patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Murder, torture, fratricide, banishment, child marriages, betrayal, civil war and mob violence were the common tools of transferring leadership.

Because of Byzantium’s location, a large, wealthy kingdom did develop and was coveted by aggressive, equally violent neighbors. Consequently, terror and destruction from continual warfare were added to the incessant bubbling of Byzantium’s domestic political stew. No wonder the word “byzantine” is still commonly used to mean overly complex, secretive and violent.

Norwich also published Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy (2012), and as far as theocratic rule and tumultuous transfer of power are concerned, darned if this story isn’t the same as that of Byzantium. In fact, as most history books seem to repeat, the entire Western world didn’t get much more democratic, rational, or peaceful until a relatively quiet spell recently since the World Wars. (Although … Bosnia in the ’90s? Russia and Ukraine today?). All this turmoil with its accompanying slaughter and destruction happened because the “civilized” world refused to check the power of monarchs and despots. Reading the history of western civilization makes me question why it is called “civilization” at all.

But there is one exception which, recognizing all mankind’s propensity for chaos, deliberately built a system to hobble it. Granting our numerous flaws and missteps, that exception is America.

The reason this can be said is that the thinkers who devised America’s democracy were profound scholars of political history and philosophy. They knew all the stuff Norwich writes about and more. They understood America was a one-time historic chance to start from scratch, away from the corruption of the Old World.

They absolutely understood the dangers of power whether held by the few elite or the unleashed masses, that checks and balances between those two entities were critical to a peaceable state, that there must be a peaceful system of transferring power, that all citizens must make compromises to that system. They knew that when you mix politics and religion the result is religion, which can be as endangering to stability as any other potential force.

We moderns understand these things to the point where they’ve become cliches, though probably still not with the depth of the founding thinkers. Nevertheless, lately it seems we’ve become willing to ignore that historic knowledge, willing to allow the discrediting of our voted system of transferring power, scornfully replacing those lessons with the petty insistence by a powerful few that what really matters is “I’m just gonna bust things until I get my own way.”

For much of my life, voting was pretty simple. You just did it as a civic duty, and the system worked out pretty well, though not perfectly; accepting unwanted results was as much a duty as was voting itself. By comparison, the manipulations we’re now experiencing are downright byzantine, intended to destroy confidence in our system, and thus to destroy the value of the vote.

We’re enabling another of history’s lessons, that even successful democratic systems aren’t safe when selfishness runs amok, when power ignores patriotism.

Ron Rude,

Plains