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Anne Applebaum

Gladiator versus the American Senate

July 30, 2025
by Peter Feinman
Cicero Denounces Catiline in the Roman Senate by Cesare Maccari (19th century fresco Wikipedia)

Is Rome worth one good man’s life? We believed it once. Make us believe it again. He was a soldier of Rome. Honor him.

Senator Gracchus: Who will help me carry him?

[Gladiators surround Maximus to carry him out of the arena]

“Gladiator” is remembered as an epic story of great heroism. Such movies of male heroics are a vanishing genre. Physical action jumped from the screen in some high paced rock-em-sock-em scenes. Many of them abounded in high energy in the tradition of Spartacus and Braveheart.  Certainly the movies of the super-doers are not practitioners of movies where heroic human males function. Tom Cruise is almost the last of a dying breed of male heroes on the film screen. And he still does his own stunts.

In an easily-overlooked substrata of “Gladiator,” the Roman Senate, also featured in “Spartacus,” is challenged to lead Rome back from imperial rule to the days of the Roman Republic. Historically, nothing like that happened. The die was cast when Augustus became emperor and Rome remained an emperor. Still, this was a movie that used some historically real names but was not telling an historically real story. “Spartacus” was based on a real person but “Gladiator” was not. Still it sang the praises of the Roman Senate rising to the occasion just as we imagine the American Senate would if confronted by a would-be dictator.

Senate has a special ring to it. It sounds more august than being the member of the House, an Assembly, or a Legislature. The stature of the Senate has endured in the centuries since the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.

Certainly the Founding Fathers of the United States had high respect and great hope for this body. It wasn’t elected by the mob. It was supposed to be a place of one’s betters (just as the Electoral College was). Once the era of the Virginia Presidential Dynasty ceased, the Senate did achieve the heights once anticipated by the Founding Fathers. For roughly over two decades from the 1820s to the 1840s, a trio of giants with presidential ambitions roamed the Senate floor. Daniel Webster of New England, John C. Calhoun of the Confederacy, and Henry Clay of the West were always on the ballot and sometimes becoming Vice President without ever taking that final step.

This year we celebrate the bicentennial of Webster’s address at the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1825. Lafayette helped set the cornerstone (and visited Bunker Hill on the bicentennial celebration of his visit). Webster spoke again in 1843 when the monument was completed. These speeches bracketed his stature as an American hero.

The Devil and Daniel Webster DVD cover (Wikipedia)

Webster’s famed endured for another century. “The Devil and Daniel Webster” a short story in 1936 by Stephen Vincent Benet became a play in 1938 and then a movie in 1941. To make a short story even shorter, Webster defends a New England farmer who has sold his soul for earthly rewards. The jury is stacked against Webster with the leading reprobates in American history (as of that time). Nonetheless, Webster prevails.

George Bailey Triumphs in the Senate

While all this was going on, a specifically American Senate movie gained national attention. The move “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), was a fable by Frank Capra about right will triumph even over the corrupt Senate, perhaps an even more evil for than the one Webster faced. In this case the hero is the naïve James Stewart who is appointed to the Senate to fill a vacancy due to a death. He is out of his league. He is ridiculed by the press and exploited by the corrupt senior Senator from his state whom Smith regards as a mentor. To escape the trap, Smith speaks for about 25 hours non-stop in the Senate before passing out. He convinces none of the corrupt Senators of the deal the senior Senator has concocted. Finally comes the most absurd part of the story. The senior Senator is overcome with remorse, flees the Senate chambers, and attempts suicide. He then returns to the Senate chambers, confesses his sins, and demands to be expelled.

The movie is considered to be one of the greatest films of all time. It was selected by the Library of Congress as one of the first 25 films for preservation in the United States National Film Registry in 1989, for its significance. Given the impact of Cory Booker’s 25-hour and 5-minute on the floor of the Senate in 2025, it is hard to imagine anyone taking “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” seriously today.

 

 

Shortly after the fictional Mr. Smith goes to Washington, on June 1, 1950, Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-ME) delivered her famous Declaration of Conscience, standing up to Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), who was smearing Democrats as communists. “I think that it is high time for the United States Senate and its members to do some real soul searching and to weigh our consciences as to the manner in which we are performing our duty to the people of America and the manner in which we are using or abusing our individual powers and privileges,” she said. “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.” With Trump’s frequent references to the Democrats as Communists, we see that his mind is still trapped in the 1980s.

Now it’s the President and his minions who are doing exactly what Margaret Smith chastised Republicans about.

There are two heroic images of Senators which have become part of American history since then. In the first. Howard Baker (Republican, TN), leads a delegation to confront President Richard Nixon during the Watergate crisis. The message is clear: time’s up, it’s time to go. Nixon complies and resigns in what become the “Howard Baker Moment.”

John McCain Goes into the Arena and demonstrates the right stuff

The second is when John McCain (Republican, Arizona) gives the thumbs down on July 27, 2017, to the Republican effort to gut Obamacare. Little did he know that seven years later the MAGA assault in the Big Ugly Bill would prevail.

SENATE GOP CONFIRMS TRUMP’S DOJ ‘HATCHET MAN’ FOR LIFETIME JUDGESHIP

MSNBC

Perhaps the most recent display of the degeneracy of the American Senate occurred in the 50-49 ratification of Emil Bove to a lifetime federal judgeship. The approval came despite whistleblower reports raised against him and nearly 1000 former prosecutors plus dozens of state and federal judges opposing his nomination.

During his stint in the Department of Justice he personally fired attorneys involved in the prosecution of the people who sought to overthrow the government on January 6. He forced others to resign and demanded a list of FBI agents to fire for political reasons. He appears to support defying court orders and doing so in derogatory language. It seems as if Trump finally has his Roy Cohn who will do whatever it takes. Speculation is that he is being groomed for a position on the Supreme Court. Unless MAGAs lose control of the Senate, if that’s what Trump wants then that is what will happen.

“Now imagine a second Trump presidency, during which dozens more Aileen Cannons are appointed to the courts—dozens more minimally qualified people who believe their role is to defend the president or avenge his enemies, not to defend the rule of law (Anne Applebaum, “The End of Judicial Independence,” The Atlantic, October 2024).

WE THE PEOPLE

As things stand now, We the People” can’t look to the House or the Senate for leadership in building a better tomorrow. The Senate’s vaunted image as the “the greatest deliberative body on earth” has been destroyed by the relentless assault on its powers by the President of the United States and by the complete capitulation of the MAGAs to the supreme MAGA. The self-pronounced would-be dictator is met by silence. No matter how many times he renders checks and balances as dead the MAGA Senate is silent. No matter how he has politicized the DOJ into his private army of retribution the MAGA Senate is silent. No matter how many American cities he invades with his private army the MAGA Senate is silent. The Senate is not a political body to be respected in real life or in the movies. Its giants are dead.

For an earlier version see Gladiator Senate versus American Senate: We Are on Fifth Avenue Now (January 27, 2020).

Star Trek: The Antidote to Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy

August 31, 2020
by Peter Feinman

On August 24, 2020, NYU John Brademas Center and NYU Votes presented an online discussion between two ex-Republicans:

Anne Applebaum, Staff Writer at The Atlantic; Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies; author, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

Moderator: Max Boot, Columnist at the Washington Post; Global Affairs Analyst for CNN; Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations,

The topic was Applebaum’s new book:

In the United States as well as around the globe, democratic institutions have begun to deteriorate, while authoritarian movements continue to gain traction. Anne Applebaum, journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, argues that this trend should come as no surprise given the “seductive lure of authoritarianism.” In her new book, Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum focuses on the surrogates who enable autocracy.

What role do writers, academics, journalists, and other members of the cultural elite play in the ascent of nationalist rule? To what extent are these figures propelled by ideology versus their own financial or political gain? And what patterns emerge when we observe weakening democracies across the world from the U.S. to Poland?

During the conversation, Boot noted Applebaum’s fairly pessimistic view on democracy’s fate. The book definitively states that we are living through the twilight of democracy right now; there is no question mark in the title. She is not raising a question about the present, she is making a statement about it and it is a negative one.

In her response, Applebaum left some room for hope. She declared that she doesn’t do predictions. However if her book is a statement on the present twilight of democracy, then there is no real need of predictions: the dye is already cast. Applebaum considers it irresponsible for people in her generation to be pessimistic because that is not fair to the younger generations. Her book should be treated as a warning and not a prediction. Democracy could die but it is not inevitable that it will die. She asserts that decisions made now can affect the outcome. Her responses suggest the title should have ended with a question mark. I wonder who made the decision for the bolder more shocking title.

Boot followed up by inquiring from where does the threat to democracy emanate and what is the appeal of authoritarianism? Applebaum responded by raising the issue of uncertainty. People prefer something more predictable and certain for the future compared to the fragile and unstable world in which we live. As a result people are distressed over future.

Earlier in the discussion, Applebaum had mentioned two specific events leading to the current uncertainty particularly for conservatives like herself but not only for them. The first followed the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. That was a triumphal moment for a generation of conservatives, a time of great optimism. Unfortunately the complacency in the 1990s afterwards was misplaced. The result was a loss of certainty in the inevitability of democracy.

She did not specifically refer to the current situation in this discussion. For the President of the United to be subordinate to the Russian leader who has a free hand to violate American presidential would have been a shocking concept after 1989 had it even occurred to anyone.

The second date was 1999 especially for Republicans but also for all Americans. The country went from celebrating what had happened in the decade just ending to a world where we often are no longer talking to each other. Along those lines, the article “Our Love Is Forever, as Long as We Vote the Same Way” in the Sunday Styles section of the NYT (August 30, 2020) reports on this very issue in a quite personal way. Dating companies now are obligated to include a line on political preferences given the impossibility of pro- and anti-Trump people to talk to each other. Once upon a time Mary Matalin and James Carville were the example of an unusual political couple. Now George and Kellyanne Conway are the mystifying couple. They recently had to take a timeout from politics for the sake of their children, their family, and their marriage AND THEY ARE MEMBERS OF THE SAME PARTY!

Applebaum added that in this new millennium people feel disappointed with what has happened for themselves, for their country, or both. Drawing on her own experience, she observes that the Polish thought the transformation of democracy would be better than it had been for themselves in their career and their country. She concluded that when you really feel disappointed, it can lead to radicalism. People become angry, convinced that there is nothing left to be done, that democracy has failed. Consequently disruptive change is needed.

There was more to their conversation than presented here. Still the major points are clear. The old order of the Cold War is over. Regardless of one’s position in that confrontation, it provided clearcut alternatives. You had a decision to make about where you stood. That decision provided meaning and purpose in life. Now everything seems up the air. Uncertainty dominates. Fear follows and that can lead to bad things. Very Bad things. Not to worry. Only I can save the country.

People deal with uncertainty in multiple ways. One way is to create certainty in the mind. For example, pilots train on simulators. They practice again and again. They learn how to recognize a dangerous condition. They learn what should be done in a perilous situation. They practice, practice, practice until it becomes so ingrained that that they can even land a plane ON the Hudson River if its engines are clogged with birds. The police practice and practice as well but not for dealing with the mentally ill, domestic disputes, or facing intensely emotional and overwrought people in a crowd.

At the end of the movie Hidden Figures, Katherine Johnson exhibits another form of mental preparation. After the successful landing of John Glen in a risky space flight, the Kevin Costner character asks her if we are ready to go to moon. She replies, “We’re already there.” She had seen the future in her mind again and again and was quite confident that it could be reached in the real world. The only question was when that world was going to catch up to her mind.

Imagining the future is one way of preparing for. We live in dystopian times so it is not surprising that our science fiction reflects these circumstances. We see a future of hate not hope, nightmares not dreams, conflict not peace. The more overwhelmed we are by the present, the more willing we are to accept drastic solutions, solutions that won’t work but which may give peace of mind for the moment without the use of drugs.

Science fiction like those simulators can help prepare us for the future. It has the possibility of generating hope. The one that did that in a way no other ongoing series did was Star Trek. The show was not just about special effects or entertaining stories. It expressed a confidence about boldly going where no one had gone before, about a confidence in facing the unknown, about a willingness even eagerness to engage the future. All these attributes and desires are lacking in a world where we have the dark carnage relentlessly promulgated by the Trumpicans and the relentlessly toppling of our past by the Woke.

We are not a Starship Enterprise country today. We cannot communicate with each other yet alone live with each. The intensity of distrust and hate ratchets ever upward making our time the twilight of democracy. Kirk’s hero was Lincoln, a name used and abused today by people who are full of malice and reject America’s vision as the last best hope of humanity. Neither candidate seeks to inspire us; we are a country without vision. Still even people who are not science fiction fans know the message of Star Trek. I suspect they yearn for a candidate who can overcome our fear of fear itself with the message that best is yet to come.