Down with historical whiggishness!

A few days ago I suggested that it is folly to expect Europeans would elect a person of color to their highest office when so few Europeans are persons of color. Today in Slate a piece basically suggests that Americans should not be so full of themselves, Only in America? The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here:

People are still amazed he won. In a country where more than a few white folks would still say outright that one of "them'' shouldn't be in charge, here was a politician who didn't downplay his ethnicity, his foreign-sounding name, or his father who wasn't even a Christian. And he wasn't just ethnically atypical. He'd made himself a member of the country's meritocratic elite. He wrote real books that really sold. That blend of outsider detachment and obvious ambition drove his earnest enemies crazy.

So they attacked him as doubly strange, both "not like us'' and elite. They claimed you could not trust this man, that he was unknowable, unreliable, a snob, and a toff. They ridiculed the seal he'd contrived for himself, with its Latin motto meaning, roughly, "yes, we can.'' These same rhetorical ploys did not keep Benjamin Disraeli (motto: "forti nihil difficle''; literally "nothing is difficult to the brave'') from twice becoming prime minister of Great Britain during the reign of his good friend Queen Victoria. So could we Americans stop patting ourselves on the back about the supposed uniqueness of our electing Barack Obama president?

The author then goes on to point out some examples:

Of course, opponents of such candidates try the usual xenophobic rhetoric, only to find that this time, it falls flat. In India, when the opposition BJP screeched about Sonia Gandhi's European ethnicity and Christian faith, it ultimately provoked more hostility to the BJP than to her. She ended up declining the premiership, but it was clear the job was hers if she wanted it. Moreover, ethno-discordant leadership is not confined to nations that hold elections. Stalin, of course, wasn't Russian. It's a matter of some debate whether Alexander the Great was ethnically Greek. Quite a few rulers of the Roman Empire came from underprivileged, barbarian families in North Africa, Syria, and the Balkans. The Times' portrait of ethnically blinkered European politics would have surprised not only Disraeli and Napoleon, but also, inter alios, such second- and third-century Roman emperors as Philippus (known as Philip the Arab for his ethnicity), Septimius Severus (father Roman, mother North African), and Diocletian (humble stock from Dalmatia, present-day Croatia).

The first immediate problem with going so far back in history is that many of our political expectations are predicated on a universal assumption that the democratic nation-state is the normal form of human government. But for most of history the nation-state did not exist, though I would argue that the Greek city-states replicated many of its features on a smaller scale. None of the Roman emperors mentioned were barbarians; they were rather citizens of the empire, and often from Latin-speaking or Latinized families (the distinction by the imperial era was minimal). The relative inclusiveness and assimilationist tendencies of the Roman political class was something which Greek thinkers such as Polybius noted early on, and it was seen as a source of strength. In contrast, the relatively xenophobic Greek city-states were by their nature unscalable, so the Hellenistic monarchs naturally adopted the forms of oriental despotism after the fall of Alexander's empire.* The gens Claudius, which was arguably the most prominent and powerful old patrician family during the late Roman republic and early empire were themselves of Sabine origin (yes, this was very far back, but the fact that they did not invent an indigenous Roman origin tells you something about the nature of acceptance of aliens in their milieu).

Our modern ideas of what the "Other" consists of is strongly shaped by the rise of the nation-state after the French revolution, and the final dissolution of polyglot entities such as the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 20th century. Though pre-modern peoples were xenophobic, their perceptions were shaped by different sets of values and often scaled very locally (e.g., the people across the river are foreign). Additionally, for most of history there was only a weak correlation between who ruled and the popular will. The late Roman emperors ruled because they led the armies which were the primary expenditure of the state. Nero's folly was that he alienated much of the elite class upon which he depended to run the empire (when the soldiers at the frontier heard of the usurpation many were angry). Obviously the rise of Stalin had more to due with the politics of the Communist party, not the attitude of the typical Russian. Oligarchies are often relatively open to "outsiders" so long as those outsiders pay their dues (e.g., in Rome provide service to the republic or empire and accumulate wealth). It is in the democratic spirit that having a political leader who "looks like us" and "believes like us" becomes more important.

Implicit in many attempts to put modern events into a historical framework are the assumptions that the march of history has been characterized by greater democracy, greater cosmopolitanism, greater pluralism and greater tolerance. But not so, these have waxed and waned, and not always in sync. I think a strong argument can be made obviously that the trendline has been toward greater democracy despite regressions such as the destruction of the Greek democracies by Macedon and Rome, but in the other cases I think the picture is much more mixed, though I suppose if by "pluralist" you mean an acceptance of total cultural relativism no pre-modern society would satisfy....

Addendum: The Roman's were probably rather shocked and appalled by Odoacer's usurpation. That would be a much better analogy.

* The argument can be made that the Macedonian dynasties which presided over the Hellenistic era were in any case derived from a political culture which was inimical to the democratic and populist strand which was prominent in Greece proper.