On the scale of Trump overreach, the presidential order last week to eschew modernist architecture in favour of Greco-Roman classicism might seem small beer. “The classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for all future federal buildings, he ruled.
But the decision – which was as much political posturing as an aesthetic act, promoting a romanticised vision of ordered life in imperial Rome over post-Art Deco functionalist and minimalist design – is a significant symbol of the president’s ambition to remake the country’s political culture.
Unsurprisingly titled Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again, the order argues that neoclassicism reflects the founding fathers’ “self-governing ideals”, while contemporary styles such as brutalism and deconstructivism are incapable of embodying America’s “national values”.
What the billionaire developer’s own taste for garish, gilt-encrusted, dictator chic skyscrapers represents is not explained.
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Like Mussolini and Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, Trump wants to enshrine classicism as a state ideology, much as he has started to rebrand the representation of history in the Smithsonian to reflect the positive aspects of a mythical American past. Or how he fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery for over-representing black experience, or intruded in the work of the national endowments for humanities and arts, public broadcasting, the Kennedy Center, and the Library of Congress.
Not that Trump, who delights in reposting memes of himself as a king or emperor, and talks emperor-like of annexing Panama, Canada, Gaza and Greenland, has an alternative coherent worldview to promote. His deeply inconsistent philosophical outlook – if it can even be called that – reflects only an articulation of his own self-interest. But for many supporters, there is a need to dress Maga in the garb of a previous civilisation. It is surprising how many of his intellectual acolytes admire classical Rome.
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” Karl Marx wrote in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. He was referring to how French revolutionaries harked back to Rome in a process of historical reappropriation. “And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”
Classicist Honor Cargill-Martin notes in the New York Times that “the ascendant right wing loves ancient Rome. Its adherents love its glories. They love its ideals of hard, unbending masculinity. And they love the idea that Rome pulled its own greatness apart from within.
“Building on a long-standing American tradition of tying its history to Rome, the right’s leaders have embraced the aesthetic: a bust of Caesar for Steve Bannon, a pen name borrowed from a fourth-century BC Roman consul for the essayist Michael Anton [now head of policy planning in the State Department], a glittering AI-generated image of himself as a Roman gladiator to go with the self-proclaimed title ‘Imperator of Mars’ for Elon Musk.”
[ Trump-Musk feud shows president knows how to hit a narcissist where it hurtsOpens in new window ]
Anton, for one, sees in “Caesarism” a necessary expression of a powerful ruler’s gradual transitioning of the state from democratic form to autocratic: his hero Trump, borrowing from Julius Caesar. A new Caesar, according to neo-monarchist guru of the far right Curtis Yarvin, is the guarantee of “cultural peace”.
Apart from the glories, there are many lesser Trumpian parallels, surely not to be emulated: Caligula’s suggestion he appoint his horse consul, historians argue, was an ironic show of contempt for the subservient Senate which would have approved it without demur. Much as cowed Republicans today vote Trump’s outrageous nominees through unquestioningly.
And the sycophants in Trump’s cabinet, praising him to the skies, would seem to owe much to Nero’s cabal of advisers, their patronage guaranteed by encouraging his grandest delusions and his projection of himself as the sun god Apollo.
Much of the new right’s preoccupation with Rome, Cargill-Martin points out, however, is with the end of empire and the need to learn the lessons of history.
“Anyone feeling late stage empire vibes?” Musk has warned. “Rome fell,” he argued in a podcast, “because the Romans stopped making Romans.” A similar population collapse, he has repeatedly claimed, is the biggest crisis facing civilisation today.
Steve Bannon claims Rome disintegrated because its moral fibre collapsed under the pressure of barbarian immigration and the elite’s sensual excess. For Anton, “prosperity and ease” and the “complacence and decadence” they bred rotted the empire from within.
Mary Beard, the Cambridge classicist and broadcaster, complains exasperatedly she can’t go into a party in DC without being asked the futile question, which Roman emperor does Trump most resemble? Her new, entertaining podcast, Instant Classics, is a masterful response, a deconstruction of the simplistic caricatures of the “gladiator” – and Trump – view of Rome.
And of the idiotic idea that classicism, for all its magnificence, is the only way to build buildings.
