“The best way of avenging thyself is not to do likewise.” — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 6.6 (trans. Charles Reginald Haines, 1916)

Every election now ends with a week of recrimination about tone, conducted in a tone that would have finished a career in 1985. The question people ask is why the country has become so coarse. The question assumes a moral cause, and therefore a moral cure, and both assumptions are wrong.

American politics did not become indecent because Americans became worse. It became indecent because the institutions that made decency pay stopped paying. A norm is not a fact about the world that stands on its own. It is a strategy, and it holds only while almost everyone else is playing it and while breaking it costs something.

The equilibrium that broke

Three changes did most of the work, and none of them was a change in character.

The first was the collapse of a shared factual substrate. The old broadcast settlement was never fair or neutral, but it was small: three networks, a handful of wire services, a common set of things about which a person could be wrong. That settlement dissolved into a feed that rewards the emotion with the highest engagement, and contempt outranks every other emotion on that measure. Outrage is not a byproduct of the current media economy. It is the product.

The second was sorting. Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort (2008) documented what the census data had been saying for two decades: Americans increasingly live near people who vote the way they do. The consequence is not that people became more extreme. It is that demonizing the other party became free. Contempt has a cost only when the person you are despising might be at your table on Sunday.

The third was the primary. A congressional primary is decided by a small and unrepresentative fraction of the electorate, and that fraction sits to the edge of the district rather than at its middle. A member who wants to keep the seat must win that fraction first. Combat is the cheap way to do it. Compromise is the expensive way, because it requires explaining a concession to people who came out to fight.

Then there is the ratchet, which is the part people miss. Norms hold when violations are punished symmetrically. Bork’s confirmation hearings in 1987 taught one coalition that a nominee could be destroyed; the other coalition learned the lesson and applied it. The filibuster became a routine instrument rather than a rare one, shutdowns became a negotiating tactic, the debt ceiling became a hostage, and the confirmation rule was rewritten twice, in 2013 and 2017, each time by the side that had just lost an argument about it. Every one of those moves paid immediately and cost the mover almost nothing. A rule that pays to break will be broken.

The objection

The standard objection is that politics was always nasty. It was. Burr shot Hamilton in 1804, and Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner nearly to death on the Senate floor in 1856 with a cane he had brought for the purpose. Anyone who tells you American politics used to be polite has not read the election of 1800.

Two things are different, and neither is the volume.

The first is persistence. The fight used to end. A campaign concluded, the loser conceded, and the country had a season in which the combat was suspended. What has gone is not the heat but the interval.

The second is reach. Politics now sorts your neighborhood, your feed, and to a remarkable degree your marriage market. When the argument follows a person into every room, it stops being an argument about policy and becomes a claim about who a person is. Once it is that, no compromise is available, because a compromise would require the other side to remain a person.

There is a third thing, and it cuts against the nostalgia rather than for it. The mid-century comity that people mourn was partly a class marker and partly an exclusion. The Senate that was courteous in 1955 was courteous in part because of who was not in the room. Some of what reads as coarsening is the arrival of previously excluded claims in a chamber built for gentlemen’s agreements. That does not make the coarsening good. It does mean that the remedy cannot be a restoration, because the thing people want restored was never quite the thing they think it was.

The emperor in the plague year

If decency is not a moral fact but a practice, then the useful question is not how to restore it but how a person behaves well inside a system that punishes it. That question has one great test case, and it is not a modern one.

In 175, Marcus Aurelius was on the Danube fighting the Marcomanni, in the middle of a plague that would kill millions. His most successful general, Avidius Cassius, governing the eastern provinces with command over seven legions, received a false report that the emperor was dead and proclaimed himself emperor in his place. Egypt, Syria, and Arabia went over to him. For three months the empire had two governments.

Marcus did not march on Rome. He concluded a hasty treaty on the frontier, freed the legions there, and moved east. Before he arrived, a centurion in Cassius’s own army murdered him and sent the head to the emperor as proof.

The Historia Augusta records what happened next. Marcus did not rejoice at the death. He gave orders that the head should be buried. He forbade the Senate to impose heavy punishment on the conspirators, asked that no senator be executed during his reign, recalled those who had been exiled, and pardoned the communities that had gone over to Cassius, including Antioch and Alexandria, which had said a great deal in support of the rebellion and against him. He said, when it was over, that he had wished to complete his reign without shedding the blood of a single senator (Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus Aurelius, 25–26, trans. David Magie, 1921).

That source has a bad reputation, and it deserves one. But the clemency is corroborated by Cassius Dio, and nothing in Marcus’s own notebook contradicts it. He answered those who spoke ill of him in speeches and pamphlets rather than with prosecutions. He held, as a working principle, that it was juster for him to yield to the counsel of many friends than for many friends to yield to his wishes, “who am but one.” And he was careful about the thing that matters most now: he “did not readily accept the version of those who were partisans in any matter, but always searched long and carefully for the truth.”

He was not soft, and the record should not be sanded down. He abolished Antioch’s public games and assemblies and issued a harsh edict against the city. He refused to visit Antioch, and refused to visit Cyrrhus, Cassius’s birthplace. Clemency, in his hands, was not the absence of judgment. It was the refusal to convert judgment into vengeance.

Four disciplines

Stoicism is often sold as a way of feeling better about a world you cannot change. That is a thin reading, and it is the reason the philosophy gets dismissed as apathy with a reading list. What the Stoics actually built was a discipline for people who could not control the outcome and were determined not to be corrupted by it. Four of its practices translate directly into political conduct, and none of them requires a single vote to go your way.

Test the impression before you assent to it. The central act of Stoic epistemology is the refusal to agree to an appearance until it has been examined. Applied to a feed, this is the pause between seeing a claim and repeating it. It sounds small. It is the highest-leverage act available to a private citizen, because a false story dies where it stops being forwarded, and the people who kill it are not the ones who refute it. They are the ones who decline to carry it.

Be correctable in public. Marcus wrote that if anyone could prove and bring home to him that a conception or act of his was wrong, he would amend it and be thankful, because he sought the truth, by which no one had ever been harmed (Meditations, 6.21, trans. Haines, 1916). The political form of this is rarer than it sounds: the willingness to lose an argument where people can see you lose it. Almost no one in public life does this now, because the audience reads it as weakness. That is precisely why it is worth doing. A practice that costs something is the only kind that distinguishes a conviction from a costume.

Watch your opponent without hating him. Marcus compared political opposition to a wrestler who gashes you with his nails and butts you with his head. You do not protest, and you do not conclude that he is an enemy. You keep an eye on him, and you avoid him good-humouredly (Meditations, 6.20). This is the hardest of the four, because it asks for vigilance and warmth at the same time. Vigilance without warmth becomes paranoia. Warmth without vigilance becomes surrender. The Stoic position is that you can see exactly what a person is doing and still decline to regard him as a thing to be destroyed.

Do not mirror the injury. The epigraph is the whole program: the best way to avenge a wrong is not to commit it. Every escalation in the last decade has been justified by the other side’s last escalation, and every justification was true. That is what makes the argument so durable and so useless. A politics composed of accurate grievances, each answered in kind, has no terminus. The only exit is a person who absorbs the injury and does not pass it on, and there is no institutional reward for being that person. There is only the private knowledge that the thing was not done.

Marcus added one more rule that keeps these four from becoming a retreat: try persuasion first, and when the principles of justice direct it, act even though men say no. If force withstands you, take refuge in being unhurt, and “use the obstacle for the display of some other virtue” (Meditations, 6.50). The obstacle is not an excuse to withdraw. It is the material of the next attempt.

The limit

Here is where the honest essay has to stop praising its own subject.

Marcus Aurelius was the most disciplined man in the empire, and he left it to Commodus. The son was cruel, vain, and catastrophic; within twelve years of his father’s death the dynasty was gone, and within a generation the empire was auctioning the throne. Every private virtue Marcus practiced was real, and none of it transferred. Rome did not become decent because its emperor was.

The lesson is not that Stoicism failed. It is that Stoicism is a discipline for the person, not a program for the state, and anyone who sells it as the second thing is selling something else. A republic is not held together by the character of its citizens alone. It is held together by rules that make decency pay and indecency cost, and those rules are built by legislation, by institutional design, and by the dull work of showing up.

So the structural half of the argument stands, and it is not optional. Change who decides the primary and you change what a member must do to keep a seat. Rebuild local news and you restore the one institution that ever made a shared set of facts about a specific place, which is why the loss of more than 3,200 American newspapers since 2005 matters more than any single cable network (Medill, State of Local News 2024). Reform the finance of campaigns and outrage fundraising loses its yield. None of this is Stoic. All of it is necessary.

What is left

But the structural work has a problem that no structural fix solves: it takes years, it may fail, and the people doing it will be lied about the entire time. That is the exact situation Stoicism was built for, and it is why the philosophy keeps returning at moments like this one. It does not promise that the republic will be repaired. It promises that the person working on it need not be degraded by the work.

The market for contempt is enormous and it is not going to close. Every incentive in the system points the same way, and the incentives are winning. What remains available, and cannot be taken, is the small set of decisions a person makes between reading something and repeating it, between being wrong and admitting it, between an injury received and an injury returned.

Marcus ordered a severed head buried. He could have displayed it. Displaying it would have been popular, defensible, and entirely within the customs of his time. He buried it, and the empire got Commodus anyway.

The point was never the outcome. The point was that on the day the outcome was out of his hands, the thing he still controlled was the kind of man who ordered the head buried. That is not a small thing. It is, on the evidence, the only thing that never depreciates.

Sources

  • Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book VI (trans. Charles Reginald Haines, 1916). Wikisource. Citations are to 6.6, 6.20, 6.21, and 6.50.
  • Historia Augusta, Life of Marcus Aurelius, 22–26 (trans. David Magie, Loeb Classical Library, 1921). LacusCurtius.
  • Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
  • Medill Local News Initiative, The State of Local News: 2024 Report, Northwestern University.

PRH | huffmanwrites.org | © Philip Huffman