I can’t help but think there is a depressing parallel between between the optimates’ self-destructive refusal to compromise with the populares and the modern partisan gridlock that’s seized the United States, especially in the last decade. Like the Republic, we increasingly have leaders ignoring political precedent and tearing into our institutions in order to further their own short term benefit. Has America ever experienced and turned back from this kind of partisan divide before?

You’re hardly the first and hardly the last to have that reaction.

However, I do want to push back on two things: first, I think a big part of the problem then (and something of the problem now) was the tendency to blame partisanship for political problems, to see factions as inherently dangerous to the Republic requiring them to be exterpated violently, and it’s not an accident either that it was usually the partisans of the elite (the optimates) using violence against the populari. 

Second, the idea that partisan divides are uncommon in America. The lack of partisan divide that existed for a brief period in time (really we’re talking 1945-1968) when the Democratic Party’s conservative wing was counter-balanced by the Republican Party’s liberal wing was highly unusual historically speaking and honestly had way more downsides than people getting misty-eyed about bipartisan compromise remember. 

Consider this: within ten years of the Constitution, an entire generation of political elites raised to hate factions had created two major political parties. One of the political parties tried to make it illegal for anyone to criticize the Federal government, and the other argued that state governments could veto the Federal government. Then a leading figure in one of the two political parties shot a leading figure of the other in a duel.