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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Coming up later this hour, we'll talk about the legal and constitutional questions around the immigration raids in LA and deployment of the National Guard without the governor's approval. The first time that that has happened since 1965, when it was really the opposite situation. The Guard was deployed by President Lyndon Johnson to protect civil rights protesters from Governor George Wallace's hardcore local cops. Yesterday, the LAPD was deployed in part to protect protesters from the Trump imposed National Guard.

Governor Gavin Newsom has now filed at least one lawsuit. Other constitutional questions may be looming. If Trump invokes the Insurrection act, as he implies he might to deploy other branches of the military, or if, as many people fear, he might be provoking confrontation so he can declare martial law, how much of democracy would that unravel? That's coming up. First, and somewhat related, a new article in The Atlantic notes how interested President Trump, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon have been in the Roman Empire. It explores the possible implications for the country.

It comes from a historian of the Roman Empire and its relevance for today, Cullen Murphy, former managing editor of The Atlantic, who was on the show back in 2007 for his book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. It's really interesting to see how he answers his question, are we Rome today? One spoiler. The headline of the new article is Feudalism is Our Future. Cullen, thanks for coming on and welcome back to WNYC.

Cullen Murphy: Oh, it's great to be with you, Brian. Thanks.

Brian Lehrer: I know some listeners are thinking feudalism really isn't that a stretch even for Trump? Hold that thought and talk about your lead line, that numerous people in and around the Trump administration seem beguiled by imperial Rome. Who and in what kinds of ways?

Cullen Murphy: First of all, just look at the Oval Office and the way it's been redecorated with all those gilded tchotchkes. You have people like Steve Bannon, who keeps a bust of Julius Caesar in his war room. You have people like Elon Musk, who he has styled himself the Imperator, which is Latin for General, Imperator of Mars. He has a son, one of his many kids is named Romulus. At the CPAC convention earlier this year, there was a banner that showed Trump done up like Augustus, like the Emperor Augustus with laurel leaves in his hair. Not to mention the overriding fact of this authoritarian atmosphere that is suffusing the administration and by extension, the country. There's a lot to look at when it comes to Roman tropes in this day and age.

Brian Lehrer: I didn't know about Bannon having a bust of Julius Caesar in his office until I read it in your article, but it made me scratch my head a little bit because one thing about the Roman Empire is that it was an empire. Trump and Bannon seem more inclined to move toward isolation. They say they don't want to globalize US power with expansionist wars anymore, just protect the US Economy and not run the world. How does that compute with having a Julius Caesar bust, for example?

Cullen Murphy: I think you can divide the subject fairly neatly into external and internal. Most of what I wrote about in my book had to do with the internal dynamics of both Rome and the US, and that's what I'm focused on in this particular article also.

Brian Lehrer: You also cite lessons of the Roman Empire that the Trump people seem to be taking, including beware of immigration, uphold masculinity, make babies. What was the beware immigration part of the Roman Empire?

Cullen Murphy: The Romans, like Americans, were conflicted about immigration. It was good for them in many, many ways, and they also feared it. One thing to bear in mind is that immigration back then, there's an image of so called barbarians spilling across the borders and laying waste to cities. That really isn't the way it usually happened. It was a slow ingress of people from the outside into the empire for economic reasons for opportunity and so on. The Romans also resented this for many reasons, including security. You see a lot of parallels with the way the Romans regarded people from outside their borders and the way Americans do, too.

Brian Lehrer: Just briefly, what about Imperial Rome had to do with upholding notions of masculinity against what perceived threats to it way back then? Because there's so much, obviously, like gender baiting, if you want to call it that, going on today.

Cullen Murphy: Yes, the Bannons and the Musks would have no problem with Roman attitudes towards gender, that is to say, Roman male attitudes towards gender. Men were in charge pretty much completely. I won't get into sexual mores and so on, but the attitudes of ancient Rome fit very neatly into the ID of a lot of right wing thinking when it comes to Rome.

Brian Lehrer: To your headline about feudalism. Listeners may be wondering, don't we have enough actual issues with Trump without laying that speculation on it? Would you explain what you mean by feudalism in a 21st century context?

Cullen Murphy: Sure. When you think of an effective government, you think of a government that is essentially doing two things. One is it's looking out for people more broadly. That's why we have the word common wheel. We're doing things together for common purpose. The other thing that's happening is just a practical thing. That is, when a command, say, has to go out from the center of government, does that command reach all the way to where it needs to reach? You want the answer to that to be yes.

Now, feudalism breaks both of those things. On the one hand, it's very much a privatization of power. We think of lords and dukes and kings and serfs and so on, but these are like Russian dolls, nesting Russian dolls, in which the upper orders really have a private control of power. The second thing is it's very hard for orders to go out from the center to where you want them to go, because on the one hand, there's a very small center and it's not very effective.

Second, the path from one place to the other is broken up by individuals who can do what they want. This is what is happening in the United States right now and other places, by putting power in the hands of private individuals and effectively taking it away from government. It's actually a big deal, and it deserves recognition alongside everything else that Trump and his allies are doing.

Brian Lehrer: The heart of your article is about privatization of government services as a road to what you're calling feudalism. What kinds of privatization do you want to center most? We just did a segment Friday on the intelligence gathering company Palantir, which comes up in your article. Maybe start there, but wherever you want.

Cullen Murphy: Let's start with national security. You've covered Palantir, but there's an example of a company that does many, many things, but the great bulk of them represent activities that the government once did and still does to some extent. Intelligence gathering. A huge percentage of intelligence operations when it comes to information collecting, both on the ground and electronically and so on, is done by private companies. It's outsourced, but then move on to military operations.

This isn't just something that's happening in the US, but there are private military contractors that have a global reach. Everybody's familiar with the Wagner group in Russia, but there are groups in Europe and the United States that are available for hire, like Mercenaries in the Middle Ages, and during the Iraq War, we spent enormous amounts of treasure effectively on mercenaries. Alongside the formal military--

Brian Lehrer: Let me amplify that even a little bit more. I'll just cite something from your article for our listeners. You mentioned a recent Politico piece that cites investors including Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary group known as Blackwater, which was active in the Iraq Afghanistan war period, proposing to Trump the creation of a private military entity set up, which would set up processing camps and conduct roundups, possibly with private citizens deputized to make arrests even. Given what's going on in LA right now, I imagine the mass deportation context would be the most likely context for that. Is that how you saw it?

Cullen Murphy: Absolutely. We don't know whether anything will ever happen with that contract that Eric Prince-

Brian Lehrer: Proposed. It's not a contract. That's not signed.

Cullen Murphy: -proposed. That's right.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Cullen Murphy: We do know that various elements of immigration policy have already been privatized, and so it will surprise no one if deportation camps are being set up by private companies. After all, a significant percentage of our prisons are already run by private companies. Why not get them to do this?

Brian Lehrer: Let me jump in on that again, just again, amplify something in the piece. I don't know why I didn't know this before, but you cite that some private prison contracts have quotas, so the government is required to imprison a certain number of people even if there aren't enough crimes. Is that overstating it?

Cullen Murphy: Maybe slightly, but you've got the gist exactly right. Let's say a jurisdiction is deciding that-- Our prison policy isn't really working all that well. We shouldn't be having this many people in our prisons. They may think that, but they may also be contractually obligated to make sure that the beds are filled in the private prisons.

Brian Lehrer: You do mention, just to be fair, that in some cases privatization makes sense for efficiency and delivery of services. Do you have any good examples of that?

Cullen Murphy: Let's say in the realm of transportation, it can very well be that privatizing an airport makes sense. Sometimes it can make sense that roads are privatized. There's a long history of roads being private toll roads in this country. There are many aspects of our life that can be privatized, and it makes them more efficient and it makes them less costly. The problem isn't just one endeavor which can almost always be justified. The problem comes in the sheer volume of privatization that has been going on over the past two and three decades, where you have a great bulk of government activity that's being moved from the public sector into the private sector.

It makes things fairly ungovernable as well as politically fraught. You see that right now with the contest between Musk and Trump is a classic case of what happens when you have privatized power and it's very difficult to control and both parties have leverage over the other.

Brian Lehrer: This ties back to your notion of feudalism in the article, precisely how?

Cullen Murphy: If this were a feudal world, you could imagine an overlord which would be the top dog, and an underlord which would be the slightly lesser dog, and that would be Musk. Technically, one of them has more power over the other. Both of them control certain amounts of private power. Because they have private power, they have their hands on different levers which can be used against the other.

In this particular case, you have Musk, who has taken over a variety of functions from the government, and he can threaten, "You know what? I don't think I'm going to perform these functions and see how you like that." The President, for his part, can say, "You know what? I don't think we want to pay for those functions. Let me see how you like that." It's a situation-- It's delicious to watch in a horrific sense. You see what happens when power has been actually taken out of where it ought to reside and is put in a place where it shouldn't.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. It's feudalism in that it's a government established system that sets up layers of hierarchy of private power.

Cullen Murphy: Exactly.

Brian Lehrer: Last thing, let's go out with a shocking stat from your article. One more shocking stat from your article. The third largest global employer among companies based in the United States, right behind Amazon and Walmart, is a private security firm that I'll bet hardly any of our listeners have ever heard of, called Allied Universal. What is Allied Universal, and what do they do?

Cullen Murphy: It's a private security firm and it's an example of something that has happened nationwide, which is the shift in responsibility for protection from the government in the form of police forces that we all recognize too many, many companies that are in the business of being hired by you, me, or corporations or whoever to do security work. Allied happens to be the biggest. It's global. It has hundreds and hundreds of thousands of employees. The fact that it's number three is symptomatic of yet one more function that we've allowed to migrate from the government into private hands.

Brian Lehrer: Cullen Murphy, former managing editor of The Atlantic, author of the book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, and his new article in The Atlantic, Feudalism Is Our Future. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. It was fascinating.

Cullen Murphy: Thanks, Brian.

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