Anthony Scaramucci: America’s billionaires and presidents have forgotten the lesson that destroyed Rome

The Greeks had a word for what happens when power goes unchecked: hubris. The pattern in their tragedies is always the same — a leader, swollen with success, decides the rules no longer apply to him. These men were not intrinsically evil; their gifts fueled their overreach while the chorus watched the collapse. Looking at America’s billionaire class and its executive branch today, the warnings from antiquity have never felt more urgent.

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When Success Becomes a License to Rule

We are living through an era in which a small number of individuals have accumulated influence that rivals or exceeds that of sovereign governments. Think billionaires who control vast technology platforms, media empires, and financial networks. At the same time, presidential authority has expanded to a degree that would have alarmed the framers of the American Constitution. With increasing overlap between both, the result is a special kind of arrogance: the conviction that personal wealth or political office confers not just power but infallible wisdom. This is hubris in the age of algorithms and executive orders.

Cicero’s Warning: Process Is Not the Enemy

Cicero, writing in the final tumultuous decades of the Roman Republic, wrote that “We are slaves to the law in order to be free.” It’s profound in its simplicity. Freedom does not come from the absence of constraint; it comes from our willingness to suborn a certain degree of individual will to a broader, shared process. Structures like the law, the constitution, and regulatory frameworks are not obstacles to greatness — and they are not the domain of a shadowy “deep state.” They are the architecture within which greatness can thrive, free from tyranny. Cicero understood this because he watched, in real time, as Rome’s elites began to treat the Republic’s institutions as inconveniences rather than sacred obligations. Julius Caesar did not destroy the Roman Republic with a single act of violence; he destroyed it by systematically treating its processes as mere suggestions.

The parallels to our present moment are not subtle, especially when considering the modern billionaire class. Many of these individuals have built extraordinary companies and created genuine value. That is not in dispute. But somewhere along the way, a troubling development occurred. Success in one domain—whether it be technology, finance, or media—bred a self-belief that those founders could — and should — dictate policy on public health, education, geopolitics, space exploration, and the structure of democratic governance itself.

Oligarchy Has a Track Record — and It Isn’t Good

At the same time, consolidation of the media landscape has given a handful of people tremendous leverage over the information we consume, the platforms on which we communicate, and increasingly, the political candidates who govern us. When a single company controls the digital public square, or when a single individual can move markets with a social media post, or when billionaires fund political campaigns with the explicit expectation of policy concessions in return, we have left the realm of entrepreneurial capitalism and entered something closer to oligarchy. And oligarchy, as Aristotle observed twenty-four hundred years ago, is one of the most unstable and corrosive forms of government—precisely because it replaces process with patronage and merit with proximity to power.

The same arrogance has infected the political sphere. The expansion of unilateral executive action—governance by decree rather than deliberation—has accelerated in ways that should concern every citizen regardless of party. Presidents now launch military operations without congressional authorization, restructure entire agencies by command, and treat the legislative branch as an afterthought rather than a co-equal partner in governance. Although the trend has been building across administrations, the current moment represents something qualitatively different: an open and unapologetic assertion that the executive need not engage the deliberate (and sometimes frustrating) machinery of democratic process.

The framers of the Constitution designed a system of checks and balances precisely because they knew that concentrated power, however well-intentioned at the outset, inevitably descends into something destructive. The separation of powers was not a bug in the system; it is an intentional feature. And when we abandon it in the name of speed or decisiveness or strong leadership, we are not modernizing; we are regressing to the very form of governance the Enlightenment sought to overcome.

What History Actually Teaches Us

If five thousand years of recorded human history teach us anything, it is this: societies that submit to process thrive, and societies that abandon process collapse. This is not a sentimental claim, but instead an empirical one. The great periods of peace and prosperity in human civilization have almost always coincided with t