The American raid on Caracas, the arrest of the Venezuelan dictator, the public triumph of the President of the United States, and the humiliation of his erstwhile counterpart now in shackles, is a tableau of caudillismo that stands in contrast to the bureaucratic desaturation of modernity. An episode that began on the plane of staid negotiation and diplomatic process was abruptly resolved in a daring expedition that, but for its machinery, would have been instantly comprehensible to the cavalry of the Comanche, Sheridan, or the Winged Hussars.

The personalisation of it – the recourse to leader versus leader as the fulcrum of the thing – is key to understanding it. What the world saw in Caracas on 3 January 2026 was grounded not in modern politics, but in a form of statecraft rooted in antiquity.

At the opening of Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Civil War, the future Roman dictator gives his account of his appeal to his soldiers — mostly, at this point, the men of Legio XIII – at the inception of his rebellion against the Pompeian state. Written in the third person, he begins with ‘the wrongs done to him at all times by his enemies… led astray [through] envy and a malicious opposition to his glory’. He then proceeds through a short critique of the abasement of Roman governance, before returning to the opening and core theme: ‘defend from the malice of his enemies’, he says to Legio XIII, ‘the reputation and honour of that general under whose command they had for nine years most successfully supported the state; fought many successful battles, and subdued all Gaul and Germany’. The legionaries, write Caesar, ‘[cried] out that they are ready to defend their general, and the tribunes of the commons, from all injuries’. The crossing of the Rubicon follows.

It is fundamentally a democratic passage, in its appeal to the mass of citizenry at hand, and yet it is also incomprehensible to the claims of democratic modernism. The would-be leader or rebel of the democratic era does not make his case to the people with what’s in it for him, but what’s in it for them. Caesar, according to our received civic narrative, should properly disclaim his own interest and act selflessly for that of the nation, serving himself up pre-emptively for its cause. This is the performance of disinterest we expect, or are at least told to expect. A statesman is, in this light, to regard himself as one of Mrs Bixby’s sons, laying himself down as ‘so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom’. What we see in Caesar, then, is a form of political primitivism, possible only in a society of men unconscious of their own natural rights and equal dignity with the person of the leader.

In contravention to the modern sensibility, Caesar appeals to ‘his glory’ and to his ‘reputation and honour’ as primary causes of the war to come. The injuries to these qualities are willed by others, and there is no fault in their defence. Surveying the field of the dead at the climactic Battle of Pharsalus, Caesar says, in grief at what is to him needless and uncaused slaughter: ‘They – the enemies of his glory – would have it thus.’

Nonetheless, it is an ethos with far more applicability to the present day than most would admit. Yet America’s Founding Fathers would admit it – and so, too, would most American statesmen prior to the past half-century.

A progressive interpretation of history adheres to the framework of an ever-ascending and inevitably improving variety of politics across time: call it the novus ordo seclorum view, which does have some grounding in the sentiment of the American Founding Fathers (think Thomas Jefferson when he was untethered from the responsibilities of government, and Thomas Paine at all times). Yet the overriding political philosophy of America’s founding, as expressed in the Federalist Papers, the debates on the drafting of the US Constitution, and beyond, endorse the opposite interpretation. The nature of man, believed most of the Founders, is essentially fixed, and so too are the problems of politics which recur across history. The experiences of the classical era, including Caesar, are therefore of immediate relevance and concern. We may revisit his appeal to Legio XIII on his own behalf in that light.

What Caesar invoked in his appeal was not mere self-aggrandisement, nor even emotive reaction. He defended an idea of himself that in Latin is rendered as dignitas. This is obviously the etymological root of the English dignity, but it communicates something at once more capacious and more fundamental. Dignitas is honour, social standing in a society that understands this quality to be a fundamental of anthropology, the violation of which is as grave a transgression as the violation of conscience, worship, or speech would be to the modern consciousness. In a civic imagination in which there is no meaningful differentiation between the individual and the societal, dignitas is also not strictly private – an incomprehensible assertion to both Romans and to most Americans until the past few generations – but rather a constitutive element of a properly ordered state and society.

The men of Legio XIII possessed dignitas as well, different in kind and scope to be sure, as a consequence of their own natures as men: had they served four centuries later, in a Christianised Empire, they would be able to name its source as the Imago Dei. The dignitas of the legionary, and that of the ordinary Roman citizen, and that of Caesar, interlocked and synthesised into what Aristotle, in his Politics  two centuries prior, would name as one of the two essential qualities of the nation: its telos, or its noble and ordered end. What emerges clearly is the ‘malicious opposition to [Caesar’s] glory’, only secondarily a threat to Caesar – and primarily a threat to the whole of the Roman state. Given the tight intertwining of that state with the Roman religion, we may even infer a threat to the Roman cosmos.

If it is difficult for us in modernity to comprehend a soldier crossing the Rubicon for his commander; it becomes quite easy to grasp him doing so for the defence of his way of life. Dignitas in its fullness becomes not the excuse of the autocrat, but the fundamental upon which all else depends. Caesar need not fulfil the modernist expectation of appealing to the particular interest of his democratic audience, because both they and he grasp their interests as one.

The generation of the American founding understood all this very clearly, and it is no accident that the most Caesarian figure of American history in this context was one of them: George Washington. We must be careful in calling Washington a Caesar, as colloquial usage implies something that he was emphatically not, and that Caesar eventually was: a dictator. Yet the parallels go far, and dignitas occupies a centrality in the lives and actions of both men.

Washington was throughout his lifetime a zealous guard of his own reputation, his dignitas, which he understood as a reflection upon his merit and the prerequisite to his ambition. Americans unfamiliar with the Revolutionary War are sometimes surprised to learn the ethic with which Washington commanded the Continental Army: not as a collection of free-spirited American militia, the commonplaces of Hollywood and popular mythos, but upon the aristocratic and disciplined lines of 18th-century European standing armies. British attempts to communicate with him during the war were summarily rejected if they did not recognise his title and commission. As with Caesar’s proclaimed motivations, this was not out of personal pique, but out of a desire to reinforce what he took for granted as the proper ordering of man and society. He was therefore beloved by his men – so deeply that he was able to quell in a moment the Newburgh Conspiracy of 1783, arguably the greatest threat to the young republic – and familiar with almost none of them. There was no expectation of the latter in a people steeped in classical values, who knew the interlocking hierarchy of dignitas in their own lives, within a Christian societal context.

They knew it so well, in fact, they made a revolution upon it. The premise of the equal creation of man, rooted in the Imago Dei, and invoked in the American Declaration of Independence, interlocked with dignitas to amplify the American founding from a regional rebellion to an encompassing ideological project that, as George Bancroft said a century later of the Founding’s partial fulfilment in the American Civil War, ‘involved the destinies of mankind’.

Washington’s dignitas also facilitated acts of civic virtue that would have been impossible and incomprehensible outside of it, most significantly his surrender of power – which he did twice, both in returning to private life after the Revolution, and in leaving the presidency after only two terms. Contemporaneous opinion understood very well that far from representing a diminution of the man, the dignitas of Washington was thereby greatly magnified. Even the king whose armies Washington defeated was reported to have commented that ‘if [Washington did surrender power] He would be the greatest man in the world’. We find a parallel in Caesar’s life as well, in his magnanimity toward his defeated enemies after the Civil War, many of whom he restored to both honours and office – including, fatally, several of the eventual conspirators who took his life.

What emerges here is thus dignitas in both citizenry and the statesman as an essential prerequisite to a humane, just, and classically liberal society. Washington’s jealousy for his reputation becomes directly causative of the grandeur and catholicity of American civics and society across two and a half centuries. A superficial understanding of it as a sort of hauteur, a characteristic of aristocrats, misses entirely its indispensability to the welfare and particular dignitas of the common man, the ordinary citizen, and the average person whose name history does not remember. The pride in Roman citizenship, seen across time and centuries, and including St Paul, is one consequence. The reputation of the Americans is another. To borrow from George Eliot, ‘the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’, who sustain the goodness of the world, depend upon the great men.

That understanding persisted across most of American history until very recently. Robert E. Lee, arguably the most Washingtonian figure in that pageant, embodied a conscious dignitas that won respect even from his battlefield foes. A century after the American Civil War, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would write to a correspondent that ‘[t]aken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history’. Eisenhower himself cultivated a dignitas as a leader of both a wartime coalition and his nation, that quality elevating him above arguably more capable strategic minds. The contemporaneous mythos of both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy also represented an assertion of dignitas with the understanding that it was essential to the republic. Only in the modern era, with the presidency of William J. Clinton and its squalid doings being the turning point, has dignitas evaporated as an assumed essential for American statecraft. With it goes the toleration, humanity and restraint that it enabled – an absence that Americans increasingly feel, even if they do not all grasp its source.

It is in this light that the presidency of Donald J. Trump may represent a restoration, a rediscovery in practice of that quality of dignitas that ran from Caesar to Washington and beyond. A commentariat unfamiliar with the western tradition and the fundamentals of politics and statecraft routinely accuse him of dictatorial tendencies but, in doing so, misunderstand his assiduous defence of himself in all things. It is interpreted as base, but the Americans of generations past, and the Romans of Legio XIII, would have recognised it as something else entirely. They would intuit the defence of his dignitas as a defence of themselves.

Americans of this generation are arriving at precisely that. So, too, has Nicolas Maduro, who challenged the dignitas of the American president, and thereby lost his own. As a source of policy and action, it is timeless. As a mechanism for the defence of liberty, it is a guarantor.

There are ‘the wrongs done to him at all times by his enemies… led astray [through] envy and a malicious opposition to his glory’, and he must be vindicated. In it, Americans, born to liberty and the Imago Dei, find the vindication of themselves.