The Burning City and the Convinced Generation: On the Very Old Belief That Our Divisions Are the Worst in History

Every generation believes it is living through the most dangerous political moment in history. This is not an observation about the present alone — it is a documented feature of human societies across time, a kind of civilizational narcissism that afflicts populations the way nostalgia afflicts individuals: consistently, predictably, and with only loose correlation to actual circumstances.

Americans in 2024 describe their political divisions with the vocabulary of emergency. Polls consistently show that large majorities of both major parties believe democracy itself is at stake in each successive election cycle. Cable news anchors speak of the present moment as though it arrived without precedent, as though the republic had sailed smoothly from 1789 to approximately fifteen years ago before suddenly encountering weather.

This framing is not entirely wrong. There are real divisions, real institutional stresses, real questions about the durability of political norms. The problem is not that Americans are concerned. The problem is the word unprecedented — a word that does a great deal of emotional work while doing very little historical work.

The Byzantine Empire would like a word.

The Blues and the Greens

To a modern reader, the factions of the Byzantine hippodrome sound almost comically trivial. The Blues and the Greens were, at their origin, chariot-racing teams — the sixth-century equivalent of sports franchises, each with devoted fan bases who wore their team's colors, filled the stadium's designated sections, and cheered for their drivers with the intensity that American fans today reserve for playoff games.

But the Blues and the Greens were not merely sports factions. By the early sixth century, they had become the primary vehicles through which Constantinople's population organized its social and political identity. They had their own organizational structures, their own neighborhood territories, their own capacity for street violence. They functioned, in the absence of formal political parties, as the closest thing the empire had to organized civic factions. Emperors cultivated one or the other. Theological disputes — and Byzantium had no shortage of those — mapped imperfectly but meaningfully onto the Blue-Green divide. Class resentments, ethnic tensions, and grievances against the imperial administration all found expression through the stadium rivalry.

The historian Procopius, writing in the sixth century, recorded the violence between the factions with a mixture of disgust and bewilderment that will feel familiar to anyone who has tried to explain American politics to a foreign friend. How, he seemed to ask, had people organized their entire civic identity around the color of a racing team?

The answer, of course, is that the racing teams were never really about racing.

The Nika Riots: One Week in January

In January of 532 AD, the Emperor Justinian made a politically miscalculated decision to execute members of both factions following a particularly violent episode of street fighting. The factions, whose enmity was ordinarily their defining characteristic, responded by doing something that shocked the empire: they united.

What followed over the next seven days became known as the Nika Riots — named for the victory cry Nika! ("Win!") that the factions chanted as they turned from fighting each other to fighting the imperial government. The rioters burned the Hagia Sophia. They burned the city's main administrative buildings. They burned entire neighborhoods. They proclaimed a rival emperor. Justinian, by multiple historical accounts, was on the verge of fleeing the city entirely.

Estimates of the death toll range from twenty thousand to thirty thousand people — in a single week, in a single city, over what had begun as a dispute about the sentencing of riotous sports fans.

Justinian did not flee. His wife, the Empress Theodora, reportedly delivered a speech whose substance Procopius recorded: that the imperial purple was a fine burial shroud, and that she, for one, intended to remain. The general Belisarius was sent into the hippodrome with troops. The surviving rioters — estimated at around thirty thousand who had gathered there — were killed.

The city was rebuilt. The empire continued for another nine centuries.

The Recurring Conviction

The Nika Riots are useful not because they are the worst example of political violence in history — they are not — but because they are among the most thoroughly documented instances of a society convincing itself that its divisions were uniquely existential while those divisions were, in the longer view, neither unique nor ultimately fatal to the civilization experiencing them.

Byzantium survived the Nika Riots. It survived subsequent riots, theological schisms, military coups, and dynastic collapses before its final fall in 1453 — nearly a thousand years after Justinian watched his capital burn. The divisions that felt, in 532 AD, like they might be the end of the world were, in retrospect, one particularly bad week in a very long story.

This pattern repeats with enough consistency to constitute something close to a historical law. The English Civil War produced contemporaries who wrote as though Christian civilization itself hung in the balance. The French Revolution generated rhetoric — and genuine violence — premised on the idea that the old world was ending and a new one beginning, a premise that was both true in important respects and wildly overstated in others. Americans of the 1850s were not wrong that the republic faced a genuine existential crisis, but the letters and diaries of that period show a population that had been convinced, for years before the Civil War, that each successive political crisis was the final one — only to find that the country endured each preliminary crisis before encountering the one that actually was.

The Specific Danger of Feeling Unprecedented

There is a meaningful difference between arguing that contemporary American political divisions are serious and arguing that they are without historical parallel. The first claim is defensible and arguably important. The second claim is not only historically illiterate but actively counterproductive.

When a society becomes convinced that its moment is uniquely catastrophic, several things tend to follow. Ordinary political compromise becomes framed as surrender to existential threat, because you do not negotiate with forces threatening civilization itself. Institutional norms — the procedural guardrails that function precisely because all parties agree to observe them — become dispensable, because extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. The shared civic identity that allows political rivals to coexist as fellow citizens rather than enemies erodes, because it is difficult to maintain fellowship with someone you have been told represents an unprecedented danger to everything you value.

In other words, the belief that polarization is uniquely dangerous tends to produce the conditions that make polarization more dangerous. The diagnosis becomes part of the disease.

This is not an argument for complacency. The Blues and the Greens were expressing real grievances through their stadium rivalry — grievances about taxation, about theological persecution, about the gap between imperial wealth and urban poverty. Those grievances deserved address. The hippodrome was simply a catastrophically inefficient venue for addressing them.

What the Long View Actually Offers

Reading the history of political fracture — not as a source of false comfort, but as a genuine record of how societies have navigated crises before — offers something that no amount of contemporary punditry can provide: a sense of proportion calibrated against actual data rather than present anxiety.

Some societies did not survive their versions of this moment. The Western Roman Empire did not recover from its internal fractures. The Weimar Republic did not find its Theodora. The historical record is not uniformly reassuring, and anyone who reads it as a guarantee of American institutional resilience is reading selectively.

But the record also shows, repeatedly, that the conviction of living through the worst moment in history is one of the most common experiences in history — which is to say, it is not a reliable indicator of actually living through the worst moment in history. It is, instead, a reliable indicator of living through a moment of genuine stress, which is a different thing, and which requires a different response.

The old routes through political crisis are not secret. They are documented in extraordinary detail by people who walked them, many of whom were convinced, as they walked, that no one had ever faced what they were facing.

They had. The roads were already there.

The question, as it has always been, is whether enough people are willing to look down and notice.