And be mocked, humiliated and exiled? For political reasons?
He did, and in fact appointed new senators- just that many senators left Rome to join the opposition- in the end most came back and were pardoned. Not Cato, however- who was a certified asshole.
But the Senate had no fixed number of members.
Caesar was the opposition. “The government resisted me taking over the government, and therefore I had no choice but to take over the government, because the alternative was facing the penalties for the crimes I’d already committed”.
Obviously we disagree here,
But does the contemporary USA meet this metric?
Americans have a high number of years of education, but it’s difficult to measure the quality of education received. Certainly overall literacy, knowledge of history, and knowledge of (and acceptance of) science isn’t where it is in other industrialized nations.
We are a wealthy nation, but there are some indicators that people are not doing as well now as they were 50 years ago in the middle class.
Healthy is also up for debate, with obesity rates and pay-to-play healthcare.
I mean, it’s not that we’re not doing pretty okay by all three metrics, but we do seem to be sliding downward.
It is true that you have to go back to the Gracchi Brothers and latifundia limits for all the details, but the article just wants to give basic information to compare to modern events.
It isn’t really the same. The American Senate may be silent and cowardly and complicit, but all they have to do to restore real democracy is to do the job that they have always done. One might say the same for the House. Are they at risk of being terminated? Are private armies roaming the major cities? The Republican majority is not even large. In the end, Trump will not succeed because he mismanaged the economy and opened his mouth too wide when discussing his plans.
You say this, but compare where we are now to where we were three months ago today.
Now factor in the number of people willing to carry out death threats against Trump’s enemies. It’s not millions of people, but I’m willing to bet it’s not zero, either.
I want to get through the summer without violence before I’m willing to say that Trump('s handlers) will not succeed.
The armies in Ancient Rome did not make a bunch of idle threats. For all of Trump’s crass tackiness in removing security from public figures he dislikes I am unaware that this has made much difference.
Right. Sadly, the fact that Trump is massively incompetent in comparison to Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar might end up being a good thing that allows us to recover from all this.
We are healthy, wealthy and educated.
The chances that a nation that transitions from dictatorship to democracy increase dramatically as per capita income hits around 5-10k. Below that level the odds are that a country will slide back into dictatorship. Above that level the odds are good a nation will maintain its new democracy status. US per capita income is around 80k.
I think the chances of transitioning to democracy increase as secondary (high school) education levels increase. In the US, about 34% of US adults have a bachelors degree. Also among white people, those with a bachelor degree are far less likely to support Trump and republicans. Among white men w/o a bachelors degree, about 75% support trump. Among white men with a bachelors degree, its around 50%.
Health is important because infectious diseases make people more authoritarian. Also due to maslow’s heirarchy, when people are sick and starving then higher needs like self actualization through a democracy become less important. People are too busy dealing with starvation and disease to care about abstract concepts like governance. Supposedly the Kim regime in North Korea intentionally tries to keep their population starving out of fear that if they are well fed, they might realize how bad they’re being screwed and rise up.
I don’t want to spend 20 minutes digging through google to find citations for all these things, but this is the general gist of it.
There is no guarantee the next right wing authoritarian will not be an idiot.
Imagine someone as evil as Trump who is also competent. Who knows how to reward loyalists, who knows how to wield power, who knows what levers to pull and how to keep the oligarchs happy (Trump destroyed trillions in wealth due to his idiocy).
I once read a quote from an insider of the white house who worked with Trump. Their quote was something like this
“People think Trump is playing 4 dimensional chess when really, we’re just trying to stop him from eating the chess pieces”
Imagine a competent version of Trump. That’s scary.
You don’t have to imagine. Just look at Vance.
I don’t feel Vance share’s Trumps innate evil. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Vance is just power hungry. Trump is evil, I think Vance more pretends to be excessively evil because he knows the GOP base are evil.
I feel if Vance were in charge, we wouldn’t have Musk or the tariffs right now. I could be wrong but I don’t think Vance would attack democracy as much as Trump does.
I’m not sure who I’d say is just as evil as Trump but also competent. I’m sure there are people out there, but none come to mind as politicians or leaders who I can think of.
I think a lot of GOP leaders pretend to be more evil than they really are to appeal to the racist, angry, bigoted GOP base. But the people who truly believe those things also tend to be stupid (MTG, Palin, Mark Robinson, Justin Eichorn, etc). I mean if your entire worldview is based on voluntary ignorance and misinformation, then you’re probably not competent.
A truly competent version of Trump would be an intelligent sociopath. Putin is a competent version of Trump, but I don’t know who domestically I’d compare to Putin. I’m certain there are endless potential Putins in the US, I just don’t know who they are.
Evidence of Vance’s competence?
Vance is an example of a DEI hire in the Republican sense of the word: “chosen for their identity and not their competence”.
Vance seems to be quite intelligent. Evil, but intelligent. And loves power. Now that Trump has shown how to corrupt the system, he will go whole hog.
I just saw that the FBI has arrested a judge who made a ruling to protect an immigrant. Augustus would have approved.
That Judge’s situation is discussed in the deportation thread, the Can Congress Kill the Judiciary thread, and one other… I’m losing track.
Vance acknowledged in Hillbilly Elegy that Yale law school took his Appalachian origins into account in deciding to admit him.
He’s DEI in every sense of the word.
If anybody else was in charge we wouldn’t have those stupid tariffs.
Vance’s problems all come down to daddy issues. He’s spent his whole life switching from trying to please one father figure to another. Trump is just his current father figure. If Trump were to leave office prematurely and Vance to succeed him, who knows who his new father figure would be?
And a suck up.
But yeah, not as incompetent as trump. Vance likely knows that Tariffs are not The Answer.