In a discussion of possible responses to this conspiracy theory, he wrote that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people”.
Dictator, they want a dictator
They’ve always wanted a dictator. This is just their latest euphemism for it.
Caesar himself doesn’t get nearly enough shit for being a destroyer of democracy.
I’ve often referred to Trump as Stupid Caesar.
Like Caesar, Trump pushed up against established political norms and found very little pushback. As it turns out, having it be up for debate whether a leader is legally responsible for crimes committed is not a stable foundation for a nation.
The only difference is, Trump did not wait to build up his base not just in the electorate but also among other political figures before pushing as hard as he did. The whole drinking bleach and shining a light to cure Covid probably didn’t help.
Also I’m pretty certain Caesar wasn’t borderline illiterate. If we look up any of Caesar’s speeches recorded by even his most ardent opponents and compare them to Trump’s, there’s a bit of a difference there.
Anyway the point is, both of these men did nothing except expose the flaws in the system, and so long as we do nothing to fix said flaws, is there anything stopping a more competent modern-day Caesar from finishing what Trump started?
Also I’m pretty certain Caesar wasn’t borderline illiterate.
In fact, not only did Caesar read books, unlike Trump, he wrote them too. And didn’t use a ghost writer and then claim he wrote the best-selling book ever.
Bellum Gallicum was a real page turner, though.
Stupid Sulla is a more accurate comparison
Sulla started a civil war with his militrary leaders being against it and strip any and all power from the plebians
The most important difference between Caesar and Trump is that Trump isn’t a war leader, and he doesn’t have a personal army backing him. Now, if Trump (or a more competent person) personally lead his own private army on a highly successful decade-long campaign of foreign conquest and plunder, enriching the population and becoming spectacularly popular in the process, and then was willing and able to use that army to successfully fight a civil war, AND if the US was already war-weary from decades of civil war among its warlords, well then we might have similar conditions to the time of Caesar. I just don’t see that happening in America. When America eventually falls from global hegemony, it will probably be more like the end of the British Empire than the end of the Roman Republic.
Fair, but Trump does have the Proud Boys… LARPing as an elite strike force is the same as battle-hardened legions, right?
Lol, the Gravy Seals!
The conditions aren’t the exact same, and they don’t have to be.
The average US citizen is weary. Of war ( or whatever they want to call 20 years in the middle east), of politics, and getting the shit end of the deal since the boomers refuse to retire or die. Now they’re barely animate corpses are still tottering around the capital, completely out if touch with what the average citizen goes through, and more to the point, very few care as long as they retain power.
It amazes me how much Americans praise authoritarian rule. And most people don’t even notice.
Look at all the children’s books, TV shows and movies that feature kings, queens, princess, etc. Even Mr Rogers had a king in make believe.
The entire plot of the Black Panther movie was due to an advanced society having a hereditary authoritarian government FFS. And the solution is a civil war where the “good king” wins.
We grow up with the idea of the *benevolent dictator" being hammered into us.
I think it’s just playing into people’s fantasies of power. Look at how much of.our entertainment is about ultra wealthy people (the romcom billionaire who falls for a humble working class woman, the rappers who brag about getting bags, etc.) despite most Americans living humbly or struggling. It may also be because most people in the US grew up on fairy tales and Disney movies involving royalty (ETA: Now that i think about it these children’s entertainments sound like propaganda).
I think you can also throw a bit of the romantic notions of knighthood, King Arthur, shit I don’t like to throw Tolkien under the bus but he probably bears some blame here too
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This is one of the reasons I love the Once and Future King so much. It’s still eighty years old at this point, so it’s certainly problematic in some ways…but one of the central themes of the book is grappling with the idea that Might Makes Right, and Arthur is desperately trying to figure out how Power should, or if it can, be wielded justly. Definitely an attempt at deconstructing the Arthurian fantasy, written during (and kind of after) WW2.
Every once in a while it comes up in RPG spaces, especially DND. Like, why are we doing the whole “king and rightful heir” trope played straight again? Monarchy is fundamentally unjust.
And then people get mad. “it’s just a game”. “Don’t make things political”. (As if a story about a king and heirs isn’t already political!)
I did a nice campaign arc that was about a small city state that had overthrown their king and established a collective, and how counter-revolutionaries were trying to bring the king back. It was good. Probably one of the best I’ve run.
Also one of the larger cities in the setting had an elected mayor, and we had an arc about getting out the vote.
Anyway. We can tell different stories. But you need to go against the grain. And be ready for chuds to get upset.
That’s fantastic!
Was it Caesar though and not Octavian? A dictator can be elected and changed democratically.
Caesar started a civil war that ended with him being emperor.
His crossing of the river precipitated Caesar’s civil war,[4] which ultimately led to Caesar’s becoming dictator for life (dictator perpetuo). Caesar had been appointed to a governorship over a region that ranged from southern Gaul to Illyricum. As his term of governorship ended, the Senate ordered him to disband his army and return to Rome. As it was illegal to bring armies into Italy (the northern border of which was marked by the river Rubicon) his crossing the river under arms amounted to insurrection, treason, and a declaration of war on the state. According to some authors, he uttered the phrase alea iacta est (“the die is cast”) before crossing.
You’re both right. Caesar was emperor except in name. His title was Dictator. Octavian/Augustus was the first emperor.
Worth nothing that Augustus used the title “princeps”, which was also an existing title in the Republic. And his power came from holding existing offices. He was careful to make himself the ruler of Rome using the existing governing framework.
He just negotiated that he would hold these positions for life.
This is the same thing Julius Caesar did, except the existing title he held - dictator - carried too much political baggage.
He was declared dictator-for-life and was in open war with much of the senate. Not hyper-democratic. And then he was killed, so we don’t know what his final goal was. Maybe he was going to set things right (in his opinion) and then hand back control to the senate, like Sulla had done a generation earlier, or maybe he would have done what Octavian did later.
I mean… he got stabbed to death by the entire Roman senate. But I get what you’re saying.
That was a good start.
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When I was an evangelical as a teenager I independently came to the conclusion that the best form or rule was a monarchy. This is what Christianity taught me to think, and it’s what evangelicals think, even if they won’t admit it. Their whole worldview is predicated on a strongman ruling and they can’t separate that from reality.
For me it was the realization of how much traditional media relies on the “father knows best” trope because they need the guidance. In reality, they like the abuse.
All this talk is why I consider a lot of New Vegas memes for Caesar’s Legion to be a clear marker for neo-fascist thinking. People laugh at me for warning them, it’s just a game.
People laugh at me for warning them, it’s just a game.
This is a huge part of fascist propaganda, and it’s why the Proud Boys chose that name: it sounds silly and benign, so it lets them fly under the radar.
The swastika was a universally positive symbol until the Nazis smeared their ideology on it; now it’s a powerful symbol of white-hot ignorant hatred.
Anakin Skywalker agrees
It goes to show you how unhinged these people are.
They know they can’t say what they’re really thinking because they know exactly that their beliefs are morally wrong, are unacceptable, impossible, unrealistic, unstable and mentally unsound.
But if you describe it in a new way, use code words, anagrams, acronyms, special dates or numbers or just some dumb phrase … somehow your dumb unhinged political ideas can make sense and they express their unstable logic in public.
It’s outright fascism … it’s the same ideas millions of people died fighting against or were killed by in the second world war. And it’s fascism that is being casually being promoted and placed in the public forum as a discussion point that can be debated.
The problem is not that there are people advocating for fascism … the problem is that we are allowing these fascist supporters such a strong and prominent voice.
Call them out for who they are … fascist scum.
Not sure anyone should be running Julius Caesar as a poster child for a political movement given that his ended with a bunch of people literally stabbing him in the back.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Julius_Caesar
That’s ironic considering I’m about 99% sure that’s how Donald Trump’s stranglehold over the GOP is going to end as well.
Iconic if they schedule it for March too.
Trump’s first trial date actually is in March 😅
Et tu, Eric?
I’m Eric!
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It’s the same with those who want America to be a Christian Theocracy. They all assume that their flavor of Christianity will be in charge. In reality, whichever version of Christianity becomes the “official religion of the Theocratic States of America” would impose its practices on them. Then, they’d complain that they weren’t allowed to practice their religion freely. (If only there was some Constitutional Amendment or something which guaranteed Freedom of Religion.)
And Fascism is especially cannibalistic; one has to be a special kind of stupid to think their life would improve under such a regime.
Especially if you’re already a billionaire.
they all have killed off the people who brought them to power or who could be perceived as any kind of threat.
So you’re saying they don’t understand they are the Brown Shirts and will meet the same fate?
okay if you know anything about Roman history this is not even code its just straight up saying they want to overthrow the government. It’s like tankies saying 1917, read fucking books people
Fascism is the bimbofication of ancient Rome
Yes, and it hilariously misses that Caesar was in the liberal faction of Roman politics at the time.
Mussolini and the PNF also loved the Roman Empire, what a coincidence!
Republicans: “Pasta is unmanly and evil.”
Red Caesarism? Which would imply that it is OK to stick a whole family cutlery set into Trumps back?
“Et tu, Chesebro?”
Don Jr.: “Friends, Americans, countrymen: lend me your retirement savings!”
This made me audibly snortle
When conservatives give up on democratic views they turn to dictatorship. It’s a tale as old as time.
Yuck, it’s that “King Cyrus” bullshit all over again.
Let’s just give them a spot to let them do their shit, like the midwest or something. We can call it the Caesarian Section.
Long way to go for that joke but I’m still proud of it.
How can any true independent or even moderate republican look at these goons and think anything other than “HELL NO”???
So… the fasces was an ancient Etruscan symbol that the Romans adopted. After the fall of the Roman empire, the symbol became associated with them and their power and the word itself gained power. It changed a little bit though. It became fascism. So there is a direct line between the oppressive Roman empire and modern fascism.
I’m not too worried about a Caesarian coup just yet. Outgoing 4-star General Mark Milley made a point of publicly emphasizing that US military members take an oath to defend the US Constitution, not a person, not even the country/population.
Caesarism clearly intends to overthrow the constitutional order, so I don’t see the military supporting a Caesarian coup, at least not yet. And you can’t overthrow the US constitutional order without the support of the US military.
The transition from Roman Republic to Empire was preceded by decades of civil war and involved armies raised by and loyal to specific warlords. Rome also had a long tradition of legally electing dictators during emergencies. The US has no such traditions or mechanisms. A lot would have to change before the US got to that point.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In June, rightwing academic Kevin Slack published a book-length polemic claiming that ideas that had emerged from what he called the radical left were now so dominant that the US republic its founders envisioned was effectively at an end.
Slack, a politics professor at the conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan, made conspiratorial and extreme arguments now common on the antidemocratic right, that “transgenderism, anti-white racism, censorship, cronyism … are now the policies of an entire cosmopolitan class that includes much of the entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and government-sponsored corporations”.
For the last three years, parts of the American right have advocated a theory called Caesarism as an authoritarian solution to the claimed collapse of the US republic in conference rooms, podcasts and the house organs of the extreme right, especially those associated with the Claremont Institute thinktank.
Though on the surface this discussion might seem esoteric, experts who track extremism in the US say that due to their influence on the Republican party, the rightwing intellectuals who espouse these ideas about the attractions of autocracy present a profound threat to American democracy.
Their calls for a “red Caesar” are now only growing louder as Donald Trump, whose supporters attempted to violently halt the election of Joe Biden in 2020, has assumed dominant frontrunner status in the 2024 Republican nomination race.
His diagnosis of US social and cultural life unfolds under a series of subheadings that are almost comical in their disillusionment: “The universities have become evil”, “Our economy is fake”, “The people are corrupt”, “Our civilization has lost the will to live”.
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