• sailingbythelee@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

    • Belazor@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Fair, but Trump does have the Proud Boys… LARPing as an elite strike force is the same as battle-hardened legions, right?

    • Case@unilem.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.