Caesarism

And one of the critiques of our book is we don't say what populism is.

I would say that we imply that it's a modern variation of Bonapartism, which itself is a variation of Caesarism, which is just using an authority figure to overcome seeming contradictions.

And I think one of the ironies of left populism is that it would actually give a lot of these...

If it worked, which I don't think it can, depending on what we mean by it, but if you can just pass a policy suite that would create a welfare state that would enable more largesse, it would either save capitalism to some degree, or it could... accelerate decay because of the impossibility of maintaining such a generous welfare state and maintaining any form of profitability at all.

He thinks the man on horseback, as he put it, would cross the Rubicon, persuade the Senate to give up its prerogatives in exchange for bribes, and install himself as a permanent dictator.

This led to very different visions of the antidote to Caesarism.

For Hamilton, the solution was a president elected for life.

He thought that if the president, that's what he said in this infamous speech on July 9th at the Constitutional Convention.

I'm not going to show the next clip, but it would have shown Simon Weston, basically, a Falklands veteran, explaining exactly what I just did, but better.

I totally understand why some people are concerned, because it does feel like we're in a state of pre-war Caesarism, with Trump asserting his will over Venezuela, Greenland and Iran, Putin over Ukraine, Netanyahu over Palestine, Mark Carney and the prospective Confederation of Middle Powers and whatnot, and of course China.

But I don't think this is the case with Javier Millet at all.

I simply think he's come under serious internal pressure due to this change of tact from the US on the UK's, obviously, Falklands administration.

Now, you and I can argue about whether it's in fact socialism or some other hybrid thing, but like taking equity shares in companies, like the $5,000 thing is just simply wealth distribution.

It's more Caesarism, I would argue, than quote unquote socialism.

And the whole Vance thing about seizing these institutions and giving their resources to our people and all that kind of stuff, has a certain kind of Khmer Rouge kind of vibe to it at times.

So my point is, is that like, there was an amazing poll that came out the other day that said that all Americans are against these equity stakes things, but Republicans are more in favor of them than Democrats are now.

Who was that Corsican of six-and-twenty? What signified that splendid ignoramus who, with everything against him, nothing in his favor, without provisions, without ammunition, without cannon, without shoes, almost without an army, with a mere handful of men against masses, hurled himself on Europe combined and absurdly won victories in the impossible? Whence had issued that fulminating convict who, almost without taking breath and with the same set of combatants in hand, pulverized one after the other the five armies of the Emperor of Germany, upsetting Beaulieu on Alvinczi, Wurmser on Beaulieu, Melas on Wurmser, Mack on Melas? Who was this novice in war with the effrontery of a luminary? The academical military school excommunicated him and as it lost its footing.

Hence, the implacable rancor of the old Caesarism against the new, of the regular sword against the flaming sword, and of the exchequer against genius.

On the eighteenth of June, 1815, that rancor had the last word, and beneath Lodi, Montebello, Montenotte, Mantua, Arcola, it wrote Waterloo, a triumph of the mediocres which is sweet to the majority.

Destiny consented to this irony.

The man who is Caesar could sway the scepter of universal empire.

Caesar and Caesarism were the inevitable last result of Roman development.

And when he had been made to feel most deeply that natural justice in the hands of a human despot is a dreadful thing for sinful man, the Holy Spirit proposes to commend to his acceptance Jesus of Nazareth as his sovereign and savior, the expected deliverer of the world.

And we're moving into a position today where there will come in a police state one man, and he'll be satanic, ruling over sinful man, and they'll cry out for deliverance.

Of the same tendency, too, the kings and the czars availed themselves to constitute their power at the end of the feudal period.

The belief in a popular emperor, that is Caesarism, has not died out even yet.

But all the while another tendency was ever manifest.

At all times, beginning with ancient Greece, there were persons and popular movements that aimed not at the substitution of one government for another, but at the abolition of authority altogether.

In reality, it gave the Roman Empire what still distinguished it from the monarchies of the East.

Caesarism, in the proper sense of the term, which may be described as a system resting on military loyalty to a quasi-royal family, lasted only from the Battle of Actium to the death of Nero.

With Vespasian came a prelude to the recovery of influence by that party in the Senate, which, sustained by the Stoic philosophy, had resisted pure absolutism.

The reform was retarded for an interval by the tyranny of Domitian, more frightful in its sheer oppressiveness than anything that had gone before.

But tyrannicide laid the foundation of nearly a century's good government.

The emperors of the second century took in hand the task of organizing the imperial system so as to make the monarchy, as Tacitus put it, compatible with liberty.

By Marcus Aurelius, Caesarism was expressly repudiated, and his ideal of the monarchy, republican in spirit, was still official in the third century.

The Roman Empire, according to the view put forward, was not to be confounded with an Asiatic despotism.

They don't want to reform the system.

They want to destroy it and replace it with right-wing Caesarism.

So says Oliver.

Man, you're doing, you, you're doing-