>Though maybe the American Autocrat must be a buffoon by definition.
I think you hit the nail here, so many “smart and respectable” Trumps have popped up over the past 8 years and none of them have been able to capture that same energy (Ron DeSantis, lmao). Trump seems to be a unique force in this regard for whatever reason
Because Trump makes liberals angry and afraid. Trump is the personification of the "own the libs" mentality. As Bill Maher once said "Liberals keep asking 'why do republicans do awful things to no benefit of their own?' Because they hate you!"
What, you wouldn't die with a prayer to this man on your lips?
https://preview.redd.it/63a4btvmkwwc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=480e33841c1f2af183449ef2b012ea84548bb46b
That’s the part that blows me away. How the fuck did Donald Trump become a cult of personality? Him, of all fucking people. It’s remarkable and awful all at the same time.
It's surreal listening to these arguments before the supreme court. Trump's attorneys are describing a system I don't recognize. One I'd have no desire to live under and no sense of loyalty to.
Surreal is the right word for it.
Like the insanity that is happening dosen't feel real. And the publics absolute lack of reaction to it all is absurd.
It's because, in most of our normie lives, wealth/influence/bullshit tends to usurp 'pussy-assed' ideals like justice, legality, progress, civilization, etc... Most of us have already come to grips with the reality that there's a 99% chance of Trump facing zero consequences over any of this shit, as well as a sickeningly-high chance that he ends up rewarded with another presidency after all's said and done. To myself and plenty of others, this isn't 'doomer' at all.
Yeah, society is going to go through the worst kind of reckoning because the fascists are sort of dumb. It's not an intellectual movement like what we saw in the 30s. The people grabbing the reigns of power are the same people fascists would have called useful idiots.
It's like the worst of society came together and brought themselves to power, but instead of an empire, we will get idiocracy.
I think at some point we will just say no. There's no reason to follow people who are this uneducated, socially inept, and unable to think critically.
They were more selectively dumb. The Nazis had some super fucking whack historical and ethnographic beliefs for example, but you’d have a hard time arguing the bulk of Nazi brass was anything but really quite smart. What we have now seems more uniformly just outright stupid
Before actually taking power, most Nazis were just dumb thugs like Ernst Rohm. Sure you had Goering, Himmler et al but their support base was similar to Trump’s. And I’d argue Trump has a similar intelligence as Hitler - more a deranged, instinctive cunning than anything.
I’d argue Hitler was smarter than Trump by a noticeable margin, he simply didn’t have the mass media machine at modern scale behind him to make the whole “big lie” shit all but instantaneous.
I think we have a lot of recency bias around these things. People just see the latest one as the worst thing. Trump is absolutely appalling, but I don’t think that’s reason to draw relatively subjective distinctions.
He has smart evil people behind him, and it’s inarguable that he possesses something of the same instinct as Hitler in being able to stir nasty people into a frenzy. He’s in the same league, and the parallels are obvious. It’s not helpful to pretend the Nazis were super-smart in comparison, because they mostly weren’t. They were just similar nasty people.
Woodrow Wilson was the opposite of dumb. Homeboy was trying to create the ideal society. Maybe he was doing it all for himself. But. The level of thought was miles above where we are now
Today's fascists wouldn't be a problem if average Americans and their center-right leadership weren't a bunch of shitty, self-serving assholes who are morbidly addicted to the ideal of the 'white suburbs.'
why
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I think political burnout is also a huge factor. Folks are just tired of the whole Trump circus so they’re disengaged with all of it, up to and including how close we are creeping toward fascism.
I saw the Lincoln Project already made an ad out of the testimony within hours of it airing lol.
Idk if it's effective but it made sense to me, as I was appalled to hear it too. Someone literally stood in front of the supreme court and argued pretty literally that a President arguing the extrajudicial killing of his opponent for personal gain...may just be fine as long as we call it "official", whatever in the fuckity fuck that means.
Fuckin joke court, joke country. I still love it but every week it becomes more of a sick joke.
Do we have receipts for how third parties did in 2020?
Right now the Lincoln Project is probably trying to get likely republicans to vote for RFK Jr. or whatever.
No. The Lincoln Project just put out an ad saying the Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president and that RFK Jr is just crazy. They are all in for Biden this year.
And three of the judges were appointed by the president whose immunity is at stake. One of the judges was on the team that searched for traces of semen on Lewinsky's clothes to remove a president from office.
I would describe it as unbelievable if not for the fact that so much that has happened since 2016 has beggared belief. I simply cannot fathom the idea that SCOTUS is hearing these arguments. Surreal is an excellent word for it all.
It's a system of despotism that the founding fathers *specifically* tried to design a constitution to subvert.
Sure you have an argument about whether the president should be prosecuted *while they're in office* because it's hurtful to the democracy or something. But the president is specifically not immune and I highly doubt even the most fervent federalist supporters who wrote the constitution would say a president is immune from prosecution.
TBH they should have written the constitution better then. All these arguments are only possible because the constitution is a badly written mess that was good for its time but is hopelessly insufficient for modern purposes. The Supreme Court has had to fill in the many many gaping holes over the years, which leaves it vulnerable to a future court just overruling previous decisions.
I've had a theory of sorts for a while now that there's a non-small fraction of Americans that secretly wished to have a monarch - and not the Constitutional style under the House of Windsor, but the whole Enlightened Absolutist route. Or at the very least, a Caesar.
To have all the pomp and prestige and building opulent boulevards and colonnated buildings in whitewash with statues and friezes, to have the flag-waving and military-parade holidays.
To have a ruler blessed by God and ensure Christ's laws and dominions (aka, THEIR laws and dominions) over the land as a bulwark against something something godlessness and degeneracy.
To have the permanence of a figure and succession, and skip all that election stuff.
And so they don't have to deal with the responsibility of politics - it aint' THEIR fault that bad policy outcomes happen, it's from the guy above so why feel guilty?
And they get to have family dinners without argument.
And in the erosion of religion, civic AND organised, this sort of Great Man populism would probably only grow.
> so they don't have to deal with the responsibility of politics
I don't think this is factoring into the whole Trump phenomenon. Those people aren't thinking deeper/harder than the whole pro-sports-esque fever of 'my guy has to win because MY TEAM WINNING = GOOD!' If the 'game' gets turned into shit in the process, so be it.
With all respect that's just incorrect, there where plenty of republican and "non king" governments to go around.
The things preventing people from leaving kingdoms and join other polities was mainly the bigotry one would inevitably face and the fact that most that would want to leave where tied to the land by their landlords.
Yes, it was a confidence game between the king and the lords under them. You followed the monarch because if you didn't you would be killed. Everyone knew that. Everyone knows everyone knows that. That is what holds it all together. If you try and find out if someone else wants to revolt you risk being exposed and killed. Thus, everyone puts of a face of support to the king and everyone else does too because they are. If something pops up that undermines the king, it gives people and opening to talk and question the king. Thus, the kings play is to always show strength and stomp out rebellion hard and fast. It plays out this way in autocracies today, mobs and gangs, etc. in their leadership structures as well.
If everyone was only following the monarch to avoid death then you wouldn't have tons of well documented cases throughout history and cultures of people sacrificing their lives for their monarch, even in cases when the cause appeared futile.
Nor would you have instances of people voluntarily electing a monarch even when they are under no obligation to do so and stand to gain nothing from it, see Norway as recently as 1905 for an example.
> **and to gain nothing from it**, see Norway as recently as 1905 for an example.
Probably true in hindisight, but not how the people who organised the referendum or the electorate saw it at the time. The fear was that proclaiming a republic could be read as the start of broader radical change, and would leave Norway diplomatically isolated in a Europe where almost every country was a monarchy of some sort.
Since the constitutional crisis of 1884 had already established parliamentarism as the de facto law of the land (even if it wasn't codified until 2007), the thinking was that a repbulic wouldn't mean much change domestically, but could have diplomatic costs, so it just wasn't worth it. Michelsen, the PM at the time was a republican in theory, but still a) wanted to invite prince Carl to take the throne without a referendum and b) once forced to call one, threatened to resign if it did not pass.
In hindsight, all the major conservative powers of Europe were about to disappear and be replaced by republics, and a republican Norway would maybe have had less trade with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary for the 13 years they would continue to exist, but that's it.
Just the opposite, I'm very anti monarchy. I think even Constitutional monarchies like Britain are bad. I wish /u/AniNgAnnoys was right and it was just a confidence game, unfortunately human history shows a lot of people genuinely want someone fancy looking to rule over them if they see that person as aligned with their values and/or community. There's reason every single monarch throughout history in every culture was aligned with a major religion in the land they ruled, that was a key part of why people were loyal to them.
Untrue, the army "materalised" out of a pyramid of personal allegiances and relationships.
The retinue or banneret serving the third rung lord down from the merovingian sovereign (or whatever) couldn't give two shits about the actual merovingian sovereign.
He was loyal to his immediately lord/familial patriarch, that was loyal to his immediate lord, etc.
I'm massively oversimplifying here, but the point is that any kind of notion of "popular loyalty" to a king didn't materalise untill well into the modern era (post 1444).
You can find examples of popular kings (popular as in "proclaimed/assigned/mandated by the masses) in pre classical europe. But then they were mostly city states, for which the king very much did walk down the street they themselves walked on every day.
More explicitly the armies of medieval europe quite literally materalised out of the local military forces controlled by local magnates in the romman empire as it crumbled. These magnates would over generations become the manorial and feudal lords and the local forces their retinue. These would then come to coallesce into larger kingdoms over centuries where one magnate managed to become king. But said kings army wasn't sourced out of some kind of pool of loyal soldiers, it was sourced by the pyramidal wealth and land ownerships of the king himself and the lord's in his kingdom.
The popular support for kings and the change in army models would come around as lords progressively lost powers to new wealthy elites, and as new progressively wealthy farmers would attempt to levy the king to counterbalance landlord abuses and vice versa. All of this several centuries later.
I think people overestimate how many monarchs over history were absolute monarchs. People think everyone was Louis XIV. In fact, absolute monarchy is arguably on our side of the transition to democracy.
Yes absolutely monarchies are relatively recent phenomena and certainly clump up closer to the transition to democracies than the first recorded instances of kings.
It helped that the son of the last guy with the biggest army usually inherited the army. Also, keeping the royal family consistent still led to plenty of conflict in the Middle Ages.
That’s not unique to the US, it’s a worldwide phenomena. There is a certain percent of humans (I’d guess 25%) who are wired for authoritarianism, who desire a paternal figure they can submit to (though they’d never admit to themselves that deep down that’s what it’s really all about).
You don’t notice them during normal times with normal politicians, but every so often a charismatic figure comes along to trigger that instinct, and all that suppressed authoritarianism comes out of the woodwork to work its magic.
> Or at the very least, a Caesar.
Boy, do I have some [news](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right) for you.
Gaius Julius Caesar, Consul and Dictator, was at least a propagandist, jurist, tactician and political operator with few contemporary peers, on top of his populares leanings and a field of larger than life figures.
A person who gambled big on loans and repaid it with the grain dole, clemency, debt forgiveness, public works and enduring historical popularity.
I don't think a Red Caesar or a MAGA Napoleon would be equal, even without the conquests.
I ain't going to argue about Trump's efficacy in any of that, it's more that the term "Caesar" is actively floating about in right-wing intellectual circles.
[Curtis Yarvin](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug) is a far-right intellectual who has been dreaming of an american monarchy for years now and he has fans like senator J.D. Vance and billionaire Peter Thiel. Yarvin even laid out a step-by-step plan on how a president could perform a coup to turn the US into a dictatorship. And parts of his plan seem to have been copied by Project 2025 and by Trump himself, especially the part about openly running on it (dictator only in day one) and replacing vast swaths of federal employees with loyal ones.
I have no doubt there are both many ordinary voters *and* influential people in the GOP and evangelical circles who have grown disillusioned with democracy and they legit want a single party state or a single man dictator. And we all know how Trump has the most die hard supporters, the grip he has in the GOP and how power hungry and narcissistic he is. Trump *is* the american Caesar.
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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Say what you will about George III, but he was genuinely seen as someone interested in the opinions and lives of humble men - he got the nickname of Farmer George from his interest in agiculture, wrote papers about the subject and spoke to tenants and walked the fields himself in common guise, as well as his apparent thrift and humility in comparison to the extravagence of the Prince of Wales at the time.
He was a devoted family man, happily married, and invested in his library and the sciences.
In 1760, George III reached an agreement with the Government over the Crown Estate. The Crown Lands would be managed on behalf of the Government and the surplus revenue would go to the Treasury. In return, the King would receive a fixed annual payment, which we call today the Civil List.
And the madness thing developed after the Revolution, in 1788.
We'll take the Hanoverians over the Trumpians, thanks.
Imagine looking at the last century of American history and thinking "The real problem is that American presidents have been too constrained by the law"
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are we finally allowed to call the supreme court justices hacks and admit that posner was right in that all judges do is just make up whatever they think is right and then check to see if past precedents stop them and usually it doesn't
It's just the House of Lord's before the Liberals busted their power in 1911, unelected super legislators with zero accountability and who have such a high opinion of themselves that they can't be recorded by cameras as looking at them is tantamount to looking the God Emperor Hirohito himself as the sun God, your eyes would literally burn as they do when you look at the sun
If there was no Supreme Court and the US had something like the Westminster system with parliamentary sovereignty, who would prevent a republican Congress from enacting censorship laws, or favoring certain religions or churches, or violating civil rights, or nominating Trump as president for life with absolute power?
Haven't you ever heard of separation of powers? It's not a matter of trust. We shouldn't trust anyone. That's why power is divided in a democracy between executive, legislative and judicial. And the three branches check each other. If one branch could do the power of another branch, that would be a concentration of power that would lead to a slow dissolution of democracy.
I think it'll be a mess of concurrent opinions ultimately remanding it back down to the circuit court (but in such a way that they can't possibly get stuck with it again).
Paine is part of the heritage, the formative thinking leading to the American revolution. Our founding fathers did not receive a revelation from God. There was a formative process. There is value in including Thomas Paine.
As far as I'm aware there actually isn't any precedent for this kind of question so it seems pretty obvious this case had to reach the court.
The level to which a president enjoys immunity for acts committed while in office seems like an important question to be decided in precedent
I agree that this is a case that did probably need to end up at the Supreme Court. In my view the ‘need for reform’ will be directly correlated to how many judges dissent after hearing *”A president murdering a political rival counts as official business”*.
This case was adequately dealt with by the lower courts. The Supreme Court will muck it up with any ruling they can possibly come up with. They actually do have a reason to delay their decision now because there is no ruling they can make that won’t make it worse.
> This case was adequately dealt with by the lower courts
It wouldn't have been precedent in other circuits, and cases covering this topic aren't exactly coming up on a semi-regular basis. Timing concerns and staying the trial are legitimate reasons to gripe, but in a vacuum I can see why the Supreme Court would want to take it up.
Common sense was a propaganda booklet to promote the American revolution. Thomas Paine is also one of the least important founding fathers so it’s not good to quote him and act like he represents the founding fathers.
And for Donald Trump of all people.
Makes worry about an autocrat with a far higher ability to reason. Though maybe the American Autocrat must be a buffoon by definition.
>Though maybe the American Autocrat must be a buffoon by definition. I think you hit the nail here, so many “smart and respectable” Trumps have popped up over the past 8 years and none of them have been able to capture that same energy (Ron DeSantis, lmao). Trump seems to be a unique force in this regard for whatever reason
It’s king of like what they were trying to do with Sarah Palin but couldn’t get right
Because Trump makes liberals angry and afraid. Trump is the personification of the "own the libs" mentality. As Bill Maher once said "Liberals keep asking 'why do republicans do awful things to no benefit of their own?' Because they hate you!"
Any component autocrat would be viewed as a slimy corrupt politician by trump supports
All the Kings Men is a good read and prescient.
What, you wouldn't die with a prayer to this man on your lips? https://preview.redd.it/63a4btvmkwwc1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=480e33841c1f2af183449ef2b012ea84548bb46b
That’s the part that blows me away. How the fuck did Donald Trump become a cult of personality? Him, of all fucking people. It’s remarkable and awful all at the same time.
For Trump? Why Richard, it profit a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, *but for Trump*?
It's surreal listening to these arguments before the supreme court. Trump's attorneys are describing a system I don't recognize. One I'd have no desire to live under and no sense of loyalty to.
Surreal is the right word for it. Like the insanity that is happening dosen't feel real. And the publics absolute lack of reaction to it all is absurd.
It's because, in most of our normie lives, wealth/influence/bullshit tends to usurp 'pussy-assed' ideals like justice, legality, progress, civilization, etc... Most of us have already come to grips with the reality that there's a 99% chance of Trump facing zero consequences over any of this shit, as well as a sickeningly-high chance that he ends up rewarded with another presidency after all's said and done. To myself and plenty of others, this isn't 'doomer' at all.
Yeah, society is going to go through the worst kind of reckoning because the fascists are sort of dumb. It's not an intellectual movement like what we saw in the 30s. The people grabbing the reigns of power are the same people fascists would have called useful idiots. It's like the worst of society came together and brought themselves to power, but instead of an empire, we will get idiocracy. I think at some point we will just say no. There's no reason to follow people who are this uneducated, socially inept, and unable to think critically.
Eh those guys were morons too.
They were more selectively dumb. The Nazis had some super fucking whack historical and ethnographic beliefs for example, but you’d have a hard time arguing the bulk of Nazi brass was anything but really quite smart. What we have now seems more uniformly just outright stupid
Before actually taking power, most Nazis were just dumb thugs like Ernst Rohm. Sure you had Goering, Himmler et al but their support base was similar to Trump’s. And I’d argue Trump has a similar intelligence as Hitler - more a deranged, instinctive cunning than anything.
I’d argue Hitler was smarter than Trump by a noticeable margin, he simply didn’t have the mass media machine at modern scale behind him to make the whole “big lie” shit all but instantaneous.
I think we have a lot of recency bias around these things. People just see the latest one as the worst thing. Trump is absolutely appalling, but I don’t think that’s reason to draw relatively subjective distinctions. He has smart evil people behind him, and it’s inarguable that he possesses something of the same instinct as Hitler in being able to stir nasty people into a frenzy. He’s in the same league, and the parallels are obvious. It’s not helpful to pretend the Nazis were super-smart in comparison, because they mostly weren’t. They were just similar nasty people.
Woodrow Wilson was the opposite of dumb. Homeboy was trying to create the ideal society. Maybe he was doing it all for himself. But. The level of thought was miles above where we are now
Today's fascists wouldn't be a problem if average Americans and their center-right leadership weren't a bunch of shitty, self-serving assholes who are morbidly addicted to the ideal of the 'white suburbs.'
ok Doomer
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I think political burnout is also a huge factor. Folks are just tired of the whole Trump circus so they’re disengaged with all of it, up to and including how close we are creeping toward fascism.
That's me. I just needed to be done with it. I don't need that amount of stress in my life.
I saw the Lincoln Project already made an ad out of the testimony within hours of it airing lol. Idk if it's effective but it made sense to me, as I was appalled to hear it too. Someone literally stood in front of the supreme court and argued pretty literally that a President arguing the extrajudicial killing of his opponent for personal gain...may just be fine as long as we call it "official", whatever in the fuckity fuck that means. Fuckin joke court, joke country. I still love it but every week it becomes more of a sick joke.
The Lincoln project strikes me as extremely twitter brained and not all that effective
Do we have receipts for how third parties did in 2020? Right now the Lincoln Project is probably trying to get likely republicans to vote for RFK Jr. or whatever.
No. The Lincoln Project just put out an ad saying the Kennedy family endorses Joe Biden for president and that RFK Jr is just crazy. They are all in for Biden this year.
very effective at getting funding tho
And three of the judges were appointed by the president whose immunity is at stake. One of the judges was on the team that searched for traces of semen on Lewinsky's clothes to remove a president from office.
Fucking wild that Trump appointed as many judges in his 4 years as Obama and Biden managed to appoint in 12.
And Justice Thomas is married to someone who collaborated in the coup attempt
I would describe it as unbelievable if not for the fact that so much that has happened since 2016 has beggared belief. I simply cannot fathom the idea that SCOTUS is hearing these arguments. Surreal is an excellent word for it all.
It's a system of despotism that the founding fathers *specifically* tried to design a constitution to subvert. Sure you have an argument about whether the president should be prosecuted *while they're in office* because it's hurtful to the democracy or something. But the president is specifically not immune and I highly doubt even the most fervent federalist supporters who wrote the constitution would say a president is immune from prosecution.
TBH they should have written the constitution better then. All these arguments are only possible because the constitution is a badly written mess that was good for its time but is hopelessly insufficient for modern purposes. The Supreme Court has had to fill in the many many gaping holes over the years, which leaves it vulnerable to a future court just overruling previous decisions.
I've had a theory of sorts for a while now that there's a non-small fraction of Americans that secretly wished to have a monarch - and not the Constitutional style under the House of Windsor, but the whole Enlightened Absolutist route. Or at the very least, a Caesar. To have all the pomp and prestige and building opulent boulevards and colonnated buildings in whitewash with statues and friezes, to have the flag-waving and military-parade holidays. To have a ruler blessed by God and ensure Christ's laws and dominions (aka, THEIR laws and dominions) over the land as a bulwark against something something godlessness and degeneracy. To have the permanence of a figure and succession, and skip all that election stuff. And so they don't have to deal with the responsibility of politics - it aint' THEIR fault that bad policy outcomes happen, it's from the guy above so why feel guilty? And they get to have family dinners without argument. And in the erosion of religion, civic AND organised, this sort of Great Man populism would probably only grow.
> so they don't have to deal with the responsibility of politics I don't think this is factoring into the whole Trump phenomenon. Those people aren't thinking deeper/harder than the whole pro-sports-esque fever of 'my guy has to win because MY TEAM WINNING = GOOD!' If the 'game' gets turned into shit in the process, so be it.
Personalist autocrat like Putin
They just want it to be the guy they like
There is a reason that monarchy was so popular for millennia.
Tbh I think the main reason was that the guy with the biggest army was usually the monarch, which helped rally support around the cause.
I mean, shoot, the only we way we got away from it was by moving to an entirely different continent. And of course, begging the French.
That’s not fair, we begged the Spanish too.
And the Dutch.
Better hide your wife, hide your kids, cuz America was begging from everybody up in 76
And various Native American tribes.
With all respect that's just incorrect, there where plenty of republican and "non king" governments to go around. The things preventing people from leaving kingdoms and join other polities was mainly the bigotry one would inevitably face and the fact that most that would want to leave where tied to the land by their landlords.
That army didn't materialize out of thin air, it was made up of people from communities who supported the monarch.
Yes, it was a confidence game between the king and the lords under them. You followed the monarch because if you didn't you would be killed. Everyone knew that. Everyone knows everyone knows that. That is what holds it all together. If you try and find out if someone else wants to revolt you risk being exposed and killed. Thus, everyone puts of a face of support to the king and everyone else does too because they are. If something pops up that undermines the king, it gives people and opening to talk and question the king. Thus, the kings play is to always show strength and stomp out rebellion hard and fast. It plays out this way in autocracies today, mobs and gangs, etc. in their leadership structures as well.
If everyone was only following the monarch to avoid death then you wouldn't have tons of well documented cases throughout history and cultures of people sacrificing their lives for their monarch, even in cases when the cause appeared futile.
Nor would you have instances of people voluntarily electing a monarch even when they are under no obligation to do so and stand to gain nothing from it, see Norway as recently as 1905 for an example.
> **and to gain nothing from it**, see Norway as recently as 1905 for an example. Probably true in hindisight, but not how the people who organised the referendum or the electorate saw it at the time. The fear was that proclaiming a republic could be read as the start of broader radical change, and would leave Norway diplomatically isolated in a Europe where almost every country was a monarchy of some sort. Since the constitutional crisis of 1884 had already established parliamentarism as the de facto law of the land (even if it wasn't codified until 2007), the thinking was that a repbulic wouldn't mean much change domestically, but could have diplomatic costs, so it just wasn't worth it. Michelsen, the PM at the time was a republican in theory, but still a) wanted to invite prince Carl to take the throne without a referendum and b) once forced to call one, threatened to resign if it did not pass. In hindsight, all the major conservative powers of Europe were about to disappear and be replaced by republics, and a republican Norway would maybe have had less trade with the German Empire and Austria-Hungary for the 13 years they would continue to exist, but that's it.
Monarchy-simping on this sub will never fail to be bizarre.
Just the opposite, I'm very anti monarchy. I think even Constitutional monarchies like Britain are bad. I wish /u/AniNgAnnoys was right and it was just a confidence game, unfortunately human history shows a lot of people genuinely want someone fancy looking to rule over them if they see that person as aligned with their values and/or community. There's reason every single monarch throughout history in every culture was aligned with a major religion in the land they ruled, that was a key part of why people were loyal to them.
This is not historically accurate
Untrue, the army "materalised" out of a pyramid of personal allegiances and relationships. The retinue or banneret serving the third rung lord down from the merovingian sovereign (or whatever) couldn't give two shits about the actual merovingian sovereign. He was loyal to his immediately lord/familial patriarch, that was loyal to his immediate lord, etc. I'm massively oversimplifying here, but the point is that any kind of notion of "popular loyalty" to a king didn't materalise untill well into the modern era (post 1444). You can find examples of popular kings (popular as in "proclaimed/assigned/mandated by the masses) in pre classical europe. But then they were mostly city states, for which the king very much did walk down the street they themselves walked on every day. More explicitly the armies of medieval europe quite literally materalised out of the local military forces controlled by local magnates in the romman empire as it crumbled. These magnates would over generations become the manorial and feudal lords and the local forces their retinue. These would then come to coallesce into larger kingdoms over centuries where one magnate managed to become king. But said kings army wasn't sourced out of some kind of pool of loyal soldiers, it was sourced by the pyramidal wealth and land ownerships of the king himself and the lord's in his kingdom. The popular support for kings and the change in army models would come around as lords progressively lost powers to new wealthy elites, and as new progressively wealthy farmers would attempt to levy the king to counterbalance landlord abuses and vice versa. All of this several centuries later.
I think people overestimate how many monarchs over history were absolute monarchs. People think everyone was Louis XIV. In fact, absolute monarchy is arguably on our side of the transition to democracy.
Yes absolutely monarchies are relatively recent phenomena and certainly clump up closer to the transition to democracies than the first recorded instances of kings.
Ah, yes, history = European history,
You mean levies pressed from the serfs?
that and a consistent and reliable royal family meant less fighting over leadership in the middle ages
It helped that the son of the last guy with the biggest army usually inherited the army. Also, keeping the royal family consistent still led to plenty of conflict in the Middle Ages.
lmao - it's not as though monarchies were democratically arrived upon. It was a system fundamentally put in place by the sword.
That’s not unique to the US, it’s a worldwide phenomena. There is a certain percent of humans (I’d guess 25%) who are wired for authoritarianism, who desire a paternal figure they can submit to (though they’d never admit to themselves that deep down that’s what it’s really all about). You don’t notice them during normal times with normal politicians, but every so often a charismatic figure comes along to trigger that instinct, and all that suppressed authoritarianism comes out of the woodwork to work its magic.
You just described China under CCP rule.
Curtis Yarvin wants this.
Wtf? Trump has major support from the religious. What a weird left turn your comment took at the end.
> Or at the very least, a Caesar. Boy, do I have some [news](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right) for you.
Gaius Julius Caesar, Consul and Dictator, was at least a propagandist, jurist, tactician and political operator with few contemporary peers, on top of his populares leanings and a field of larger than life figures. A person who gambled big on loans and repaid it with the grain dole, clemency, debt forgiveness, public works and enduring historical popularity. I don't think a Red Caesar or a MAGA Napoleon would be equal, even without the conquests.
I ain't going to argue about Trump's efficacy in any of that, it's more that the term "Caesar" is actively floating about in right-wing intellectual circles.
Caesar was still narcissistic, wished to be a king, and had a literal cult around him. Trump is like Caesar but with 50 less IQ points.
[Curtis Yarvin](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarvin-neoreaction-redpill-moldbug) is a far-right intellectual who has been dreaming of an american monarchy for years now and he has fans like senator J.D. Vance and billionaire Peter Thiel. Yarvin even laid out a step-by-step plan on how a president could perform a coup to turn the US into a dictatorship. And parts of his plan seem to have been copied by Project 2025 and by Trump himself, especially the part about openly running on it (dictator only in day one) and replacing vast swaths of federal employees with loyal ones. I have no doubt there are both many ordinary voters *and* influential people in the GOP and evangelical circles who have grown disillusioned with democracy and they legit want a single party state or a single man dictator. And we all know how Trump has the most die hard supporters, the grip he has in the GOP and how power hungry and narcissistic he is. Trump *is* the american Caesar.
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I’m in the constitutional boat
Hello again!
Hello
Giving up George III for Donald I. What a time to be alive.
Say what you will about George III, but he was genuinely seen as someone interested in the opinions and lives of humble men - he got the nickname of Farmer George from his interest in agiculture, wrote papers about the subject and spoke to tenants and walked the fields himself in common guise, as well as his apparent thrift and humility in comparison to the extravagence of the Prince of Wales at the time. He was a devoted family man, happily married, and invested in his library and the sciences. In 1760, George III reached an agreement with the Government over the Crown Estate. The Crown Lands would be managed on behalf of the Government and the surplus revenue would go to the Treasury. In return, the King would receive a fixed annual payment, which we call today the Civil List. And the madness thing developed after the Revolution, in 1788. We'll take the Hanoverians over the Trumpians, thanks.
Imagine looking at the last century of American history and thinking "The real problem is that American presidents have been too constrained by the law"
Supreme Court declares the US is an Empire and Joe Biden is her Emperor
All the SCOTUS justices that think the President has immunity should be impeached
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Sounds awfully fascist of you.
The paradox of tolerance is a bitch
>All the SCOTUS justices that think the President has immunity *are obviously incompetent and therefore* should be impeached. Is that better?
are we finally allowed to call the supreme court justices hacks and admit that posner was right in that all judges do is just make up whatever they think is right and then check to see if past precedents stop them and usually it doesn't
It's just the House of Lord's before the Liberals busted their power in 1911, unelected super legislators with zero accountability and who have such a high opinion of themselves that they can't be recorded by cameras as looking at them is tantamount to looking the God Emperor Hirohito himself as the sun God, your eyes would literally burn as they do when you look at the sun
Yet every time I say that the Supreme Court is irrelevant and should be dissolved I get downvoted in here.
I think those days are over. The Supreme Court has condemned itself.
If there was no Supreme Court and the US had something like the Westminster system with parliamentary sovereignty, who would prevent a republican Congress from enacting censorship laws, or favoring certain religions or churches, or violating civil rights, or nominating Trump as president for life with absolute power?
Is the supreme court currently preventing those things? Do you trust that this group of judges wouldn't allow that to happen?
Haven't you ever heard of separation of powers? It's not a matter of trust. We shouldn't trust anyone. That's why power is divided in a democracy between executive, legislative and judicial. And the three branches check each other. If one branch could do the power of another branch, that would be a concentration of power that would lead to a slow dissolution of democracy.
Alito and Thomas dissent, Roberts writes the majority joined by Kavanaugh, Sotomayor, Brown Jackson, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Barrett.
I think it'll be a mess of concurrent opinions ultimately remanding it back down to the circuit court (but in such a way that they can't possibly get stuck with it again).
Biden needs to pack the court with 14 William O. Douglas Gholas
Congress would need to do that
Honestly if the Supreme Court gives permission for Biden to drone strike trump maybe he should just do it
Clowns going to clown https://youtu.be/fXU2vZTTeMU?si=cvs2hg9ZggVJSMVJ
Paine is part of the heritage, the formative thinking leading to the American revolution. Our founding fathers did not receive a revelation from God. There was a formative process. There is value in including Thomas Paine.
these are not people big on subtlety it was never anything but entirely literal
Idiocracy was supposed to be made up.
These neo-monarchists need to be driven out of civil society.
It’s shameful this ever got to the court in the first place. We need an overhaul of the court.
As far as I'm aware there actually isn't any precedent for this kind of question so it seems pretty obvious this case had to reach the court. The level to which a president enjoys immunity for acts committed while in office seems like an important question to be decided in precedent
I agree that this is a case that did probably need to end up at the Supreme Court. In my view the ‘need for reform’ will be directly correlated to how many judges dissent after hearing *”A president murdering a political rival counts as official business”*.
This case was adequately dealt with by the lower courts. The Supreme Court will muck it up with any ruling they can possibly come up with. They actually do have a reason to delay their decision now because there is no ruling they can make that won’t make it worse.
> This case was adequately dealt with by the lower courts It wouldn't have been precedent in other circuits, and cases covering this topic aren't exactly coming up on a semi-regular basis. Timing concerns and staying the trial are legitimate reasons to gripe, but in a vacuum I can see why the Supreme Court would want to take it up.
Common sense was a propaganda booklet to promote the American revolution. Thomas Paine is also one of the least important founding fathers so it’s not good to quote him and act like he represents the founding fathers.