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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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