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Persimmons's avatar

"Everything about the American system is designed to prevent a Ceasar from rescuing the system from it's own corruption via the assumption of dictatorial power"

It's funny, the American founding fathers were Romeaboos but took the exact wrong lessons from Rome; they read historians like Livy and Tacitus who romanticized the Republic and bemoaned the loss of the parasitic senator class' power, conveniently ignoring the fact that Rome was most stable, successful and powerful under the control of monarchs. Hell, it was kinder to its neighbors, too: the image of Rome as this militaristic, bloodthirsty empire is pretty much only applicable to the Republic, while the Empire had extremely stable borders.

When Augustus said "I have restored the Republic", many erroneously believe this was a cynical ploy to keep the illusion of "Republican" government, but this is anachronistically projecting the modern definition of Republic backwards; the /res publica/ he claimed to restore could be thought of as the "will of the people" (or perhaps "commonwealth"), which his regime absolutely upheld compared to the senate.

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Jeannie's avatar

I've often thought that since it's the federal government which has outgrown the Constitution, maybe it would be better to dissolve the union and go back to being sovereign states. Maybe not 50, but definitively not one big country.

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