Post #4052393
2026-07-24 02:56 UTC
This goes back to the Roman roots of "Western civilization" for the Roman Republic was porous and vague in this same way, and this is what killed the Republic in the end: they had an office called the dictator that was supposed to be a temporary wartime measure, but the measure was easily made permanent.
C. Octavius, so-called "Augustus", finally did away with the Republic except as a vestige, keeping alive a cosmetic Senate as a rubber-stamp body and distraction for court parasites and ruthless patriarchs to fight over.
(cont'd)
Replies (1)
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@mxchara@seattle.pink 2026-07-24 02:58
That's roughly what U.S. #conservatives say government ought to be like. Under cover of a strictly deceitful show of faith in democracy and liberty the Republicans have agitated for a return to the "constitutional republic" (modelled after Rome) that used to prevail in the earliest days of the United States when there was no universal suffrage and slavery still held and #politics was a pastime for big landowners and plantation slavedrivers and other such persons whom conservatives deem to be the only truly productive, creative, intellectual, and honorable human beings who ever exist. (cont'd)