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I find myself increasingly perplexed by the people who think a second Trump term would be any kind of a big deal; that there’s anything he’d be able to do in a second term he wasn’t able to do in the first. It’s primarily in fellow right-wingers that I find this attitude most vexing, but it also holds to a lesser degree for the people on the left who hyperbolically opine in outlets like Newsweek and The Economist about how a second Trump term would “end democracy” and “poses the biggest danger to the world.”
Really, it’s not even about Trump for me, either. I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either. What can they possibly accomplish, except four years of utterly futile attempts at action that are completely #Resisted by the permanent bureaucracy? Giving “orders” to “subordinates” that prove as efficacious as Knut the Great’s famous command to the tides?
I hear about how the president can do this or that, according to some words on paper, and I ask “but can he, really?” Mere words on paper have no power themselves, and near as I can tell, the people in DC haven’t really cared about them for most of a century now, nor is there any real mechanism for enforcing them.
If I, a random nobody, come into your workplace and announce that you’re fired, of course you still have your job. Security will still let you in when you show up each day, you can still log in and out of whatever, your coworkers will treat you the same, and you’ll still keep getting paid. Now, suppose your boss announces that you’re fired… but everyone else there treats that the same as the first case? You still show up, you still do the work, you still get paid. Are you really fired, then?
What do you wish Trump et al could accomplish between 2024 and 2028? Is it mainly restricting low-skill immigration?
I'm a monarchist, awaiting an Augustus Caesar — while almost certain we'll never get one.
Why a (presumably hereditary) monarch versus a regular ole dictator?
The succession problem. I once recall someone pointing out that the broad strokes of Henry VII Tudor's life are a match for any number of Latin American dictators… and someone else pointed out the clear counterpoint of "except when it ended." Where most modern dictatorships fail is at the transition of power following the dictator's death, but when Henry VII died, then here comes Henry VIII.
As others have pointed out, not all monarchies are hereditary. I recall de Maistre, in his discussion of Aristotle's classification of systems of government, pointing out that both Roman monarchies — the pre-Republic Kingdom and the post-Republic Empire — were non-hereditary. He then went on to describe hereditary government as a later innovation, created to address the associated issues that Rome repeatedly encountered. Yes, succession crises do happen in hereditary monarchies (though a number of the historical factors are less likely to be relevant in the modern world), but not nearly anything as often as modern dictatorships collapse over transitions of power. And the primary example in the present day of one that hasn't, and has shown some of the most longevity, looks pretty hereditary in practice.
Hm, in that case aren’t stable democracies even better for avoiding civil wars over succession crises? What historical factors are less relevant now?
And are dictatorships worse in that regards? Of the ones that immediately come to mind — Stalin, Franco, Pinochet, Mao — their countries didn’t descend into civil war at the end of their reigns.
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