The Romans Tried to Save the Republic From Men Like Trump. They Failed.

[TexasTowelie]

A man stands before a crowd, trawling for votes. He's rich and the son of a rich man, though his personal finances are tangled, he's saddled with debt, and his career to date has been studded with scandal. Far from pretending to be good, he makes a virtue out of his lack of pretense, and plays up his excesses as extravagantly as he stokes the crowd's resentment of his own class.

Call him Donald Trump. But this man is also Julius Caesar, Catiline, Clodius, and a legion of other men who lived in ancient Rome, from which the American Founders drew inspiration for the political system we have today. Long before Max Weber studied "charismatic authority" or Adorno the "authoritarian personality," Alexander Hamilton, unexpected darling of today's Broadway, would have recognized the type instantly from his knowledge of Roman history.

He's a man of wealth and power, but he tells the people he is an outsider, just like them. He insists the system is rigged against them by the influential few. He rails against the people, too: "You've given up everything in exchange for laziness and apathy, thinking you've got freedom in abundance because your backs are spared the lash. The elite will fight and enjoy their victory, and regular people will be treated like a conquered nation: This will be more the case every day, so long as they work harder for total power than you do to get your freedom back."

That's not Trump, though it sounds like him. It's a politician called Licinius Macer, haranguing a crowd in Rome in 73 BCE. It was with men like Macer in mind that in the first of the Federalist papers, Hamilton identified the claim to fight for popular freedom as the demagogue's most insidious and effective tactic. "Dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people," he wrote. Far from the innocent meaning of the original ancient Greek word, "leader of the people," for Hamilton the demagogue paves a "much more certain road to the introduction of despotism."

Read more: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/the-romans-tried-to-save-the-republic-from-men-like-trump-they-failed-9575234

[JenniferJuniper]

1. If the Senate displeased Trump,

I can see him making his horse a senator. To show them their place. And for the ratings of course.

[meow2u3]

2. One problem: Trump doesn't have a horse

Another problem: he'll have to make a horse's ass a Senator, BTA, there are enough horse's asses, a.k.a., Repukes, in the Senate already.