/lit/ - Literature

>>17919651
>By the term "Caesarism" I mean that kind of government which, irrespective of any constitutional formulation that it may have, is in its inward self a return to thorough formlessness. It does not matter that Augustus in Rome, Qin Shi Huang in China, Ahmose I in Egypt, and Alp Arslan in Baghdad disguised their position under antique forms. The spirit of these forms was dead, and so all institutions, however carefully maintained, were thenceforth destitute of all meaning and weight. Real importance centred in the wholly personal power exercised by the Caesar.

>Caesarism is not dictatorship, not the result of one man's overriding ambition, not a brutal seizure of power through revolution. It is not based on a specific doctrine or philosophy. It is essentially pragmatic and untheoretical. It is a slow, centuries old, unconscious development that ends in a voluntary surrender of a free people escaping from freedom to one autocratic master.

There is no one "Caesar". You cannot look at one man and say he is a Caesar. Caesarism as a concept is a psychological phenomenon. If you really want to say who is the "first Caesar" it would be Andrew Jackson. But he was just a product of an age of increasing democratization and the growth of federal power. The same can be said of Lincoln and the two Roosevelts. By the time you get to Nixon the American president is already as powerful as an emperor, and Nixon himself as characteristically eccentric as any Roman emperor.

Trump is the first time that party politics have been completely replaced by the sway of an individual leader. The Republican party was no longer the Republican party but the Trump party. The same may be said of the Democrats, a cabal run by the Clinton-Obama-Biden triumvirate. But with Trump all gravity rested solely in him. The 2020 election was decided not by platform or policy but by one's opinion of Trump's personality. Trump didn't begin anything, he is a representative of the age and a glimpse into what American politics will look like in the years to come.