America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship | “Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.
by WhileFalseRepeat
America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship | “Thought leaders” of the far right talk openly about a 2025 dictatorship. People need to be alarmed.
by WhileFalseRepeat
38 comments
>The incredible scenes this week on Capitol Hill — leaving the U.S. House without a speaker and promising an autumn of sheer chaos in Congress — marked a rapid escalation of the downward spiral of American democracy.
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>In capitals around the globe, world leaders and baffled analysts struggled to make sense of the utter dysfunction paralyzing the nation that just a generation ago held itself out as the lone superpower. Yet to a small but influential gaggle of so-called “thought leaders” on the edge of the stage — the pseudo-intellectuals of right-wing think tanks, and chaos-agent-in-chief Steve Bannon — the growing rot infecting another key U.S. institution is just more evidence for their stunning argument now flying at warp speed, yet under the radar of a clueless mainstream media.
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>The D.C. dysfunction is more proof, they would argue, that the nation needs a “Red Caesar” who will cut through what they call constitutional gridlock and impose order.
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>If you’re not one of those dudes who thinks about Ancient Rome every day, let me translate. The alleged brain trust of an increasingly fascist MAGA movement wants an American dictatorship that would “suspend” democracy in January 2025 — just 15 months from now.
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>The guru of this push for a president seizing dictatorial powers to overthrow what far-right activists see as a “deep state” of liberals — corrupting institutions ranging from government agencies to the media to large corporations and the Pentagon — is a professor of politics at Michigan’s ultraconservative Hillsdale College, Kevin Slack.
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>Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.”
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>In a recent Guardian article, writer Jason Wilson — who deserves enormous credit for tying together these threads — finds anti-democracy arguments like Slack’s are gaining traction in the small but influential world of far-right think tanks like Hillsdale and the Claremont Institute. That’s been tracked here in Philadelphia by another writer, the centrist liberal Damon Linker at UPenn, who sees a dangerous conspiracy theory taking root not just with obscure professors but with the iconoclastic billionaires who back the right.
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>Slack writes that the “New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.”
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>It’s all the more remarkable since we all know who the actual “Red Caesar” is — even if he is, technically, orange.
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>Donald Trump, the 45th president who seems to have already locked down the Republican nomination to become the 47th, has been accused of running a rambling, ideas-free campaign — except that’s not true.
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>As the Los Angeles Times recently noted, Trump has been pretty specific in recent speeches and interviews about the actions he would take if he takes the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2025 — such as naming a special prosecutor to go after his political enemies, blowing up civil service protections to fill the government with his acolytes, deploying the military in a massive deportation campaign, and sending troops to “control crime” in Democratic-led cities. If Julius Caesar were still here, he’d surely be giving a Trump 47 presidency a Roman salute.
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>But the media and others struggle to understand how someone like Trump — twice impeached with 91 pending felony indictments, found in New York courtrooms to be both a rapist and a fraudster — has a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House. That requires understanding the role of the right’s No. 1 chaos agent — Bannon, who was Trump’s 2016 campaign manager — and his ability to move pawns like the foot soldiers of the McCarthy ouster, such as Reps. Matt Gaetz and Nancy Mace, across his messy chessboard. Bannon, now a popular podcaster who was pardoned by Trump but faces new charges, understands better than anyone that creating political mayhem is laying the groundwork for a strongman to declare — as Trump did in 2016 — that “I alone can fix it.”
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>In a 2022 article, a former Bannon associate, Benjamin R. Teitelbaum, wrote that the Trump ally frequently told him “about the destiny of the United States and the role he sees for chaos and destruction — for ‘craziness’ — in it. The worldview he laid out to me was one where things he might otherwise consider harmful, like the dissolution of our electoral process or the erosion of shared understandings of truth, were to be embraced as fated stages in a process of national rebirth.”
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>So now that Bannon’s craziness is here, the phony intellects of Trumpism at Hillsdale or Claremont are seizing the opportunity to make their case for the “Red Caesar” to bring about that “national rebirth.”
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>In addition to Hillsdale’s Slack, proponents of suspending the Constitution include the likes of Claremont’s Michael Anton, the leading academic proponent of Trumpism, who in a 2020 book floated a similar theory about a “form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny.”
Here is that Guardian article mentioned (it’s worth a read)…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/01/red-caesar-authoritarianism-republicans-extreme-right
I’m almost convinced there are portals to Hell located at the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College so that Satan can hold strategy sessions with all his favorite demons. And, seriously, I knew the world was kinda batshit a long time ago – but somehow the crazy just keeps getting crazier and the evil gets more evil.
Get me off this ride.
I’ll take one modified DeLorean with a flux capacitor and a shitload of plutonium, please?
Oh, and if you ain’t got the plutonium in stock – a well placed lightning strike would suffice.
Thanks!
If this is their 2025 plan, that means even if they lose this will be their plan the next time they get into power. Republican’s will be the downfall of America. I predict that if they are ever given full control again(Executive, Senate and House), they will trigger a constitutional crisis and attempt to rewrite the Constitution (*aided by all the ratfucking they are doing at the state level).
This reads like the plot of a lost season of Scandal. Intriguing and terrifying!
We really need to be alarmed . And nothing new . Some capitalists are really like dictators , ordering their dictats.
We opened the gates of Hell with Citizens United. Chaos is being funded.
This stupid clickbait should say “far right be funded by billionaires to remove democracy” but that’s not sexy enough. Edited.
I’ve been in a constant state of alarm for 7 years now. Feels a little hopeless that we the people can defeat this, can someone share a little hope? I’ll keep working, donating, and VOTING, is there anything else we can do??!!
Things didn’t go well for Caesar.
I’ve been alarmed for a while and I agree there’s a false equivalence going on where people are equating the Democratic party, which is pretty much politics as usual, with Republicans who are willing to throw a grenade into the process.
In essence, it seems that the people who have been causing the corruption and dysfunction in government now want a dictator to fix it all. And their leading candidate is someone indicted in four criminal cases.
There is no figure in the entire GOP spectrum, who has anywhere near the gravitas and stature that Caesar had. He fucking earned his dictatorship. (and he also exploited weakness in the Senate and laws to make it happen). Trump tried, and he was too much of a weak candidate to even come close to succeeding. Main issue was lack of military backing. The right needed a strong general, and I think Flynn was supposed to be that person, but he was very weak in the political area as well.
This Red Caesar shit ain’t going to happen. But that won’t stop them from trying.
When we call Republicans nazis, it’s not hyperbole. It’s the cold, hard truth. They believe the same things the nazis did and want to do the same things the nazis did. The Republican party is the greatest threat to national security, democracy, liberty and our lives. They are our enemies. They want to murder us or enslave us for not thinking the way they do or not looking like them. It’s time for all of us to take this threat seriously.
While there are plenty of Never-Trumper conservatives out there, what I don’t see are many conservatives who have figured out that it’s their fundamental ideology that has got us to this point. They still believe Republicans just took a wrong turn somewhere and need to get back on the right track.
More conservatives need to say that the Republican Party must end. It can’t be saved. And they need to reflect on the blame they share.
I agree.
Republicans will point to American democracy not working but they are the ones obstructing and not governing. It’s like owning car, but you slash the tires, pull off the engine belt, jam a potato in the muffler and say that the manufacturer can’t make a working car.
Never even heard of this. So glad the media is spreading the idea wide and far by reporting on it.
Obligatory David Frum quote
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
The big question is what do the big money puppet master financiers of all this madness ultimately want ? I’m not sure a complete deconstruction of Democracy is the best plan for maintaining shareholder value. Then again for a lot of greedy vulture capitalists a complete governmental meltdown would be the ultimate profit opportunity of a lifetime.
All these stupid terms they come up with.. “Red Caesar” “Project 2025” blah blah
It’s just Fascism, again and again.
They’ve been talking about this stuff openly for a long time now. The Project 2025 stuff is a conservative fantasy wishlist which has been known for decades now. This isn’t anything new.
They can’t make this stuff a reality unless they both win the Presidency in 2024 *and* have massive majorities in Congress. And even then, there’s a lot they can’t do.
They aren’t getting the massive Congressional majorities, and it’s still doubtful they take the Presidency with Trump openly advocating national abortion bans.
Volunteer, donate, vote. Get your friends and family to do the same. And don’t confuse subreddit activity with activism. You aren’t changing the outcome of the 2024 election by dooming here.
The vast majority of the votes were democrats.
If you’ve ever spoken to ‘evangelicals,’ they openly advocate for a dictatorship to put us on the path to god. They regard democracy as ‘weak’- that it panders to populistic solutions to buy votes. The Constitution is outdated because the founding fathers never dreamed we would turn into a nation of sin and sinners. They want tough love for the whole country to set it on the path of righteousness. Killing heathens and infidels is quite acceptable- the ends justify the means.
Every fucking Sunday the religion of hate preaches this to millions. They are conditioned to receive and accept this message. As true believers, they see themselves as beneficiaries to theocratic fascism.
Anyone voting Republican right now don’t care, they’re blaming everything on democrats because that’s what select media is reporting. I know individuals who constantly blame Democrats right now and believe Trump will win the election coming next year because of this crap.
I get so tired of this steaming bs every day. America is too big and too diverse for anything like this to happen. Everybody should relax and remember that politics are local and balanced.
Let’s not go comparing Trump to Caesar.
1. Caesar had actual victories.
2. Caesar was beloved for his actually military accomplishments, and did not have contempt for his soldiers who served honorably and were wounded for Rome.
3. Caesar was well educated and an accomplished general with a brilliant tactical mind.
Trump is no Caesar. His followers? Almost all fools and ignorant morons. The ones that aren’t pray on the ones that are.
Not to state the obvious but if you are on the right and support the people who are moving in this direction then you should really understand that it is the end of the US constitution. That means no second amendment or anything else. They won’t establish a dictatorship and leave everything alone.
We’re all so fatigued about the right’s love for fascism that explicit facist plans just feels like another day. THIS long moment in time is the kind of historical bridge between ‘democracy’ and a dictatorship. VOTE. Dont downplay.
So they create absolute chaos by starting fires everywhere, blame the Democrats and “Woke Culture” while they do it, and when the dysfunction becomes so great that everyone is utterly confused as to what to do, they sweep in with a “King” that will solve everything and give them as much unchecked power as possible.
This is inevitable.
The right hasnt been winning the popular vote for a long time now. They can only hold power through extraordinary manipulation but the demographic trends are obvious, as are voting trends.
The old white monied conservatives are not going away by being voted out. They will scrap the system before they allow anybody else to wield power in this nation.
If it happens, get ready for the second version of Russia. There’s no way the oligarchic Republican Party doesn’t ratfuck every source of agency funds like they did with PPP and Zinke’s Department of the Interior. It won’t just be Puerto Rico that suffers the consequences of issuing rebuilding efforts to the Republican’ best buds.
I thought it would be U.S extremists that needed to be alarmed.
I see America more turning back to what it was before the Cold War. Before we had a common interest in espousing freedom in order to contrast Soviet style authoritarianism.
The US had a core interest in projecting unique levels of openness as a matter of policy and geo-political necessity. Was a major driver for things like civil rights, social security, workers rights and education. The current backsliding seems to dovetail with this dynamic removed.
Though we prefer not to talk about it, the US has a pretty dark history with authoritarian rule. Those elements in American society see a vacuum and they’re looking to fill it.
Fuck Caesar…give me a Philosopher King.
Sounds like Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is attempting to position themselves for Order 66
Somehow a senior, close to death, teetering on the edge of dementia lacks inspiration as a possible supreme leader.
Plus it just points to the fact that all the conspiracies about med beds, clones, lizards, and magical cures for aging aren’t true – or we’d not be currently witnessing people who should be retired and under medical care daily trying to pull off being political leaders.
The youth vote won’t let a sickly, wizened ghoul who destroyed 3 years of their childhood/teenhood take power.
It really pisses me off that Dem leaders are dragging their feet to address this. You have to take this threat seriously, even if you think it’s unlikely.
We should very carefully review and publicize the rules against treason and rebellion and then start enforcing them.
It seems as if prosecuting efforts to install a dictatorship are actually, or should be, non-partisan.
This is nothing new. This started with Nixon and has gotten worse with every Republican Administration!!!!!!!! In October of last year, the Heritage Foundation, ALEC and Koch started selling the WOKE laws in the south, to prevent government interference with their profit and ideology (PROFIT AT EVERYONE ELSES EXPENSE). Less than 2 months ago at the 50th ALEC convention (this is where lobbyist, mega donors (or just their money), lawyers, already written legislation, and almost only republican politicians (now including city council and school board members) get together. The elected officials take the money, the already written legislation and the marketing plan to go destroy more of democracy. This is where Project 25 marching orders were distributed. We are at war, with a group of people that have been arming an army of lone wolfs that willingly answer their stochastic calls. The Bush admin allowed more of these thugs into our military.
WHERE ARE THE DEMS??????? they get the same money.
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIAN LEADERS???? In bed with a minor child or at the bank with other conservatives.
Vote only for the most PROGRESSIVE Canidates.
This country will not survive the decade as long as republicans are treated like a legitimate political party instead of the fascist terrorists they are.