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It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
This is what Sulla did. It Did Not Work Out.
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Trump will step down in 2028; he is not in a position to pull a Cincinnatus, since he isn't dictator in the first place. Nor, obviously, is Musk. Trump quoting Napoleon (apparently not in reply to anything?) is basically him stirring up his opponents for some reason.
Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.
I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.
I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.
EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)
Ah, Twitter drama. Still don't care.
The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.
I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.
While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.
If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.
This is not the original Roman sense of the word.
And another reading is that he is denying that he is engaging in extra-legal activity at all.
He would get nowhere. Nothing would happen. He does not even have a majority; Congress is split three ways, between Democrats, MAGA Republicans, and non-MAGA Republicans.
Congress did not create much of what Trump has been going after -- it's either discretionary or entirely the creation of the executive. You will not find a line item in any bill appropriating funding for a transgender opera in Colombia. If Congress did not create it, it should not take Congress to tear it down. The demand that it should is just a ratchet which allows things to grow but not shrink, or allows Democrats to do things but that Republicans not undo them.
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You mean the one that spoke in favour of the Trump assassination?
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
Well Im glad that youre so principled, but... calling for literal, legal-definition murder is not the same as saying that e.g. men and women are different. At the point when that was what you had to do to get fired as a rightwinger, they didnt complain about cancel culture, they didnt even form that concept. If this is where you lost hope, you might as well never have hope - and I have my suspicions if you actually apply/ied that standard to the left in practice.
I think there's a big difference between wishing someone's death, and calling for someone's murder. Don't get me wrong, both are ugly, but saying "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" isn't that different from saying, "I wish the private jet his plane came in on crashed" or "I wish someone had strangled him as a baby in his crib."
There's plenty of colorful ways to say, "Boo X", and wishing their death is one of them. I do think after an assassination attempt we should ideally show more decorum, and hold off on such rhetoric, but again, I don't think it is worthy of firing if someone fails to show such decorum. And I definitely think it is a stretch to say that it is literally calling for murder.
The woke left was the culturally ascendant group at the time. It was natural for me to look towards the anti-woke people on all sides of the aisle for the hope of a different set of cultural norms that encouraged engagement with ideas. In some ways the Motte really does model a lot of the discursive norms I wish existed in normie spaces, though I get that it is far too rarified and self-selected to truly serve as a model for society at large. Even so, I did have hopes of a more open society that embodied the virtues of frankness of speech on the one hand, and curiosity and charity on the other.
If you mean that it doesnt meet the legally actionable threshold, then sure. But if it had somehow happend before, e.g. reporting on the presence of an assassin before hes neutralised, she tweets then - that is getting into danger territory, and I dont think your arguments about booing psychology are much stronger if its after. You definitely can call for murder in the illegal way thoughtlessly if you just run condemnationbabble.exe, and I dont think thats an excuse. The point of this is not if its "worth" firing for, but to establish that were talking about very different levels here without having to assume my ideology-in-general.
And at what level of cancel culture did you start to look away from the left? Was it already at the level where only incidents like this one were punished, or a lot later?
There are some naturally-blue people who felt that it was worth supporting the right to some extent because cancel culture had gotten that bad, and then at various levels of right-ascendancy no long felt that way. Thats fine, but its not fine to present your personal all-things-considered switchback point as if it were parity on this one issue. We are still far from parity, and I doubt itll ever get there.
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Of course, back in the days when the U.S. was a real democracy, they merited tarring and feathering, or having the offending printer's press thrown into the local river. But I agree, burning is a bit much.
The United States was never a "real democracy," and that was by design. The United States is a republic with democratic elements.
There were founders like Thomas Jefferson who advocated for the democratic element to be more expansive, and amendments like the 13th, 17th and 19th have pushed the United States in a more democratic direction, but in theory we still retain most of our republican institutions, at least formally.
Personally, I would tend to be against destroying printing presses. Seems like it would have a chilling effect on free speech.
And yet that was at the height of print culture, when every town and village worthy of the name had at least one circular paper and most cities had four. I notice that your explanation isn't accurately predicting the historical results.
I don't think what you said connects. The following two statements can both be true:
Put another way, do you think that when Elijah Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed multiple times and he was eventually murdered over his abolitionist position, that this was good for free speech culture or bad for free speech culture? Do you think, on the margins, that people were more likely to want to speak out in support of abolition or less likely? Of course, there's no accounting for the martyr effect, but I assume the goals of Elijah's killers should be obvious and repudiated.
I think "free speech culture" in the context of the 1850's - a far more legitimately democratic (in the sense that actual political and physical power was exercised directly by the demos upon and against itself rather than via an elected/appointed expert/governing class) is something of a category error. The people who mailed Preston Brooks canes in encouragement of his beating of Charles Sumner on the Senate floor were exercising speech just as much as Lovejoy was. So was Cassius Clay in his antislavery advocacy. So was Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the other Secret Six fundraising for John Brown. People clearly were not deterred from expressing their political views.
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But a person saying “they are sorry the guy missed” is not giving a political opinion. It’s a threat. You can’t cheer on death and hide behind it being a political statement.
Not it's not. You are being disingenuous. It's a statements of words. Words do not hurt or harm. And a statement of belief.
Why can't you? You literally can, and it can very much be a political statement. People cheer death all the time. I remember people cheering Saddam Hussein dying. Was that not political statement, belief, and speech? And I literally can't count and catalog the amount of political invective I've heard against the Clintons on the Internet, over the years.
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That is by definition not a threat. A threat must communicate the intent to do something to somebody. Saying "I'm sorry the guy missed" is wishing death on someone and that's bad, but it isn't a threat either.
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Sure you can. One can wish certain events would occur, or have an emotional reaction to certain events, without threatening to take illegal action to cause those events to occur.
Surely there is at least one person somewhere whom you wish would die, such that you would feel happy if you heard the news that they had passed.
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https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/25/conservatives-as-moral-mutants/
I’ve been hearing things like this for a decade, now. In America you seem to have avoided this by a hair, for now. In Britain the process is still ongoing.
I don’t like cancel culture. I think the right should be careful lest we cut off all feedback the way the left did, and I appreciate @curious_straight_ca and others for being stubborn and saying, “no, really, how is this meant to help?”.
But.
It is also true that I don’t feel confident enough in victory to give quarter. For silly reasons I ended up leading anti-woke resistance in one organisation, and one of the reasons that we failed was because I prevented people from attacking certain obvious weaknesses in the woke activist team, not wanting to sink to their level. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.
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