- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
After weeks of authoritarian threats to crush protests with the military, cancel elections, conquer foreign countries, and send masked agents door-to-door to round up anyone who can’t prove their citizenship, Trump on Wednesday told an already uneasy room full of world leaders that “sometimes you need a dictator.”
The offhanded comment came in the middle of a rambling speech at the reception dinner for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday, in which Trump congratulated himself on a different rambling speech he’d given earlier that day at the summit.
“We had a good speech, we got great reviews. I can’t believe it, we got good reviews on that speech,” Trump said of the widely mocked address in which he continued to demand the US take over Greenland (which he repeatedly referred to as “Iceland”) and made new tariff threats against Canada and Europe if they resist the annexation.
I see no reason you’d ever want a dictator, but I admit that sometimes, I wish I could unilaterally amend the US Constitution. I’d be able to fix campaign finance, voting methods, gerrymandering, looting the government by the rich, and a whole bunch of other crap all at once.
You’ve got to watch that impulse. Anyone can have it, and things never go as you expect.
The mythos of Cincinnatus, the idea of a temporary dictator who acts benevolently and then gladly cedes power, has a strong presence in the founding of the US. Washington was regarded as one (his contemporaries were quite surprised when he willingly stepped down, it was felt that after his success in the war of independence he could have easily claimed power). That civic virtue is eminent enough to be the namesake of one of their cities. Pity it’s in Ohio, of all places. I probably can’t blame Ohio for the decline in American civic virtue, but I wish I could.
Hey I know it’s just a funny Internet meme to shit on Ohio, but any time someone does (especially in the current times where we need to find allies more than ever) I feel obligated to remind them that Ohio is actually not a hell hole, it just has backward rednecks in the rural areas, just like any other state with rural areas. Cincinnati is a beautiful city, Ohio is a beautiful state, and a huge chunk of the ~12 million people that live here are in fact not shit people.
Columbus on the other hand
What did Flavortown ever do to you?
It was a dark and stormy night, 2011. My mother and I were driving my deceased grandmother’s old Mazda MPV van, loaded to the gills with the contents of her life, back across the country from Arizona when we pulled off the highway in Columbus to find a hotel. The rest is history.
I feel like that part was also history.
Of course, it’s only in jest. I’ve even dated someone from Ohio, and not even one of the nice parts.
Which part of them did you date then? Just out of curiosity…
Just the taint.
The whole shebang, as it were.
As an American, honestly I feel like anticommunism was a huge factor in the decline of our civic virtue. When you start praising and empowering wealth over mutual benefit you weed the ethical and the dutiful from the leadership pool, both politically and culturally. Many left wing movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in America prioritized civic duty separate from the state (left wing) or through it (liberal).
I think the other big damage to it was the American civic religion. The country went from a huge machine we each had to play a part in, built on philosophies that everyone was supposed to understand, to a golden calf. The constitution went from the foundational rules meant to steward us towards the goals stated in the preamble it became a holy text thats name is cited, but its goals are not cherished. People often don’t actually think about how what they want fits in to a reasonable interpretation of say, the 4th-8th amendments.
Idk, sometimes I feel massively outnumbered here as someone who takes her civil duties seriously.
Well said.
Tbf, most of us don’t really count ourselves as Ohioans. Cincinnati really stands apart from the state.
I think you might be onto something blaming ohio actually.
Unfortunately I grew up in the Cincinnati area and developed a strong sense of civic duty. Is there a way we could blame Kentucky?
Cincinnatian here. Somehow this has to be Newport’s fault.
It’s a land that God forgot, and it belongs on no map.
Also James K Polk, Republican of the stump – promised to be a 1 term pres and stuck to it.
Can you imagine how great that would feel? To be trusted with such authority in service of your people, and to have kept your promise? I’d be a living legend, for the rest of my life I’d feel confident in having lived my ethos to its fullest. I cannot fathom why it does not appeal to some.
I honestly can’t imagine a better peak experience. Like, I’ve made choices that proved my ethics even at personal cost and felt extra good just not telling anyone for years about them. I still feel pride for some I engaged in as a child. It’s straight up the exact opposite feeling of remembering something cringe you did (of which I have many more examples). I sincerely wish that experience on everyone, though I hope most don’t get the martyrdom urge that led to it.
The world needs more people who feel this. The sense of being a valued and irreplaceable part of a world worth living in.
It’s not even being valued or irreplaceable, it’s just knowing you’ve done the right thing even when nobody would have blamed you for not. It’s the fundamental dignity and pride associated with knowing that you have shown integrity and the understanding that when presented with an opportunity to display it that it’s absolutely worth it.
Being able to live with yourself feels much better than always trying to hide from your own misdeeds.
If there was a way of ensuring a truly benevolent dictator I think it would be great, however any dictator we could pick realistically would be inherently flawed.
I don’t even think a benevolent dictator would be all that great. Dictators are always at the mercy of the information they receive, so you’d also need a cabinet full of benevolent secretaries, who in turn would need agencies full of benevolent directors, who’d need benevolent managers, etc. I just don’t think autocracy is an efficient form of government regardless of intent. Checks on power exist to limit the damage that those entrusted with power can do, regardless of their intentions.
Dictators are more efficient and agile than democratic governments. That’s why the Romans originally had them. In the early Roman republic dictators were appointed to fix a specific problem and given significant power to do specifically and only that. So for example you could have a “fix gerrymandering dictator” that would be able to sidestep normal processes to fix gerrymandering, and then disappear.
There’s A Robert A. Heinlein book about how and why to be involved in politics called Take Back Your Government. At one point he talks about sharing his concerns that fascism was in fact more efficient than democracy with a person who had escaped Hitler’s Germany. The friend asserts that fascism is less efficient, because under fascism, everyone is afraid of the boss, so no one wants to admit when anything isn’t going according to plan, so problems pile up. Democracy, on the other hand, expects and encourages constant complaint, so the problems tend to get discovered and fixed sooner than under fascism.
You can see this process taking place right now: everyone is afraid of displeasing boss Trump, and as a result you’ve got all these clearly fucked up decisions being made while nobody is being honest about how bad of an effect they are going to have. In a functional democracy, representatives would be afraid of the consequences and do something to stem the damage to avoid being tossed out in the next election. In our current reality… we’ll see, I guess?