_portrait.jpg){kind=link}
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
1375 points (98.9% liked)
Leopards Ate My Face
5588 readers
1726 users here now
Rules:
- If you don't already have some understanding of what this is, try reading this post. Off-topic posts will be removed.
- Please use a high-quality source to explain why your post fits if you think it might not be common knowledge and isn't explained within the post itself.
- Links to articles should be high-quality sources – for example, not the Daily Mail, the New York Post, Newsweek, etc. For a rough idea, check out this list. If it's marked in red, it probably isn't allowed; if it's yellow, exercise caution.
- The mods are fallible; if you've been banned or had a comment removed, you're encouraged to appeal it.
- For accessibility reasons, an image of text must either have alt text or a transcription in the comments.
- All Lemmy.World Terms of Service apply.
Also feel free to check out !leopardsatemyface@lemm.ee (also active).
Icon credit C. Brück on Wikimedia Commons.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I mean, if you want to get extra snarky, Rome's still there. Still one of the wealthiest cities on earth, to this day. The infrastructure is what makes the city and that can be repaired or rebuilt, improved even, as generations come to their senses.
I pin this far more on the toxic media atmosphere than COVID, although the pandemic definitely took its toll. That said, the current hysteria around migrants and Woke feels a lot more like the post-9/11 moment than COVID. Democrats rolling over sheepishly while a Republican wields unitary executive power to disappear dissidents and intimidate
What folks on here don't want to accept is that this isn't the first time we've had a President behave like this. Its not even the first time in our lifetimes (for the most part - sorry teenagers). This is more normal than not, in fact. Reagan's War on Drugs, Nixon's War on Crime, Eisenhower's Red Scare, and FDR/Truman's Japanese Internment echoed all the same fascist tendencies.
What's really changed in 2025 is the abysmal long term economic outlook. Liberals in 1984 could duck their heads and glare at the rampant poverty around them and mutter "If those hippie slackers had earned an education rather than smoking dope and fucking around, they wouldn't get picked on by the police". But now... fucking kids at Columbia University are being targeted. Surgeons are getting targeted. Judges are getting targeted.
Literally the only thing you can do to avoid these purges is Be MAGA. And "Just be MAGA, you won't get hurt" isn't something liberals can quite bring themselves to do yet (although keep an eye on Gavin Newsom and Richie Torries and Andrew Cuomo, because its coming).
Dictatorship isn't making people feel safe. It's making them feel terrified and helpless.
The city of Rome still exists but the Roman Empire does not. That is the long term future of the us.
The brain drain is necessary for the dictatorship to fully take over. Just like in Russia, I also expect people to eventually have to play along - or lose their job, house etc.
Dictatorship only scares the non maga. Maga feels safer with it.
Absent that brief ill-conceived stint at empire under Mussolini, sure. But the roadways and the ports and the political connections and the religious iconography that centered Rome within the ancient world continue to persist. It isn't the center of a sprawling intercontinental kingdom, but it holds a privileged place within the modern sprawling intercontinental kingdom of NATO.
Russia's in a peculiar place precisely because brain drain and privatization and punitive sanctions and the latest round of pointless horrifying bloodshed has sapped it of so many talented and driven young people. But the dictatorship - the bourgeois dictatorship, anyway - came under Yeltsin, following the Gorbachev coup. It brought in an entirely illegal dismantling of public industry and services, a looting of pensions and public reserves, and a fire sale of military hardware which set off a wave of ugly overseas wars in Africa, Oceania, and Latin America.
Only after the country had been hollowed out economically, by a cartel of untouchable oligarchs, did the public warm to the idea of a new singular strongman dictator. And the call for dictatorship was, at its heart, a plea for someone to drag the cartels back into line as part of a national project.
People have to play along in every system, because we're not self-sustaining little monoids. We are hugely interdependent and most efficient when we are working together in concert as collaborative specialists. What we're searching for is leadership. But all we seem to be offered is different flavors of oligarchy or autocracy.
That's because its called Vatican City now.