this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Except the fall of time was a gradual things that occurred over hundreds of years, with no clear delimitation. Not one specific tiping point that occurred within two months of a specific leader taking over.
There's a large hill and at the bottom of that hill is a cliff, we've been sliding down that hill since Regan and this past January we finally reached the cliffs edge.
And Nixon pushed us
Wilson pushed us. Nixon greased the track
You can lay blame at the feet of almost every single president since Wilson. We've never really been great, but Wilson was a real piece of work. It's wild that he's treated as some kind of progressive hero. It's really been a long, slow death by a thousand cuts.
What's the elevator pitch for Wilson being terrible? All I really remember about him is the League of Nations and some limited involvement in WWI.
Basically, he was all aboard with Eugenics, and he saw probably one of the most aggressive expansions in government power in US history while using WWI as an excuse. Stuff like shutting down newspapers that ran articles he didn't like; the news of the flu outbreak was pretty suppressed for a while because of the war IIRC. He also banned prostitution not because of any moral argument, but because soldiers were catching STDs at troop collection points and being kept from being deployed because of the STDs. So, 100 years later, it's still illegal because not using a condom kept a bunch of boys from being fed into the meat grinder.
There's a bunch of other pretty wild shit that isn't coming to me at the moment, but Wilson fucking sucked and generally doesn't deserve any of the praise that people seem to offer him now.
He wrote Southern Revisionist History, and used his Yale credentials to spread it even before he was even president. Once he was president, he refounded the KKK, built a ton of statues of Confederate traitors, segregated the federal government, and used presidential funding to help produce "Birth of a Nation," which he screened at the White House. I could go on.
Well, I'd agree and disagree, but you can pretty much point at the last 100 years and draw a lot of parallels between the fall of our republic and the fall of their republic. Emphasis on the collapse of representative democracy into naked empire.
You can draw parallels with almost anything if you generalize enough. My car breaking down was like the fall of the Roman Empire, enough small issues never got fixed that they just ended up with the thing breaking up.
I assume they're talking about the Republic and not the Empire.
Why would you assume that? Fall of Rome usually refers to the collapse of the empire.
Why would they be talking about stupidity when Rome fell to the Ottomans militarily?
Because there were decades of corruption, overextension, and bad policy which lead up to them being susceptible to conquering by an outside power. The "fall of time" wasn't one single event. It was a gradual decay, mostly in the Western half of the split empire