patrick.net

I'm on the Plutarch "Lives" chapter on Julius Caesar. I had previously read some of Cicero's complaints that Caesar was redistributing land, but now things make more sense.

The Roman Republic had some familiar problems around 50 BC, namely that the populace was increasingly impoverished while the tiny upper classes were getting fantastically rich. A lot of that was due to usury, because the wives of soldiers away on campaign for Rome had to borrow so as not to starve, and ultimately lost the family farms which they put up as collateral.

So the masses had a lot of legitimate grievances which were not being addressed by the Senate. To gain power, Caesar addressed these complaints, requiring lenders to forgive a lot of interest, and confiscating land from the super-rich to give to his soldiers as family farms.

Of course these policies were extremely popular with the soldiers and the people, so popular that they didn't really mind if Caesar was not following the letter of the law.

America has seen a similar evolution of extreme disparity in wealth as the American ruling class obliterates millions of jobs by outsourcing to China and driving down the wages for the shit jobs remaining by illegally importing tens of millions of criminal aliens who will work for less than Americans will.

The "Democratic" party completely betrayed the US working class, ditching unions and going all-in on support for mega-corporations as they devastated US worker wages to boost profits for shareholders. Then they went further and actively shit upon the working class, calling them "racist" and "deplorable" for objecting to their impoverishment at the hands of the Democratic Party. The Republican party was always for business, but with the Democrats now actively undermining US living standards, US workers had no representation in either party.

This left an immense unmet demand for someone like Trump to step into that gap and address those legitimate grievances, just like Caesar stepped in.

I'm pretty sure Trump has no plan to make himself dictator, and at 78 he's kind of old for that anyway. But still, there is a clear echo of ancient history going on here because of the utter failure of the Democratic Party to defend US jobs and wages.