1 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Trumpism, here to stay?
The basic analogy stands. Regardless of the specific politics involved, Julius Caesar was an extremely popular figure who capitalized on public discontent to topple one of the earliest republics.
And one of the things you have to ask yourself when evaluating history is: how much of our opinions of dead people come from the propaganda of the victors? If Trump's neurotic bullshit was all that was recorded about the Democrats of today, future generations would look at them with the same opinion you're voicing about the Roman Senate.
Comment by Xerox748 at 27/01/2025 at 13:11 UTC*
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Still, no. And it’s not just rhetoric of the victors. We have the records from people on both sides of the conflict.
The idea that Caesar “capitalized on public discontent to topple the republic” is what’s woefully incorrect here. Not even remotely the sequence of events that played out. Even by the accounts of pro-senate writers like Cicero, that’s not what happened.
You can definitely find examples of that in history, and this situation with Trump is looking like history repeating itself with regards to those, but Caesar’s struggle with the Roman Senate isn’t a parallel situation.