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Some Ramblings About Trump and the Fall of the Roman Empire
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It just gets worse: The White House asked the Navy to hide a destroyer named after Senator John McCain in order to avoid having the ship appear in photographs taken while President Trump was visiting Japan this week, White House and military officials said Wednesday. Although Navy officials insisted they did not hide the ship, the John S. McCain, they did give all of the sailors aboard the day off on Tuesday as Mr. Trump visited Yokosuka Naval Base. Two Navy sailors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, said that the… Read more »
I’m curious: is there any historical precedent or historical examples of a government successfully saving itself in this situation? Or is the overall trend that we’re doomed? I’d like to think that there is some historical event equivalent of “voting the bums out” and restoring sanity, but maybe I’m just being naively hopeful.
Well, there’s a somewhat limited sample of relevant parallels because democracy on a national basis is a recent thing. We’ve certainly seen countries oscillate between democracy and monarchy (France, for example) and Republics and dictatorships (many examples). Countries like Turkey and recently Egypt have had the military step in when they felt the will of the people had gone off the rails. Until recently, the Turkish army generally intervened on the side of preserving secularism, and that’s basically what happened in Egypt too, although they didn’t relinquish their power. The nature of a representative system is that it should be… Read more »