Status Updates From The Coming Caesars

The Caesars of the future, if they eventually materialize, will only be a terrible symbol of something more terrible still: the death of our Western soul—and the body would not be long in following it to the grave of history

when wars and revolutions devastated the culture areas, the great bulk of the culture-people themselves began to long for peace and security at any price, for the constructive stability displayed by the civilization-states. It was the appeal thus involuntarily created that compelled the civilization-people to take over the leadership of their respective worlds, that compelled them to extend their more democratic soci

In Tocqueville’s words, “Of all societies in the world, those which will always have most difficulty in escaping absolute government will be precisely those societies in which aristocracy is no more, and can no more be.”

Democratic equality has done away with hereditary aristocracies everywhere, and in all cases, gigantic bureaucracies recruited “democratically” take their place—the most convenient tools in the hands of the Caesars: the Chinese mandarins who replaced the dying aristocracy, the Egyptian bureaucracy created by Pharaoh Amenemphat

The rise of Caesarism in America is considerably eased by a number of American features. In the first place, democratic equality, with its concomitant conformism and psychological socialization, is more fully developed in the United States than it has ever been anywhere, at any time. There are no social barriers, such as existed in Rome’s remnants of aristocratic tradition