Well. Doug, conspiracies do exist. Just ask Julius Caesar. I agree that The Thirty Tyrants from Tablet is just a bunch of emotional assertions. The supporters of Donald Trump never explain how this brilliant and heroic business leader was betrayed by so many of the people he personally chose to join his team. Worse than that, actually, is the poor writing. The article cited is just disguised as a scholarly examination. The introductory theme of the Thirty Tyrants is never followed through for a complete parallel construction. If anything, it follows Machiavelli, though without being explicit. It just opens up with some broad allusions to emotional triggers - "tyrant" and "Machievelli" - and then quickly becomes a rant. As for the Thirty Tyrants, we need to understand them in their history. First of all, they did not last. Wikipedia (of course) has the story. Find it wherever else you want. Their rule ran eight months. The article from Table cites ten years. And if you follow Qanon and the John Birch Society and the Know-Nothings you see that this has been going on almost forever. (At least that is the story line in the Illuminatus! trilogy which sources this to the Fall of Atlantis.) More consequentially, the Thirty slaughtered 5% of the population. That has no parallel here and now. That is why the author, Lee Smith, could not carry forward the analogy. If you look back over four years, it was supposed to happen that President Trump was going to assemble a loyal military cadre to take over the government, execute the liberals, and restore the Constitution, then step down. That did not happen of course. In fact, the military leaders chosen by President Trump were fired or quit. But that does not stop the ranters. Consider how religious millennarians claim that Jesus is Coming and when He does not show up, they just adjust their claims but keep (most of) their followers. That also played out with the communists of the 1920s to 40s. But, being largely true intellectuals interested in facts and the theories that explain them, they abandoned the Moscow party. We saw this in Objectivism, also, with TOS and ARI. People interested in the truth go one way and people following the party line go the other. Here, we have unregenerate Trumpeters clinging to their failed idol. I cancelled my financial support of The Galt's Gulch discussion board because it was taken over by writers who echo the Qanon rant. The January 6 assault on the Capitol was the last straw for me. I agree also: "If there is some truth to the part about the very wealthy abandoning the Republican Party, that might help explain how that party got taken over by populists and racists." Back when mastodons roamed the streets and I was in high school and YAF, for current events in history classes on Fridays, I often brought columns by William F. Buckley, Jr. All of the teachers were liberals, of course -- most of them, anyway; one was a conservative, another was actually a Rand Fan!-- and one of the teachers said that previously, the liberals had been the intellectual leaders but now, considering Buckley, it seemed that the conservatives were the ones with the ideas. That was over 50 years ago. You can see where we are today. (Edited by Michael Marotta on 2/14, 6:56am)
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