The ever accelerating pace of the World has made it disorienting and difficult for Radicals and plain citizens alike to fully gauge the moment we find ourselves in right now, with the "Nationalist International" moving at break-neck speed in order to implement their agendas, such as dismantling the welfare state and turning "undesirables" (who just so happen to be migrants and Muslims) into public enemy #1.
And yet, as right wing parties in the so called "developed world" grow their power by bypassing all of our established rules and norms of government, political establishment parties on the Center/Center Left seem hopelessly tied at the hip of what they farcically dub the "moral high ground" and proposing ineffectual calls for a return to "normalcy" which relies on empty symbolism and increasingly blatant theatrics.
If they aren't interested in playing the role of Controlled Opposition, then, they mistakenly believe that submitting to right-wing perspectives on "Culture War" issues will win them votes, only to be utterly humiliated come election season.
The best example of this phenomenon is the American Democratic party's handling of the second Trump administration's blatantly racist and fascistic mass deportation scheme. Following the passage of the "big beautiful bill" (which, during the process of it's creation, Dem leadership pathetically considered it a victory to force a name change for the bill, citing violations of procedure), has firmly established ICE as the American iteration of Nazi Germany's secret police with a budget larger than many nations' militaries and is now the largest branch of American law enforcement without any institutional oversight or democratic accountability.
Again, this publication must emphasize just how little the Democratic party are offering a credible resistance to this tide of repression. Michigan senator, Deep State pantomime, Ronald Reagan fan, and Gazan genocide enabler, Elissa Slotkin recently introduced a bill that would require ICE agents to display identification and ban them from wearing masks, as if implementing rules on Fascists will make their actions more humane.
These political games show that our current political structure is stuck within a "Ratchet Effect" where any possible move to the Left is institutionally blocked while the machinery of the state continues to turn to the Right. The most "radical" among the pro-Dem pundit class are calling on Democrats to engage in "retributive politics" if the party can gain control of the government again, which, basically means that they want to wage "Lawfare", a means of persecution using the Judicial system, against Republicans as get-back for them ignoring all of the "gentleman's agreements" that guided the ship of state since the 90's.
If your average card carrying Democrat or Republican were to be polled on whether or not they approved of using Lawfare to get rid of their political enemies, there is little doubt here that a alarming majority of them would agree to the practice.
In a nation where the last two election results have triggered unsubstantiated allegations that there was massive voter fraud which tainted the electoral process, this mass disenchantment with the political process has shown that the myth of the "exceptional institutions" of the American Republic are very blatantly coming to an end. The idea that American policy making was simply about working out differences of opinion rather than our government policy spelling out life or death for millions is also sobering up the juvenile intoxication Liberals have had with the system.
Now, both parties are prepared to abuse the powers of the state to gain the upper hand on their opponents. For those of you who are students of history, the current state of the American political crisis disturbingly mirrors the same specific state from Antiquity that has served as the blueprint for the foundations of the American project since the beginning: the Roman Republic.
Seeing as most people know the history of the Romans from the death of Julius Caesar and the birth of the empire, we will offer a short history of the institution that was killed in order to allow Julius Caesar to rise to power and lay the foundations of the empire in the first place:
Initially after it was founded, Rome started off as a small Italian city state that was ruled as a kingdom. Eventually, as Roman mythology goes, the Roman people got sick of the abuses of their kings that they forced their last king, Tarquin, to flee to a neighboring city state, after a popular revolution among the populace, the Roman Republic was founded and immediately afterwards started expanding, conquering the lands that the king fled to so that Rome would never be under the thumb of tyranny again.
With the establishment of this new political order, internal and external forces caused the city's new rulings class (nobles known as the "Patricians") to fight nearly endless wars to enrich these elites, while the poor (known then as "Plebs") suffered most of the consequences. It wasn't until the end of the 3rd Punic war which destroyed Carthage, Rome's main nemesis, that made them the only superpower left within the Mediterranean world, and permanently shifted the focus of the Roman public towards domestic issues that would ultimately spell the end of Rome's Republican systems.
It's actually incredibly jarring to compare the similarities between the Roman Republic and the US: both waged bloody civil wars regarding who among their populace had the ability to gain citizenship, both reached lone superpower status after the collapse of their main geopolitical rivals, and finally, both had political institutions with vulnerabilities to democratic backsliding which were utilized by Conservative politicians who attempted to block the expansion of, welfare, voter rights, and civil liberties to the poor.
What may cause a bit of controversy with this comparison is the fact that there is an absence of political violence within America in a similar way that was true for the final years of the Roman Republic, which eliminated would be Radicals such as the Gracchi brothers (pronounced "grock-eye").
This publication's rebuttal would push back upon this critique by relying on an Anarchist framework of understanding violence: they see violence as much more than simple threats or physical intimidation, they argue that violence is "a force that limits options", which, for example, can be the same type of violence you're threatened with during an unlawful detention by a police officer who uses excessive force.
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