The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.
Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?
The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn’t even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.
But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.
We learn more and more each time, actually, but all the very rich people support these movements which include a huge infusion of anti-intellectualism, since the insanely wealthy really, really want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains.
This is how all the big super-popular podcasts hosts are hyper-masculine misogynist far-right dude-bros like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Like PragerU, they’ve all been supported with infusions of money until they became functional franchises of their own.
NSDAP in Germany also drew large donations from the ownership class eager to stay the ownership class in the face of the rise of communism. Essentially they (including some Jewish donors failing to predict their own arrest and evacuation) sought any opposition party, who was the fascist autocrat party.
The fall of the Roman Republic certainly was. One of the biggest forces driving it was malignant social inequality. The wealthy patrician class, buoyed by hoards of slave labor seized from the conquered provinces, was dispossessing the Roman citizens who had fought and died to conquer those lands.
Reformers had a variety of ideas on how to solve this. One of the most popular ones was to simply buy land up and give it to Roman citizens that found themselves destitute. An expensive program, but you know what the real stupid thing was?
The money was there. The Roman state had overflowing coffers, vast amounts of gold and other riches taken from those conquered provinces. The reformers didn’t even want to raise taxes on the rich to pay for their social redistribution programs. They just wanted to take some of this vast pile of gold the state had won and use some of it to benefit the people who actually did the fighting and dying to win that gold.
But, the elites refused to share. They wanted it all for themselves. And eventually they lost all their power to the Caesars as a consequence.
Humanity is really fucking good at making the exact same mistake over and over and never even coming close to learning anything from it.
I blame the tyranny of our amygdala.
Whilst in 2 millennia we massively evolved the tools we use, we barely evolved socially and did not at all evolve Psychologically or Physiologically.
We can change our environment but we can’t change the hearts of our neighbors.
We learn more and more each time, actually, but all the very rich people support these movements which include a huge infusion of anti-intellectualism, since the insanely wealthy really, really want to keep their (ill-gotten) gains.
This is how all the big super-popular podcasts hosts are hyper-masculine misogynist far-right dude-bros like Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Joe Rogan. Like PragerU, they’ve all been supported with infusions of money until they became functional franchises of their own.
NSDAP in Germany also drew large donations from the ownership class eager to stay the ownership class in the face of the rise of communism. Essentially they (including some Jewish donors failing to predict their own arrest and evacuation) sought any opposition party, who was the fascist autocrat party.
Only correction I would make is Ben Shapiro is their Token Jew and def not a hyper-masc dude-bro. He’s the dweeb part of that movement.
So, pretty much like any other era, really.