Will America need a Caesar?



Earlier this month, San Francisco’s Hamilton Society held a debate on a question that would have sounded absurd not long ago: Does America need a Caesar?

Older Americans may scoff. Younger politically engaged Americans are less likely to. Many came of age after 9/11 amid corruption, institutional drift, and visible decline. Even a presidency that has slowed the Biden-era collapse has not repaired the deeper sense that the system no longer works.

America needs a path out of cybernetic collapse that does not end in machine rule or technologically enhanced autocracy.

From that premise, the temptation follows: If everything is broken, perhaps history’s oldest emergency remedy deserves a second look.

But one does not simply “have a Caesar.” Critics who dismiss the whole discussion as live-action role-playing or strongman wish-casting have a point. A generation trained to think and talk rather than act will naturally produce elaborate theories of action it has never practiced.

The Hamilton Society debate captured that tension. The motion that America needs a Caesar failed, 56% to 44%, though the pro-Caesar side gained five points after the arguments. I had agreed to argue against the motion before a scheduling conflict kept me away.

Nervous breakdown

That case is easy enough to make today. America does not need a Caesar right now. The disturbing question is whether conditions could change until it does.

The danger lies in those two little words: right now.

Right now, America is entering a period of radical uncertainty, driven in part by artificial intelligence. My feed is filling with nervous remarks from people working at the edge of the AI industry. Their concern confirms two things: Our near-term future remains unwritten, and our capacity to make plans is beginning to break down.

The threat is not only a race toward recursively self-improving intelligence. It is also the recursive destruction of our ability to understand what is happening while our political order comes apart.

RELATED: The path to America-first AI

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The federal government faces a brutal dilemma. Its legitimacy depends partly on maintaining American strategic dominance. As AI advances, can Washington preserve that dominance without claiming the most powerful systems for itself and using them at its discretion?

Maintaining such an edge would not mean controlling only today’s strongest models. It would mean controlling tomorrow’s, then the next day’s, forever. The ultimate AI weapon is not one machine. It is the power to weaponize anything at any scale, from the planetary to the personal.

The technocratic answer is more cybernetics: tighter governance through self-improving systems of monitoring, prediction, and control. But we should be preparing for cybernetics itself to fail under the pressure of the moment.

Diminishing options

When a system can no longer govern itself, societies reach for familiar exits.

One is withdrawal: Head for the hills, build resilient communities, and live beyond the failing machinery. Some people should do exactly that. But if escape becomes a mass impulse, it stops being resilience and becomes flight. Poorly prepared internal refugees would remain trapped inside the same collapsing country.

A second option is spiritual authority. In periods of corruption, societies often turn to their holiest figures. America, however, is ill-equipped for that solution. Our churches are divided, many religious leaders suffer their own crisis of trust, and our constitutional order does not provide for theocracy.

That leaves the third option: one man entrusted with enough power to impose order on the people and, now, their machines. A ruler believed strong enough to bear the burden of writing a new law for a broken society.

In other words: Caesar.

What would have to happen before Americans not only wanted such a figure but believed they needed him? A broad majority would have to conclude that without one, the country would collapse and Americans would cease to be recognizably American.

RELATED: The question of the AI age: How much humanism is too much?

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The failure of the American experiment would leave us unable to agree on what regime should replace it. We might not even know what sort of people we had become. Under those conditions, an all-powerful AI could offer to decide for us.

If the choice appeared to be submission to the machine or submission to a man who promised to preserve both our humanity and our national identity, Caesar would suddenly look pretty attractive.

A civilization, if we can keep it

Here is the catch: Every historical Caesar has been pagan or Christian, and Christian Caesars ruled empires. America has imperial features, but it is not the kind of civilization likely to produce a Christian emperor. The Christian model for the ruler of one nation is the king, not the Caesar who governs many peoples.

That leaves the more plausible American outcome: a pagan Caesar.

Few Americans worship the classical gods. Politically, however, pagan gods were the gods of the regime — powers embodied by the city, the state, and ultimately the ruler. Caesar did not merely govern beneath them. He could become one of them.

Artificial intelligence now offers a lone ruler something no ancient emperor possessed: the prospect of near-divine control over information, movement, behavior, and even human cognition. AI could restore the oldest pagan political dream — the “gods of the city” made operational.

That is the point of departure for “Pagan.ai,” my essay in the new issue of Frontier.

America needs a path out of cybernetic collapse that does not end in civil anarchy or cyber theocracy. If we don’t like the Caesar we may someday believe we need, we should begin now to repair the conditions that would make him possible.

The best way to avoid Caesar is not to mock the question. It is to build a country that never has to ask it.

Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire still burns



Thomas Jefferson wrote many letters to John Adams about government, liberty, and England’s corruption under King George III. Jefferson once put his disgust plainly: “It has been a strong reason with me for wishing there was an ocean of fire between that island and us.”

Earlier in their political careers, Adams had chosen Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson then penned a sentence that became the greatest line of revolutionary fire ever written, separating freedom from tyranny as clearly as any ocean of fire could.

With one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.

During the classical era, pharaohs claimed godhood and treated their people as lesser beings, fit only for slavery and submission. Godhood placed the pharaoh and his ministers above the humanity beneath them.

But in the land of Goshen lived the tribes of Israel. Freed by Moses, they came to camp in the shadow of Mount Sinai, where they received the Ten Commandments — the law of God on earth, demanding obedience from kings, priests, and commoners alike.

Centuries later, democracies emerged along the Hellenic coasts of Greece, while the Roman Republic arose on the Italian peninsula. These societies were imperfect but freer than the empires around them.

In Greece, that freedom lasted until Philip II of Macedon devoured the city-states and left an empire to his son Alexander. After conquering Egypt, Alexander demanded to be known as the “son of Amon,” claiming the aura of godhood and exerting a tyranny like that of the pharaohs.

In Rome, the republic endured for nearly 500 years before falling to imperial rule. The Julio-Claudian line eventually produced Caligula, who demanded to be adored as a god in the Temple of Solomon itself. Thus came the tyranny of the Caesars.

In medieval Europe, kings could not claim to be gods. But they could claim to be anointed by God, placing their crowns above ordinary men as surely as the stars appear above the sea.

King John of England ruled through vis et voluntas — force and will. The rapacity of his will and the weakness of his rule led to Magna Carta in 1215, the first great liberating document written in Europe since the Roman Republic.

A descendant of King John, Henry VIII, placed in his own person the powers of king and head of the church. He claimed to rule by divine right. The kings who followed asserted the same claim: that all beneath the sun was beneath them by God’s will.

So it is that the history of humanity is, in large part, the history of tyranny.

Then a descendant of that line, George III, inspired Jefferson’s line of revolutionary fire: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

That sentence means all of us possess the same rights, and no one has a superior right to take them away — no pharaoh, emperor, conqueror, king, queen, or dictator.

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If our rights are given to us equally by God, then none may rule over us by claiming we are unequal. Among those rights are faith, speech, assembly, and the right to remove from power those who misgovern us.

Thus, our government is our servant — never our master.

By that one line, the tyranny present throughout human history was turned upside down. Humanity knew real liberty in a new and enduring way.

The foremost lesson of history is that tyranny is always with us.

In recent history, the murderous Bolsheviks toppled the 300-year empire of the czars, looted and burned churches, and murdered priests. They knew God would never be a socialist Bolshevik, so they placed themselves above God.

When Hitler came to power, he sought to eradicate the Jewish people, murdering 6 million Jews. He knew that neither the Jews nor God would join the socialist Nazi Party, so he placed himself above God.

In China, Mao Zedong drove the moral center out of his nation through a murderous purge, killing tens of millions of his own people in the name of revolution. Confucius had no place in Mao’s socialist order, so Mao placed himself above God.

Such is tyranny in our own time.

In America today, democratic socialists attack the faith of our Jewish neighbors and fellow citizens. They seek the removal of the Ten Commandments from schools and public squares. They attack Christianity and Western civilization. They insist that our nation under God is evil and must be remade.

It is socialism in America that must be defeated.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the greatest sentence ever written in the history of freedom, let us hold fast to God, the creator and guarantor of our rights.

Let us hold fast to that line of revolutionary fire with a will of steel — for the sake of all our liberties.

The Declaration is not a relic. It is a warning.



A century ago in Philadelphia, July 5, 1926, Calvin Coolidge gave America the speech it needed on its 150th birthday. He did not flatter the country. He did not scold it. He reminded Americans that the Declaration was not a museum piece or a political slogan, but a spiritual document rooted in permanent truths. On our 250th birthday, his warning looks less like history than prophecy. Read this excerpt slowly. Then ask whether we still believe it. Editor's note: This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

We meet to celebrate the birthday of America. The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation. It is to pay our tribute of reverence and respect to those who participated in such a mighty event that we annually observe the 4th day of July.

Whatever may have been the impression created by the news which went out from this city on that summer day in 1776, there can be no doubt as to the estimate which is now placed upon it. At the end of 150 years, the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgment of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.

No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

It is not so much, then, for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.

Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.

It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history.

Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if it roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions.

Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws that creates the character of a nation.

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About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern.

But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp.

If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped.

Reject The System That Stole Your Medical Freedom

Patients are not free to decide their own care even though medical autonomy is supposedly protected by law.

Glenn Beck: When the government says THIS phrase, protect yourself immediately



Tyranny rarely arrives wearing a villain’s mask. More often, Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck argues, it comes wrapped in the language of compassion.

“The most dangerous sentence in all of human history is not, ‘I hate you.’ It’s, ‘This is for your own good.’ Cruelty announces itself, and you can guard against it. But tyranny that believes it’s being kind never stops because it never feels guilty,” Glenn explains.

“When somebody justifies power, a policy, or an exception by telling you it’s to protect the vulnerable, that is not the time to relax. They’re not protecting the vulnerable. They may think they are, but they’re not,” he continues.

And Glenn has several news stories to back up his belief.


“Britain, that full report on the sex scandal that has been going on with the, dare I say it, with the Muslim immigrants, the number now is at a quarter of a million girls were raped,” he begins.

“The officials shielded, you know, one favored group from criticism at all cost. And the cost was the children. And the instinct that did this was not hatred for the children or the British people. It was a warped idea of protection. Protect the favored group,” he explains.

“Story two ... the UK wants to scan all content on every phone in the country. Not kids' phones, every phone. Your photos, your messages, everything you do on the presumption that it might find something helpful to protect the children,” he continues.

“Protect the child becomes scan every adult. That’s the slope. That’s the play,” he adds.

The third story Glenn uses as an example is the FTC’s lawsuit against the world’s leading transgender medicine organization, where they allege that it “cooked its own clinical guidelines to juice insurance coverage for procedures on minors.”

“Now, I want you to set aside wherever you land on the underlying issue. Look only at the structure here. The institution you’re told trust because it’s credentialed authority where the doctors were protecting your child,” he says.

“They bent the science toward the billing department. Same pattern, different lab code,” he continues, before revealing the one question those who value their freedom need to ask when it's being challenged.

“Ask the one question that has protected free people for 300 years,” he says, asking, “Who watches the protector?”

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How the laptop revolution destroyed public education



A recent Fortune magazine article made waves with a grim admission: After more than $30 billion spent flooding classrooms with laptops and tablets, standardized scores keep sliding. Worse, neuroscientists now link more classroom screen time to lower performance. The device meant to modernize learning may be helping to unmake it.

Schools rushed into a technological revolution without asking the most basic question: What does this do to a child’s mind? Many teachers saw the answer firsthand and in real time. Administrators and “experts” ignored them because the fad sounded like “progress.”

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

I taught history and civics in Florida public schools as the laptop trend took hold. Computers had sat in classrooms since my own childhood, but they played a supporting role. A few desktops in the back helped with research. A computer lab handled bigger projects. Most learning still happened on paper with books, notes, and conversation.

Then the Chromebook arrived: cheap, durable, limited, and perfect for one thing — living inside a web browser. Suddenly a district could put a machine not just in every room but in the hands of every student.

Buzzwords beat judgment

Public-school administrators love buzzwords. “Technological literacy” sounds noble, as if every ninth grader is training for Silicon Valley while working on their grammar assignment. Google did not just sell discounted laptops. It supplied a full ecosystem: Docs, Sheets, Slides, Classroom. The whole apparatus of schooling migrated into Alphabet’s software suite. Few people in the system asked why a private company wanted to become the operating system of childhood.

The laptop push also fit the religion of metrics. District offices love anything that produces dashboards, timestamps, and “engagement” graphs. A worksheet completed on paper frustrates the spreadsheet priesthood. A worksheet completed on a Chromebook generates data. The device did not just enter the classroom; it entered the managerial imagination, where metrics matter more than minds.

Once laptops became ubiquitous, the problems announced themselves. The deeper the integration, the harder it became to control.

Cheating became routine. Students searched answers in seconds. The larger problem went beyond quizzes. Googling replaced thinking. Kids refused to read because they assumed a quick search and a copy-paste counted as “learning.” Wikipedia became the default authority. Students stopped vetting anything because they treated the first search result as truth. Even writing shifted. Instead of building an argument, students stitched together paragraphs from the internet and hoped the teacher felt too tired to fight.

RELATED: The world changed, and now we homeschool

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The distraction machine

Schools tried parental controls. Teenagers treated those controls as a challenge. When thousands of bored adolescents share a building, they collaborate. A new filter went up; within days, kids found a workaround. Soon the screens again showed games, movies, even pornography — during class, in plain view, behind a pretense of “work.”

Students used shared Google docs as a covert messaging system. They gossiped, bullied, and planned actual crimes while keeping a document open to look studious. My school eventually held assemblies to remind students that everything typed into a document leaves a record and that bragging about criminal activity or sexual escapades can end up as evidence.

All of that raised another issue: privacy and capture. Google did not subsidize devices and software out of corporate charity. By making Google search and Google apps the center of a child’s information life, the system trained dependency. Google finds the truth. Google organizes the truth. Google presents the truth. A student’s education happens inside a Google ghetto. Pretend the company is not collecting that data if you want, but the incentives cut the other way.

Screens also fed the attention crisis. Administrators told teachers to stop showing videos longer than three minutes without pausing to explain because students could not stay focused. The device that was supposed to expand horizons kept shrinking attention spans. Teachers began competing with the entire internet for a child’s attention, and no lesson plan can win that contest for long.

Locked into the system

The system made escape difficult. Florida went all-in on Chromebooks and tied them to everything. Standardized tests moved entirely onto laptops. “Test prep” software got woven into daily coursework. Students with accommodations or limited English got pushed toward the device as a universal crutch. Denying a Chromebook got treated as denying an education. Teachers who resisted risked discipline.

I reached a point where my students mattered more than compliance. I rebuilt my classroom around paper, books, and discussion. Students used Chromebooks only for mandated testing and accommodations we could not meet otherwise.

The shift showed results fast. Students engaged more. Distraction dropped. Discipline improved. More assignments got finished. Grades rose.

Then COVID-19 struck.

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Remote learning turned the screen into the classroom itself. Even Florida, which resisted lockdown hysteria, shifted much of schooling online. Learning fell off a cliff. The lockdowns devastated achievement, but the damage did not end when students returned in person. After COVID, it became nearly impossible to pry students, parents, and administrators away from screen-based schooling. Digital integration became mandatory. No exceptions.

Now the corporate press arrives to play cleanup. Reporters discover the failure well after the money has been spent, the infrastructure has hardened, and a generation has been trained to treat a browser as a brain.

A way back

Public education is stuffed with managerial drones who chase consensus and trends while ignoring what helps students. The bureaucracy will keep this program alive through sheer inertia even as evidence piles up. Parents and lawmakers need to force a reset: paper-based instruction as the default, screens as a tightly limited accommodation, and tests that reward reading and writing instead of clicking. Districts should stop outsourcing childhood to Big Tech, stop laundering ideology through “digital citizenship,” and start treating attention as a scarce resource worth defending.

A concerted push to remove screens from classrooms needs to begin now. Start with elementary grades. Bring back books. Bring back handwriting. Bring back sustained attention. Put the devices where they belong: limited tools, not the center of learning.

Kids learn slower, but they learn for real.

Is Leftist Rage About to Turn as BLOODY as the French Revolution?! | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 277
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Is Leftist Rage About to Turn as BLOODY as the French Revolution?! | The Glenn Beck Podcast | Ep 277

Conservatives can’t barbecue their way through national collapse



Conservatives want to be left alone. They have families, jobs, churches, hobbies. They love their country, but they stay busy and comfortable. Politics feels like something for other people — activists, ideologues, the perpetually aggrieved. The left may dream of tearing the system down in a fiery Marxist revolution, but one solid vote every couple of years or so should keep the crazies in check. Then it’s back to work, back to Little League, back to the barbecue.

That belief sustained many on the right for decades. It has become a liability.

A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort.

The sunshine conservative lives under the assumption that the American system more or less runs itself, that excesses can be corrected with minimal effort, and that power remains constrained by shared norms. Those assumptions no longer hold. The times that try men’s souls have returned, and the sunshine conservative is about to discover that comfort carries a cost.

For years, a bipartisan consensus reshaped the country through mass immigration. Call it conspiracy if you like, but incentives explain it better.

Democrats saw a reliable path to permanent power. Immigrants arrive without wealth, social capital, or political leverage. They gravitate toward the party that promises redistribution and protection. Every program — health care, housing, loans, benefits — tilts toward newcomers. Open borders grow government, entrench dependency, and expand the progressive patronage machine.

Republican incentives looked different but proved just as corrosive. Conservative voters opposed mass immigration, legal and illegal alike, but party leadership feared one thing above all else: being called racist.

Progressive programming successfully framed the idea of America as a homeland — run for the benefit of its people — as morally suspect. Any attempt to articulate national interest became “nativism.” Chamber of Commerce Republicans exploited that fear, importing millions of workers willing to accept suppressed wages while silencing critics through ritual denunciation.

While the country changed, conservatives largely stood aside. The transformation unsettled them, but lawn care got cheaper and food delivery faster. The sunshine conservative preferred comfort to confrontation. Political activism felt vulgar. Winners, after all, make money and buy boats.

Now the bill has come due.

Human trafficking. Drug flows. Violent crime. Overcrowded hospitals. Stagnant wages. Exploding housing costs. The social fabric frays under the weight of policies designed to benefit elites while disciplining everyone else.

RELATED: Aristotle’s ancient guide to tyranny reads like a modern manual

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The Trump administration’s effort to remove the worst offenders collides with a system addicted to inflow. Obvious solutions exist — employer enforcement, E-Verify, ending the H-1B visa scam, taxing remittances heavily — but those measures threaten donor interests. Instead, enforcement proceeds piecemeal, state by state, criminal by criminal.

Each attempt to exercise authority triggers panic among mainstream conservatives. They fret about optics. They warn about norms. They clutch abstractions while the left shoots at or runs over federal agents, storms churches, and treats public order as optional. Establishment voices agonize over power even as their opponents wield it without hesitation.

A friend of mine returned from the Global War on Terror with what doctors labeled post-traumatic stress disorder. The diagnosis missed the point. His trauma didn’t come from violence alone. It came from clarity. He had lived in a world where stakes mattered, where power operated openly, where failure carried consequences. Returning to a culture submerged in therapeutic language, pronouns, and safe spaces proved disorienting. Everyone else lived inside a fantasy and demanded that he play along.

Eventually, he learned to stay quiet. He still regards much of what surrounds him as childish and unmoored from reality.

That reaction mirrors what many feel toward sunshine conservatives. They cling to a story about politics that bears no resemblance to how power functions. When confronted with evidence, they demand that reality conform to their narrative. It never does. That narrative existed to pacify them, to make them manageable. They defend it with the same fervor with which the left defends its own delusions.

Each crisis cracks the façade. An assassination. A church invasion. A city surrendered to disorder. Every time, a few more conservatives wake up — only to be swarmed by those demanding a return to small talk about tax rates and process. The problem never lay with those who saw the danger. It lay with those insisting everyone else look away.

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The question no longer concerns policy tweaks. It concerns survival. One side believes the country deserves preservation and repair. The other treats it as illegitimate and disposable. That divide cannot be bridged by nostalgia or proceduralism.

The sunshine conservative era has ended. Saving the country requires engagement, sacrifice, and the willingness to place political reality over personal comfort. It requires choosing the future of one’s children over quarterly returns. It requires the disciplined use of power to defend the nation’s institutions, borders, and communities — even when that makes polite society uncomfortable.

A vote followed by retreat no longer suffices. The fantasy that it does belongs with other comforting lies. The right can either shed it or be ruled by those who never believed it in the first place.

Aristotle’s ancient guide to tyranny reads like a modern manual



In “Politics,” Aristotle explains that political rule comes in three basic forms: rule of one, rule of the few, and rule of the many. Each form has a healthy and a degenerate expression. Monarchy and tyranny describe rule by one. Aristocracy and oligarchy describe rule by the few. Polity and democracy describe rule by the many.

What separates the good from the bad in each category is not structure but motive. A king governs for the common good. A tyrant governs for himself.

Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, the philosopher’s portrait of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary.

Aristotle does more than classify regimes. He explains, in cold and unsentimental terms, how tyrants preserve power once they seize it. His warnings, written more than 2,000 years ago, read less like ancient theory and more like a field manual.

The tyrant begins by eliminating rivals. He fears competition, especially from men of spirit and competence. Anyone admired for virtue, courage, or leadership poses a danger because excellence inspires imitation. Such men are removed through exile, execution, or disgrace.

Next the tyrant attacks institutions that allow citizens to form bonds. Aristotle lists common meals, clubs, educational gatherings, literary societies, and discussion groups. Any shared practice that fosters trust, loyalty, or independent thought threatens despotic rule. Organization creates solidarity, and solidarity creates resistance.

The tyrant also forces citizens to live publicly. Privacy breeds conspiracy. Public life enables surveillance. Aristotle describes rulers who compel their subjects to remain visible so that dissent never escapes notice. Long before Bentham’s panopticon, Aristotle understood that constant observation disciplines behavior.

Surveillance alone does not suffice. Tyrants cultivate networks of informers to uncover thoughts that cannot be seen. Citizens learn to treat one another as potential threats. Suspicion replaces trust. Speech becomes guarded. Silence becomes safety.

Aristotle could not have imagined digital surveillance, but he would have recognized its function. Technology merely perfects a strategy the ancients already understood.

Social bonds must then be weakened. The tyrant sows discord between neighbors, friends, and families. These relationships form the first line of resistance to centralized power. When trust dissolves at the most intimate level, organized opposition becomes nearly impossible.

Poverty also serves the tyrant. Aristotle observes that despots deliberately exhaust their populations with endless labor. The goal is not productivity but distraction. Citizens too busy to rest or reflect lack the energy to conspire.

He cites the construction of the Egyptian pyramids as an example of forced labor designed less to achieve a purpose than to consume a people’s strength. The task glorifies the ruler while leaving the population depleted.

War further strengthens despotism. Constant external threat convinces citizens that they need a strong ruler to survive. Crisis suspends normal limits. Emergency justifies control. Under perpetual conflict, organization becomes treason.

Aristotle claims that tyranny, the degenerated rule of one, borrows from the worst features of democracy. Despots empower groups unlikely to organize independently against them. He mentions women and slaves not as moral judgments but as political calculations within the ancient world.

The logic remains familiar. Tyrants elevate those dependent on the regime and hostile to existing social hierarchies. Dependence fosters loyalty. Resentment supplies enforcement.

Flattery plays a crucial role. Tyrants surround themselves with sycophants who inflate their ego and confirm their righteousness. Men willing to abase themselves rise quickly. Men of honor refuse to flatter and therefore remain dangerous.

Flattery becomes a sorting mechanism. Those who value dignity exclude themselves. Those who crave favor advance.

Aristotle adds that tyrants prefer foreigners to citizens. Citizens possess memory, tradition, and moral expectation. They know how things once were and how they ought to be. Foreigners lack these attachments, and they are happy to flatter the ruler who elevated them.

This arrangement benefits both sides. The tyrant gains enforcers without local allegiance. The foreigner gains status, wealth, and protection. Without the ruler, he has nothing.

RELATED: Do you want Caesar? Because this is how you get Caesar.

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Despite the millennia that separate us from Aristotle, his description of tyranny feels uncomfortably contemporary. Surveillance now operates through algorithms and cellphone cameras rather than forcing everyone to live at the city gates, but the purpose remains unchanged. Security replaces liberty. Total observation replaces trust.

Our institutions remove ambitious and virtuous individuals while elevating compliant managerial drones. Debt binds the population to endless labor. Work consumes life without building independence. Citizens remain busy, anxious, poor, and isolated.

Cultural and political authorities weaken family, denigrate religion, and discourage independent association. Community dissolves into administration. Loyalty transfers from neighbors to systems.

Ruling classes increasingly rely on populations with little connection to national history or tradition. These groups have no reason to defend inherited norms and every incentive to please those who grant them status.

Some details differ but the formula for tyranny does not. Aristotle understood tyranny because he understood human nature. His analysis endures because the same impulses govern power in every age.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Why the laws of government physics remain undefeated



In an age when government grows with the regularity of the sunrise and the humility of a bonfire, Dan Mitchell’s “20 Theorems of Government” land not as abstractions but as reminders of truths America’s founders understood almost instinctively. The theorems, devised by the co-founder of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, capture the recurring failures of centralized authority and the virtues of free people operating in free markets.

These theorems are not predictions. They are explanations of what government always does when left unchecked and how society always suffers when the state’s reach exceeds the citizen’s grasp.

The problem is not the quality of the people in government. The problem is the nature of government itself.

Mitchell’s First Theorem, which describes how Washington actually functions, could be carved above every federal agency door. Politics rewards the spending of other people’s money for other people’s benefit. The entire system is designed to avoid accountability and to maximize political reward. Once you accept that incentives drive outcomes, the rest of the theorems follow naturally.

The Second and Third Theorems make this point bluntly. Any new program will grow, metastasize, and waste money. Centralization magnifies inefficiency because bureaucracies face no competition, no profit-and-loss constraint, and no personal consequences for failure. When the private sector gets something wrong, it pays for its mistake. When government gets something wrong, it demands a larger budget.

Theorems Four through Seven widen the gap between political rhetoric and economic reality. Good policy can be good politics, but incentives push politicians toward superficial fixes and short-term gratification. Even strong ideas rot inside bureaucratic execution. And the larger the government becomes, the more incompetent and unresponsive it grows. Bureaucrats answer to political pressure, not consumer choice, and the results are inevitable: waste, rigidity, and indifference.

The Eighth through 10th Theorems confront the moral dimension of government overreach. Politicians who obsess over inequality rarely seek to lift up the poor; they seek justification for more control. Crises — real or imaginary — become tools for expanding that control. And politics almost always overwhelms principle. This is not cynicism. It is observation backed by centuries of evidence.

Theorems 11 through 15 dismantle common misconceptions. Big business is not the same thing as free enterprise. In many cases, it is free enterprise’s most persistent enemy. Corporations often work hand in hand with government to protect themselves from competition. Meanwhile, anyone who opposes entitlement reform is endorsing massive, broad-based tax hikes, because arithmetic leaves no other option. You cannot fund European-style welfare states without European-style taxation. And history shows voters resist paying for the bloated government they claim to want.

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This leads naturally to the 16th and 17th Theorems. Economic progress becomes a race between private innovation and public consumption. When government grows faster than the private sector can produce, stagnation follows. Worse, when dependency becomes a norm, the cultural foundations of liberty erode. A nation that forgets how to rely on itself cannot long remain free.

The final three theorems complete the picture. Climate policy becomes hypocrisy when elites demand sacrifice from others while refusing it themselves. Politicians operate under incentives that reward short-term benefit at long-term cost. And the fiscal results — from rising deficits to ever-multiplying promises — are exactly what those incentives predict.

Taken together, Mitchell’s 20 Theorems point to a conclusion Milton Friedman drew decades ago: The problem is not the quality of the people in government; the problem is the nature of government itself. A government that grows without limit will, eventually and inevitably, burden the citizens it claims to serve.

If Americans wish to preserve both prosperity and freedom, they will have to internalize these theorems as practical truths, not relics of libertarian theory. The path forward is not mysterious. Limit government. Unleash markets. These principles are old — and their urgency has never been greater.