The GOP’s 'Red Caesar' new political order plan marches forward

“Thirty years ago,” Damon Linker told The Guardian, “if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the United States, you would have said that I was insane.” Now, however, the senior lecturer at Penn State University’s Department of Political Science and author of the Notes from the Middleground Substack newsletter has reconsidered. In the event that Gov Ops searches a person’s home, these rules mean that the person 1) must keep the entry a secret, 2) cannot seek outside help, and 3) could face criminal charges if Gov Ops deems them uncooperative.” Meanwhile, down in Florida, Ron DeSantis has created two new armed organizations answerable to himself: a new “state guard” militia and a police agency that is supposed to provide for “election integrity”. As former Republican Governor Charlie Christ said of DeSantis’ new armed officers: “No governor should have his own handpicked secret police.” Across the country, Republicans are threatening and intimidating teachers and librarians into stripping from their collections any books that positively portray Black or queer people. One of the leading Republican thinkers on the topic, Professor Kevin Slack, put it simply: “ New Right now often discusses a Red Caesar, by which it means a leader whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.” Reporter Jason Wilson, at The Guardian, quotes wealthy industrialist GOP supporter Charles Haywood as saying: “I like, if not love, the idea of Red Caesar” since “Caesarism, and its time-legitimated successor, monarchy, is a natural, realism-based system, under which a civilization can flourish.” Monarchy, in fact, seems to be exactly what the GOP wants to move America into.