More anti-democratic thoughts from 2018 the NYT allowed this writer to exclude from his current piece. Delivered with an air of detached irony, as if he miiight be joking or exaggerating. But is he?
Not only is this guy an asshole, he’s also wrong: many, many pre-modern regimes were very unstable and changed frequently. The difference is this change would come from civil wars between rival elite factions, wars that reliably immiserated the population
The Roman Empire sometimes went decades without an uncontested sovereign. Norman/Plantagenet England had a civil war more or less every other generation. The Holy Roman Empire had occasional generation-long interregnums. The Cordoba caliphate collapsed after a succession crisis
