One thing I am getting out of the conversations about authoritarianism is that Americans are so thoroughly Liberal they cannot imagine how a government based on the raw exercise of power would work in practice
One thing my history teacher hammered was that the Roman Republic was a state constantly at war with itself. Reading about all the normalized mob violence led by *fucking senators and magistrates* was nightmarish
The Gracchi brothers being the obvious instance of how a state handles extremely nebulously defined rules that are then broken, and Octavian taking advantage of the fraying and formalizing the rule by strength
