“When you’re the emperor Augustus, they let you do it.”

The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years, about twice as long as Americans have had theirs. As was surely true for the Romans, most Americans can hardly imagine that their system of self-government might break and be replaced by an imperial dynasty. That is why considering what undid the Roman Republic is useful today—if we can learn from the Romans’ mistakes.

Augustus was Rome’s first emperor. In so becoming, he dismantled the republic and founded a monarchy that would last for more than a millennium. In Rome, most aristocratic men were also senators and usually held that position for life. In the later republic, some of those men—notably, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus—grew so extraordinarily rich and influential that they began to ignore the constraints of the Senate and the law. In the first century B.C.E., decades of aristocratic overreach and the authoritarian violence of Augustus’s predecessors Sulla and Caesar brought Rome to the brink more than once, but Augustus pushed it over the edge.

Full article: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/04/rome-senators-republic-augustus/682469/. Approximately 1,250 words. Contact me if the article is blocked by a paywall.

And good news from Fix the News:

Solar and battery prices keep on falling… solar panel prices dropped 37-46% and batteries fell by 20% last year. This cost reduction drove nearly 600GW of global solar installations, with 700GW expected this year and 1,000GW annually by 2030. Solar manufacturing capacity is now three times current global demand, while 30% of all new battery storage is getting paired with solar, an irresistible combination. Renew Economy

Admiration for autocracy is built on a pernicious lie that I call the “myth of benevolent dictatorship.” The myth is built on three flimsy pillars: first, that dictators produce stronger economic growth than their democratic counterparts; second, that dictators, unswayed by volatile public opinion, are strategic long-term thinkers; and third, that dictators bring stability, whereas divided democracies produce chaos….

Let’s start with the myth that dictatorships produce stronger growth. This falsehood arose from a few well-known, cherry-picked examples, in which despots oversaw astonishing transformations of their national economy…. But a systematic evaluation of the overall data reveals another reality. Even with these outliers of strong growth, most rigorous studies have found limited or no evidence that authoritarian regimes produce better economic growth than democratic ones… However, the myth of strongmen as economic gurus has an even bigger problem. Dictators turn out to have manipulated their economic data for decades. For a long time, they’ve fooled us. But now we have proof: The reason their numbers sometimes seem too good to be true is that they are…. the notion that Benito Mussolini made the trains run on time was a lie; he built ornate stations and invested in train lines used by elites, but the commuting masses got left behind.

The myth’s second pillar turns out to be no less rickety than the first. It holds that dictators are more strategic long-term thinkers than democrats because they’re not beholden to fickle public opinion. But this lie is believable only if you don’t understand how most dictatorships actually work. ((more details))

The most persistent pillar of the myth, however, is the one that holds that dictators produce stability… Eventually, though, dictatorships tend to fall apart. And when they collapse, they really collapse. Elections in democracies change governments, not regimes. Personalist dictatorships, by contrast, often implode. ((more details)

Approx 2,100 words: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/07/authoritarianism-dictatorship-effectiveness-china/674820/.

And good news from Fix the News:

Europe’s wild predators stage a stunning comeback. Since 2016, golden jackal numbers have surged by 46% to 150,000, wolves have increased by 35% to 23,000, brown bears by 17% to 20,500, and Eurasian lynx and wolverine populations expanded by 12% and 16% to 9,400 and 1,300 animals respectively. The best recovery? Iberian lynx numbers are up from 100 at the turn of the century to over 2,000 today. Guardian