“But over time, the executive branch grew exceedingly powerful. Two world wars emphasized the president’s commander in chief role and removed constraints on its power. By the second half of the 20th century, the republic was routinely fighting wars without its legislative branch, Congress, declaring war, as the Constitution required. With Congress often paralyzed by political conflict, presidents increasingly governed by edicts.”
The world is absolutely flooded with people warning about literally everything all the time. Sometimes a few of them happen to be right; that doesn’t make them prescient, just lucky. Broken clocks, and all that. Whose advice do you follow? The guy who says fascism is on the rise, or the guy who says the economy is going to unrecoverably tank? Does it matter that both of them have pretty good evidence to suggest that they might be right? Or that there are 400 more books released in any given year that claim that fascism is on the decline and the economy is booming like there’s no tomorrow, and that they also have pretty good evidence to suggest that they might be right? This is the nature of prediction: it’s all down to how you interpret the signs and signals.
The more recent you look the more that becomes the case, but 40 years ago anyone who said ‘in 40 years we’re going to have a fascist dictator of a president who wants to ransack the courts he packed’ or whatever would just be one more whisper in the hurricane.
If everyone on the outside looking in had been saying the same thing for decades and continually been proven right- I dunno, I’d probably listen to them at some point instead of calling them alarmists and flipping them the bird for daring to weigh in on your problems.
If such a mythical creature exists then feel free to correct me, but meanwhile I’m going to wonder how they have been accurately predicting the future for 40 years and aren’t the most famous person on earth? Like you get a couple billion dollars in the bank and every motherfucker who knows how to operate a keyboard is asking your opinion on stupid shit, how is this guy not on the front page like every day? Elon Musk has only been publicly-known for like 15 years and I can’t buy a pack of smokes without hearing about his opinion on some bullshit or other, so your guy must be flying way under the radar.