I’d prefer something sci-fi or fantasy, but really wondering about anything fictional. About the best I can come up with is Dune that starred Sting, but that’s just cause Trump looks like the floating fat guy (Baron Harkonnen) minus the boils. Although now that I think about it, he acts like him too.
Sometimes I think Star Wars mirrors some of it, but then it doesn’t. Curious what any of you come up with.
Idiocracy
This. Maybe this too:
This will rapidly get into P & R, @jpinard
Honestly it should probably go there.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
If it goes south I’ll move it.
@Ginger_Yellow - I’d thought about that, but it’s kinda missing the hate & fascist element.
To queue off this non fiction, The Storm Before the Storm. About Marius, Sulla, the Gracchi, it is a period with non trivial commonality.
And it’s by Mike Duncan of History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts.
If we are paralleling, I agree. I actually think we are in the Gracci phase, pre-Social War
You just went there. :)
It Can’t Happen Here essentially anticipated all of this.
Foreign wars fueling accretion of wealth to an increasingly small elite which uses spoils to push out small land owners (the middle class) to further consolidate position, leading to rising discontent and populist sentiments that are manipulated by the wealthy in order to expand their political ambitions?
Yeah that seems about right. Though then question is, do we continue trend, and is the Marius of our day on stage.
I hoe we do not find out. And given the way things develop, it would happen in much condensed fashion, not the decades Rome took.
What is fascinating to me is how many of these things stem from predictable social patterns. And, as a nation, we already had one potential inflection point missed. The rise of Teddy Roosevelt, and the political reaction to the late Gilded Age, actually is fascinating to me, as it seemed to short curcuit events that could have led to such scenarios at that time.
However Rome is always a cautionary tale in applying history to modern life. It’s easy to draw wrong conclusions.
!00% on that. Tapping out now.
Sci-Fi and Fantasy authors tend to have a hard-on for the “enlightended dictator/monarch/king” thing, so there’s really not a lot of such works that reflect what is happening in the US (or, generally speaking, across the Western world) today - at least not as cautionary tales.
“It Can’t Happen Here” has already been mentioned. Another book I’ve heard about (though haven’t had time to read), is Philip Roth’s alternate history “The Plot Against America” about a Charles Lindbergh led “America First” movement prior to WW2. That might fit the bill.
Hopefully The Manchurian Candidate does not apply.
Woody Allen’s Banana’s.
V. The 1983 TV miniseries. It was all about how shit can turn bad really quickly by letting Nazism take hold.
Of course inspired by It Can’t Happen Here.
and lizard people.
Mad Max: Fury Road was a documentary. We just didn’t realize it at the time.
Star Wars did buck that trend though I guess you could look at Leia’s family along those lines.
I haven’t read nearly as much Sci-Fi as I should have, but out of the many books by the likes of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, wondering if they touched upon this in a “non-American” scenario. In some ways I look at Fahrenheit 451 as a metaphor for what trump does to facts on the Internet and tv.
1984. Of course the book, but also the movie, the one made in 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton.
Keeping up with the Kardashians?