Caesarism

But its inevitable outcome, he argues, is mob rule, bitter factional division, the debasement of civic culture and finally some version of Caesarism.

For Anton, the coming of Caesarism — defined as “authoritarian one-man rule partially legitimized by necessity” — appears almost historically determined.

Le Pen’s opponent, Macron, exemplifies something annoying: “French Caesarism.”

He does not seek this — he has three young children — but does not summarily spurn the idea of offering temperate voters a choice of something other than a choice between bossy progressivism and populist Caesarism.

But in the last few years, the years of Obama’s Caesarism and Trump’s caudillo act and Congress’s utter uselessness, I’ve developed a limited sympathy for Kennedy’s imperial approach.