Gratillonius' intelligence service includes Rufinus and Apuleius. Niall will attack again. Stilicho, effective dictator of the Western Empire, has been able to make only a patchwork peace with Alaric the Visigoth, must deal with trouble brewing in Africa and will need troops for protection against the Eastern Empire as well as against the barbarians. In particular, Britannia might be stripped of its defenders.
"'If Rome collapses, Scoti and Saxons will swarm into Britannia, Franks and their kin into Gallia. They'll breed like cockroaches.'" (p. 39)
How long will Ys, on its peninsula of thinly populated and defended Armorica, survive? Not long, we know. Meanwhile, Gratillonius does what he can - as our leaders fail to do now? The Andersons show us the end of an age and we live in one.
9 comments:
Leaders, even powerful ones, operate under systemic constraints that limit their choices.
I have my character Marcus Aurelius, while engaged in shuffling off a prominent nonentity to a post where he can't do much damage, reflect: "How I wish I could promote men solely for ability!"
But he can't afford to alienate too many powerful families.
"But he can't afford to alienate too many powerful families."
Basically the main point made in
"The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behaviour is Almost Always Good Politics"
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: I only wish Marcus Aurelius was President, instead of the corrupt, bungling, senescent dotard we have in DC!
Jim: IIRC, Niccolo Machiavelli made that same point in either THE PRINCE or THE DISCOURSES.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the test of a system is not how it works when there's a brilliant incumbent.
It's how it works with dullards, routiners and scoundrels.
That was the fatal flaw in Bismarck's Second Reich, for example.
It worked fine as long as Bismarck was running it: but then he was a genius and had lots of day-to-day cunning too. Anything would work well with someone like that running it.
When he was gone, it was revealed as a -bad- system without adequate mechanisms for coordination between various institutions. It only worked well with a practical-minded genius as Chancellor.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I agree! For any kind of tolerable political system to last for a long time it needs to have safeguards built in. Preferably by so arranging matters that no one has a concentration of too much power. And, for a long time that was the case with both the US and UK.
IMO, for the US, the rot started with the 1912 Presidential election, after the so-called "Progressives" failed to take over the Republican Party.* After that the "Progressives" focused on the Democrats--and became steadily more impatient with the Constitution, more and more leftist, till now they have gone quite simply insane and woke.
Ad astra! Sean
*Conservative Old Guard Republicans, alarmed by Theodore Roosevelt's increasing radicalism, basically threw the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats. They figured that altho Wilson had many of the same radical ideas as TR, he was far less competent than Teddy and would thus do less harm.
Sean: well, they threw the election to the Democrats, but they did it by cheating Teddy out of a nomination the overwhelming majority of Republican party members wanted to give him.
If the substitution of open primaries for 'caucus' and behind-closed-doors' stuff had gone further, they wouldn't have been able to cheat him that way.
I wrote a whole series based on the alternative that Taft dropped dead after the Ohio primary... 8-). If TR had gotten the nomination, there's no doubt he'd have walloped Wilson's stuffing right out and been elected with a huge majority.
As it was, Wilson didn't get a majority of the vote in any state that hadn't been a member of the Confederacy.
(In which he suffered a humiliating defeat in his own home state, btw.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, rigged caucuses and "smoke-filled" back room deals were basically how Presidential candidates were chosen down till about 1960. And our current system of open primaries and "anyone can run" system also has its disadvantages. As that corrupt, bungling dotard "Josip" and Trump has shown!
TR was vastly more able than Wilson, but I don't like the radical "Progressive" ideas he picked up.
Ad astra! Sean
TR was a much better -politician- than Wilson, and the Republicans of 1912 were much less averse to centralization than most Democrats.
TR regarded 'States' Rights' as an outworn shibboleth, for example. So did Wilson, but less so, and his party -very- much less so.
IMHO, if TR had been elected, he'd have been able to enact much more of his program; and he would also have been much more inclined to full-scale intervention in Mexico, which would have further pushed centralizing measures War does that.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, but since 1912 the GOP has become much more sympathetic to states rights and distrustful of centralizing more and more power in the national gov't.
So I would emphatically disagree with TR about those issues!
And I love how you are working out the scenario described in your last paragraph in your BLACK CHAMBER series! I look forward to reading WARLORD OF THE STEPPES when it comes out. I still think the end result of TR's aggressively expansionist policies is the US becoming an Imperial monarchy a la the Roman Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
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