Trump has probably become the greatest living exemplar of free speech in the twenty-first century. As he put it, we can’t improve if political correc… - Charlie Kirk

If old Democrat was something like civil liberties/welfare/internationalism and new Democrat is something like censorship/socialism/internationalism, while old Republican was something like theocratic/corporate/warlike, then the new Republican formula is roughly free speech/entrepreneurial/pro-peace.

The willingness of, for example, generations of the elite to fight those devastating wars over oil-rich regions is a perverse side effect of the mingling of private interests and public power. Just as government subsidies for pharmaceutical purchases start looking like a great idea if your family is in the pharmaceutical industry (or, like Medicare Part D architect and former senate majority leader Bill Frist, the hospital management industry), your family being in the oil business just might make you more willing, on a subconscious level, to tolerate great sacrifices (on the part of others, including taxpayers) in the name of keeping the black lifeblood of industry flowing.

Cicero came from a wealthy family, and through his oratory became what we might now dub a major media star in ancient Rome. He could have enjoyed a life of luxury and avoided conflict but regarded his foray into politics, necessitated by his sense of civic duty, as his greatest achievement. He spent much of that political career combating conspiracies to overthrow the republic, in a fashion that might well be dismissed as paranoid by the complacent elitists of our own day. His fears were proven tragically correct, though, as Julius Caesar (sometimes talked about now as if he were the very pinnacle of Roman achievement but in truth a dictator who was the death knell of the Republic) pushed Rome in the direction of empire. Cicero himself ended up executed by government soldiers, his head and hands later displayed on Rome’s central public speaking platform, a final taunt to Mark Antony — one of Caesar’s allies, and after Caesar’s assassination, part of Rome’s ruling triumvirate.