Well said! This retired sailor considers Bannon an embarrassment to my Navy. His (and his ilk’s) love of Sparta not only evinces their ignorance of what Sparta was, and how and why they eventually fell, but also serves as a wonderful example of how some will twist history and especially religion to excuse their own beliefs. The racists of the Deep South used Scripture to defend slavery, and the Nazis used the writings of (virulently anti-Semitic) Martin Luther to excuse their actions against the Jews in then-majority-Lutheran Germany.

But what bothers me is how history tends to rhyme (as Mark Twain is alleged to have said). The Romans had a five century-long history of violent opposition to even the idea of a monarchy, and had a form of republic from when a man named Brutus led the overthrow of their king until not long after another man named Brutus joined in the assassination of Julius Caesar…yet Rome still wound up with an emperor.

Some wanted Washington to be our king, but America was founded as a republic. But almost half our voting public seems now to prefer authoritarianism to democracy. Is it then our fate as a nation (as short-lived as it is so far) to be nothing more than a rhyming (or perhaps homophonic) stanza in what Herzen called “the autobiography of a madman”?