Will the Next U.S. President be a General, as the U.S. Becomes More Like Ancient Rome?

From a Lew Rockwell interview with Doug Casey:

CASEY:  I hate to make political predictions about the U.S.  I don’t consider myself to be a good political handicapper in the U.S. because I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the hoi polloi and the trailer parks and the barrios and the ghettos, the people that actually go out and vote for these sociopaths that run for office.  But my guess is that now that Obama’s in office until 2016 — and I think the economy is really going to fall apart in the next few years with these trillions of new currency units they’re creating — that in the election of 2016, I’ll bet they run Hillary for the Democrats but she won’t win because the Democrats will be blamed for the domestic problems.  And the Republicans will run a right-wing general because everybody thinks that generals are non-corrupt and competent and, you know, they know how to straighten things out.  That could be a real disaster then because he’s likely to turn the country into something looking like a military camp.  So that’s my guess.  The Republicans win with a general in 2016.  Bad news.

ROCKWELL:  Well, that is bad news.  And, of course, they almost — I think almost nominated Petraeus this last time, until there was a coup within the CIA to take him down by his own bodyguards and other people who didn’t like him who exposed him and so forth.

CASEY:  Yeah, it was very interesting.  The military, the upper military — of course, all these top generals are really political operatives more than they are military guys at this point.  But they’re really treated like Roman proconsuls.  It was quite amazing the things that came out about Petraeus, about all the entourage that he’d get to carry around with him and so forth.  And all these top generals are that way.  This is a bad trend and a bad habit, among many others that I could name.

ROCKWELL:  I appreciate your political predictions.   And I’ll bet all our listeners do, too.  And it’s quite scary, I think.  I wouldn’t bet against you on the idea of a general, and the Republicans all do worship a general.  In fact, hasn’t that been sort of an unfortunate thread throughout American history?  I mean, everybody thought George Washington was a great guy because he was a general, and Eisenhower and William Henry Harrison and all the rest of them.  They –

CASEY:  And Andrew Jackson and –

ROCKWELL:  Yeah.

CASEY:  — you know, Ulysses S. Grant.  So we’ve got a history of liking generals.

ROCKWELL:  Yeah, Americans like killers and they like presidential killers, too.  Of course, the presidents who have killed the most people are the greatest:  Lincoln and Roosevelt and Wilson and Nixon.  Maybe they don’t like Nixon.  Although, Clinton gave him quite an encomium after Nixon’s death and really raised him to the pantheon — (laughing).

You know, you mentioned Rome.  Aren’t we becoming ancient Rome?  I mean, Cullen Murphy had a book about that.  But it seems like the proconsuls and the empire — and some are provinces, some are directly ruled — and the legislature being just a rubber stamp for the most part for the princeps.

CASEY:  Absolutely.  And the presidents are becoming more powerful and starting to resemble the Roman emperors ever more.  And that’s why I don’t feel it made any difference when Obama replaced Bush, and Clinton and all that.  It’s really like, in Roman days, when the Romans were so happy when Tiberius died.  And then after Tiberius, they got Claudius.  And after Claudius, they got Caligula.  And they thought, how can it get any worse than Caligula?  But then they got Nero.  And then they got their first civil war.  So it’s starting to resemble that in the U.S., I think.

Just wait until the next real or imagined “terrorist,” quote/unquote, incident happens in the U.S.  They’ll really lock this place down like one of their numerous new prisons.  I’ll be so happy to be out of the U.S. when that happens.