In the Star Wars prequels, by the end of Revenge of the Sith, a democratic Republic has spent years handing its elected chancellor emergency wartime powers, crisis by crisis, to fight a war that conveniently keeps evolving and never quite ends. Eventually this chancellor, Palpatine, stands before the full Senate and declares the Republic reorganized into essentially a Galactic Empire, with himself in permanent charge as emperor, ‘for a safe and secure society.’ The chamber rises in applause. One senator watching from the gallery, Padmé Amidala, a former queen whose no-confidence motion first put him in power, observes “so this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause.” Nobody reaches for a weapon. Only hours earlier, the Jedi, the order charged with guarding the Republic against exactly this kind of threat, were cut down by the troopers who had served under them as generals, a betrayal almost none of them saw coming. In the same speech, Palpatine tells the Senate his purge put down a Jedi rebellion; the Senate believes him. And hanging over the whole sequence, under construction the entire time in the background, is the Death Star, a battle station built large enough to be mistaken for a moon and designed to erase a planet in a single shot.
The films take the better part of seven hours to stage a republic's collapse into empire, but the final transfer of legitimate power itself doesn’t involve a proverbial mustache-twirling (or hooded and dark-robed) villain seizing anything by out-and-out force in the room where it happens. However, the force at play is both real and enormous; outside the halls of power, an entire order of peacekeepers has been liquidated in a single coordinated night, and nobody applauding in the Senate chamber has to watch or answer for it. What looks like consent is what's left over once the only group capable of safeguarding it are already gone.
Plenty of that maps onto our own moment, but what the films never quite say outright is a more fundamental point underneath it. A machine built to wield that kind of power doesn't care whose hand ends up on the controls, only that a hand is there at all.
A long time ago, though in a galaxy considerably closer to home, the instinct might be to reach for Julius Caesar; he is the one everyone remembers crossing a certain river with an army behind him. But Caesar is a culmination, not the mechanism or apparatus itself, which starts a generation earlier with a general named Marius, who did something merely administrative by comparison. He professionalized the Roman legions and in doing so quietly rewired where a soldier's loyalty pointed: not with the state anymore, but with the man who paid him and promised him land when the fighting was over.
That is the first crack in the foundation. Fast forward some years, an elected official pushes a law through the assembly stripping another general and Marius' protégé, Sulla, of his command against a foreign enemy, along with the fortune and glory that war would have paid out, and hands it over to Marius instead. It is exactly the kind of personal defeat the old system was built to absorb, a political loss, bitter to swallow but gentlemanly settled inside the system and left there. Except Sulla does not leave it there. He goes to the legions waiting to sail east, men who by Marius's own reform owe their loyalty to whoever pays and promises them land, and asks them to follow him back into the city instead. They do. Sulla becomes the first Roman general ever to march on his own capital, retake it by force, and have the offending official killed, before finally sailing east to fight the war he was stripped of. The personally loyal legion turns, for the first time, against the thing it was built to defend.
There is civil war, and he wins decisively.
Dictatorship enters the picture. The office itself is nothing new; it’s a real constitutional post, reserved for genuine emergencies and bound by custom to a six-month term, after which that specific dictator is expected to step down, goals achieved or not. Nobody has held it in over a century. However, with Sulla's rivals dead or scattered, Rome itself divided in insoluble factions, and his legions occupying the city, the Senate appoints a subcommittee that ultimately appoints Sulla emergency dictator indefinitely, though not just to handle one crisis, but legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae, for the writing of laws and the reconstitution of the republic. Nothing about the vote breaks the letter of the constitution; the whole progression reflected a real legal process, working exactly as flexibly as designed while leading to an outcome it was never intended to produce.
What he did echoes forward two thousand years. He published proscriptions (kill lists with bounties attached—property seized and no trial required, an entire class of named enemies put outside the law by decree). He packed the Senate with roughly three hundred new loyalists, nearly doubling its size, and he gutted the singular office of tribunate of the plebians, stripping away the one recourse the non-noble working classes had used for centuries to check or veto the aristocracy's excesses. Three separate levers, each aimed at a separate check, each one again operating entirely within the letter of the law.
Then he does the thing that makes him as interesting as he was brutal. Believing the old order restored, Sulla resigned the dictatorship a few years later and retired to private life, dying within the year a private citizen. By most accounts it was a sincere, if imperfect, gesture from a man who had every means to keep that power. It didn’t matter. Within a few decades, the tools he built, the precedent that Rome could be taken by force for legally defensible reasons, a hollowed tribunate, and a compromised Senate still sat available to anyone with the nerve to co-opt them; that turned out to be Caesar, originally aligned with the faction opposing Sulla, who in turn led to Augustus, the first emperor. Sulla's actual legacy was never the restoration he thought he had secured, but a proof of concept that legal tools with no politics of their own simply wait for the next hand willing to pick it up. Rome would not see its republic again.
Two millennia later, a different kind of ending got declared for a different kind of politics. In 1989, watching the Cold War conclude, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay titled "The End of History?", expanded three years later into The End of History and the Last Man, arguing that liberal democracy had not just outlasted its ideological rivals but had settled the underlying argument for good: humanity had reached, in the Hegelian sense, the end of History with a capital “H,” the culmination of the process of human political development. Lower-case history, the actual record of events, would keep looping regardless, elections and wars and scandals, but only as noise on top of a settled signal.
Except Rome ran the same experiment first. Its republic looked, to plenty of Romans living through it, like its own settled and final form, a capital-H terminus nobody expected to need defending again. It wasn't, because a constitutional structure doesn't enforce itself; it only ever describes what a given generation is willing to do with the tools sitting inside it. What actually decided the outcome wasn't some deeper current pulling toward a final form. It was lower-case history and the specific, contingent record of Marius professionalizing an army, Sulla marching on his own capital, Caesar picking up what Sulla left lying around. The capital-H argument didn't get refuted. It got outvoted. The Senate applauds the victor.
The capital-H argument didn't get refuted. It got outvoted.
Plot that same sequence onto the present and the roles assign themselves. Whatever 2026, 2028, and beyond turn out to be, and whatever comes from the results, they will get decided the same way (albeit hopefully and likely less dramatically).
The current Republican administration, building out emergency and removal-power precedent case by case, is constructing the toolkit, testing how far each piece of it stretches, becoming the case study rather than the exception. Whoever eventually succeeds it—a potential backlash leading to a rising Democratic coalition very much included—would inherit that architecture the way Caesar inherited Sulla's, simply by being the next hand willing to pick up tools that already exist and are already legal. Caesar didn’t need to be better or worse than Sulla for the outcome to hold; he only needed to be next. That coalition is not merely theoretical; NBC's own polling now has 43% of voters calling their midterm vote a direct signal of opposition to Trump, the highest that figure has run in 20 years of the same question, per NBC News.