Here's the problem with republicanism.
When it works well it works really well. But it's fragile. If you tamper with it it will die. It is sustained pretty much entirely by a people voluntarily abiding by an unspoken agreement to follow the rules and not try to cheat each other or throw a shitfit and purge each other anytime they lose. And every time someone undermines the rules, it gets so much easier for everyone else to do it, until the whole thing falls apart spectacularly, a snowball effect in the course of a lifetime.
This was what happened with Rome (Storm Before the Storm, Mike Duncan).
And when it dies, you can't just go get it back.
Problem is, sometimes you have people that cannot be lived with. They don't obey the rules, never will obey the rules. And if you have enough of these people, motivated around some common ideal, they can present an existential threat to your republic. But the problem is that we're also prone to hysteria (see Articles and News and Happenings) and people, normalfaggots included, always, always think their times are the worst times ever and society is falling apart.
So you can have situations where you have no option but to flip the switch and go free helicopter rides to save the most important institutions of society, sacrifice what you can't keep to save what you can. And the sooner you do it the more likely you are to win. But you can't know when that line in the sand is, and once you commit to it you can never undo it.
That's the problem of the West as it is today.
