What if Sauron had won?

Moral of the story: Don't be a micro-manager. Even Sauron wasn't like that.

Sauron got an entire book series named after him, he won where it really mattered.

He did win, I just got hired as the new mouth of Sauron job. Great pay, great benefits looking forward to my new office in the Barradur.

There'd be alot more "Support the Witch King of Angmar for county sheriff" signs in everybody's yards

At least the trains would run on time!

Gondor? Sacked. Rohan? Pillaged. The Shire? Nuked annually.

Sauron’s over confidence was no match for the true unsung purest of heroes in Samwise Gamgee

I got fantastic ad placement on this video. Right after you said the heroes looked the mouth of Sauron in the eye and saw this, it cut to an ad for elf on the shelf

Had Sauron won, I think he would have ended up getting rid of Orcs in favor of Men, who were less likely to be constantly fighting one another. Eventually though, the Valar would have intervened directly. Leaving Middle-Earth forever under Sauron's dominion would have been unacceptable.

There is an old D&d supplement called midnight where the realms of the world are controlled by a Sauron like figure. What happens besides resistance to that rule is a lot of intrigue between the Lieutenants

There is a really good RPG that was originally published by Fantasy Flight Games that was for D&D 3.0 called Midnight that was this exact scenario. Izrador was that amalgamation of Sauron and had great lore regarding what the elves were trying to survive, the dwarves, etc. Highly recommended.

Human sacrifice. Elves and Dwarves living together. Mass hysteria.

interesting that Sauron doesn't want to deal with an occupation of a hostile territory (hmm...) like Gondor, so he'd give them a some slice of freedom in exchange for taxes etc, fascinating

Given that Sauron is a master of deception he would have said one thing but in time meant another. His vengeance against the elves and anyone else who would have stood against him would not have been forgotten. Also I wonder if he would have an ultimate goal of reviving Morgoth? Interesting to think about

In the history of fiction there are perhaps three Evil Plans I consider the best... The first was Judge Doom’s from Who Framed Rodger Rabbit, whose ultimate plan was to destroy Toon Town so he could build a freeway. In his monologue he made it sound as ominous as the Death Star. “My God, It’ll be Beautiful!” The second was Evil’s from Time Bandits. His hilarious rant against The Supreme Being highlighted 43 species of parrots and nipples for men as proof the Supreme Being was a lunatic. Once able to escape the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness, Evil planned to remake man in his own image - starting with lasers from day one. The third was in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where a shadowy hegemony of Psychiatrists, Fortune Tellers and Philosophers conspire to destroy the whole of the planet Earth, eradicate the Humans species, and the Answer to Life the Universe and Everything along with it ... simply to keep their clients unhappy and themselves in business.

Sauron's dominion was destructive to the point that it would've collapsed into an evil civil war at sooner rather than later since as Aragorn and company could see plain as day, the Mouth of Sauron would not have left them any freedom as soon as Isengard was rebuilt and his armies could just do away with any pretense of 'vassalage.' Sauron's lieutenants were all reflections of his own corrupted and evil need to impose order... his order (or rather their own orders, which would inevitably conflict as their various fiefdoms refuse to cooperate with each other since their external enemy is defeated and their own competence or lack of it becomes exposed to the rest).

Tulkas walks in. "Give me the ring or I will cut it from your hand for a second time."

If Sauron won, that probably means Gollum wouldn't have died, and in his incessant desire for the one ring, he forms a new resistance against and topples Sauron. Gandalf did say he still had a role to play after all.

Saruman was breeding orcs with men to have orcs that could stand daylight. Saruman was the modernist technocrat who used science. Sauron, as far as I recall did not dabble in such things. Otherwise, this is yet another great video Robert. Thank you!

Sauron would have expended his power in dominating Men, weakening him as Morgoth had weakened himself by expending his power in similar ways. Eventually he would be weakened to the point that an exceptionally powerful Man could challenge him, and eventually he would have been overthrown.