By Rich Lowry
Wednesday, September 06, 2023
An op-ed in the New York Times warns,
as the headline puts it, that “America is an empire in decline” and finds a precedent
in imperial Rome.
The piece, written by the co-author of a new book, Why
Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, shows that the
cottage industry in comparisons between the United States and Rome is as robust
as ever.
It is an irresistible temptation to superimpose the
history of Rome and especially its decline and fall — an enduring subject of
fascination — on top of our own experience and future.
Both conservatives and progressives are prone to their
own versions of this narrative, tending to emphasize either moral decline or
imperial overstretch, respectively.
But the most important thing to know about us and our
supposed imperial forebear is that we aren’t Rome and aren’t experiencing any
of the most direct, spectacular causes of its fall.
It’s become fashionable among some scholars to argue that
there was no fall. There were no barbarian invasions. There was no material
decline. Nothing to see here — simply evolutionary change.
It is true that Rome’s fall — a long, messy process —
didn’t unfold with the pleasing cinematic simplicity that the popular
imagination might believe; the extent of the barbarian population transfers has
been exaggerated, and the eastern half of the empire lived on for another 1,000
years.
Still, the Western Roman Empire unquestionably fell, with
disastrous consequences for a long time. It’s just that dragging us into it is
wildly off base.
Rome tore itself apart with constant assassinations,
usurpations, and civil wars. It weakened itself economically and militarily,
while confronting challenges from armed bands on its borders that it became
incapable of handling as it steadily lost its territory and sources of
financial support to barbarian groups.
At the same time, it had to grapple with the Persian
Empire to the east.
Is this happening to the United States? Well, an armed
contingent of Quebecers isn’t (like the Visigoths) wandering throughout the
United States, fighting periodic battles with the U.S. military and
seeking subsidies from the U.S. Senate before besieging — and eventually
sacking — Washington, D.C.
Migrants to the United States don’t settle en masse in
national groupings led by military leaders seeking power and preferment. They
disperse throughout the country and take illegal jobs as busboys and the like.
U.S. presidents have to worry about declining poll
numbers, a recalcitrant congressional opposition, and reelection campaigns.
They don’t, like Roman emperors, need to think all the
time about potential assassinations and armed usurpers. They don’t need to
worry that if they assign a general to take over, say, CENTCOM, he will use the
position to muster the troops and resources to challenge for power himself.
They don’t need to consider the positioning of military forces with an eye to
checking internal enemies.
January 6 was a disgraceful day but a blip hardly worth
mentioning relative to the perpetual, large-scale internal disorder in imperial
Rome.
The First Infantry Division isn’t marching on Washington,
D.C., from Fort Riley, Kan., and fighting a pitched battle with the Fourth
Marine Division devastating to the countryside somewhere in Ohio.
None of this is to deny that the United States and the
West may have entered a period of what will ultimately prove to be terminal
decline or that rivals, most notably China, are on the rise. It is to say that
unless our representative democracy degenerates into an unelected dictatorship
with no reliable means of succession, and Canada and Mexico begin to eat away
at our territory, the story of our decline is not going to track closely with
that of Rome, a vastly different polity, at a different time.
By all means, study the history of Rome for its own sake
and for the insights it affords into human nature and the roots of the Western
world. But the moral of the story needn’t be about 21st-century America.
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