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You need to read up on TR.

“While he was not a devout believer in the religion of socialism, the effect of Teddy Roosevelt’s terms in office was to promote the liberal-socialist cause. Like all college-educated persons of that era, Roosevelt had been thoroughly exposed to the secular and materialistic doctrine of socialism, first as a Harvard undergraduate, then in public life. In his defense, it may be said that he confronted an America that was fundamentally different in the economic sphere from the America of 1776.

Surprisingly for a man who was well-educated in the classics, Roosevelt was heedless of the need to preserve the traditions of a government of laws, not of men. A clue was one of his favorite books, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which advanced the theory that the rise of Christianity was the cause of Rome’s fall.

In power, Teddy was a headstrong man who consulted only his personal ideas of good, with indifference to legal precedent and the inherent rights of individuals under the Bill of Rights. It was the beginning of the “implied powers” doctrine that Teddy’s young cousin Franklin Roosevelt was to use twenty years later to impose a thoroughgoing system of socialism.

Teddy also set the pattern for our present-day expectation that the President is to be the dominant figure in national politics, grasping ever-greater measures of power at the expense of constitutional checks and balances. His legacy is an American public that labors under the delusion that a President can run the nation as if it were a private company. This, of course, is precisely the collectivized management and social-engineering demanded by liberal-socialists.”

:...Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which advanced the theory that the rise of Christianity was the cause of Rome’s fall.”

I’m no scholar, but I would say the fall of the Roman Empire was likely from the fact that they tried to run the whole known world back then. Many small city-states and impoverished countries to have to support and keep in line. To much to control for one government.

Spread themselves too thin.