Posted on 06/27/2013 8:21:51 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
By A.D. 200, the Roman Republic was a distant memory. Few citizens of the global Roman Empire even knew of their illustrious ancestors like Scipio or Cicero. Millions no longer spoke Latin. Italian emperors were a rarity. There were no national elections.
Yet Rome endured as a global power for three more centuries. What held it together?
A stubborn common popular culture and the prosperity of Mediterranean-wide standardization kept things going. The Egyptian, the Numidian, the Iberian, and the Greek assumed that everything from Roman clay lamps and glass to good roads and plentiful grain was available to millions throughout the Mediterranean world.
As long as the sea was free of pirates, thieves were cleared from the roads, and merchants were allowed to profit, few cared whether the lawless Caracalla or the unhinged Elagabalus was emperor in distant Rome.
Something likewise both depressing and encouraging is happening to the United States. Few Americans seem to worry that our present leaders have lied to or misled Congress and the American people without consequences.
Most young people cannot distinguish the First Amendment from the Fourth Amendment — and do not worry about the fact that they cannot. Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln are mere names of grammar schools, otherwise unidentifiable to most.
Separatism is believed to bring dividends. Here in California, universities conduct separate graduation ceremonies predicated on race — sometimes difficult given the increasingly mixed ancestry of Americans.
As in Rome, there is a vast disconnect between the elites and the people. Almost half of Americans receive some sort of public assistance, and almost half pay no federal income tax. About one-seventh of Americans are on food stamps.
Yet housing prices in elite enclaves — Manhattan, Cambridge, Santa Monica, Palo Alto — are soaring. The wealthy like to cocoon themselves in Roman-like villas, safe from the real-life ramifications of their own utopian ideology.
The government and the media do their best to spread the ideals of radical egalitarianism while avoiding offense to anyone. There is no official War on Terror or against radical Islamism. Instead, in “overseas contingency operations,” we fight “man-caused disasters,” while at home, we deal with “workplace violence.”
In news stories that involve crimes with divisive racial themes, the media frequently paper over information about the perpetrators. But that noble restraint only seems to incite readers. In reckless fashion they often post the most inflammatory online comments about such liberal censorship. Officially, America celebrates diversity; privately, America is fragmenting into racial, political, and ideological camps.
So why is the United States not experiencing something like the rioting in Turkey or Brazil, or the murder of thousands in Mexico? How are we able to avoid the bloody chaos of Syria, the harsh dictatorships of Russia and China, the implosion of Egypt, or the economic hopelessness now endemic in southern Europe?
About half of America and many of its institutions operate as they always have. Caltech and MIT are still serious. Neither interjects race, class, and gender studies into its engineering or physics curricula. Most in the IRS, unlike some of their bosses, are not corrupt. For the well driller, the power-plant operator, and the wheat farmer, the lies in Washington are still mostly an abstraction.
Get up at 5:30 a.m. and you’ll see that your local freeways are jammed with hard-working commuters. They go to work every day, support their families, pay their taxes, and avoid arrest — so that millions of others do not have to do the same. The U.S. military still more closely resembles our heroes from World War II than it resembles the culture of the Kardashians.
Like diverse citizens of imperial Rome, we are united in some fashion by shared popular tastes and mass consumerism. The cell phones and cars of the poor offer more computing power and better transportation than the rich enjoyed just 20 years ago.
Youth of all races and backgrounds in lockstep fiddle with their cell phones as they walk about. Jeans are an unspoken American uniform — both for Wall Street grandees and for the homeless on the sidewalks. Left, right, liberal, conservative, professor, and ditch digger have similar-looking Facebook accounts.
If Rome quieted the people with public spectacles and cheap grain from the provinces, so too Americans of all classes keep glued to favorite video games and reality-TV shows. Fast food is both cheap and tasty. All that for now is preferable to rioting and revolt.
Like Rome, America apparently can coast for a long time on the fumes of its wonderful political heritage and economic dynamism — even if both are little understood or appreciated by most who still benefit from them.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Stanford University Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book, The Savior Generals, is just out from Bloomsbury Press.
Here is the difference between Rome enduring for three more centuries and the United States failing rapidly:
Rome had multiple rules during the three centuries they remained a global power. ONE ruler, Hussein, has destroyed this country in six years and by the time two more years pass, the US won't be a global power of anything and already is not respected in any country, including its own. The majority in our country detest every leader in Washington, except a few. When a country detests its government, other countries feel free to spit on it. We are drowning in spit.
As a result, I am running my own world in my house and garden so I can exist fairly well without any public utility/services or whatever this soon to be fully communist government does. No one knows what Hussein will do next to us, so I have divorced my life from his government.
I can go Galt any time I want and screw Hussein.
“Imperial Rome actually did fairly well despite some atrocious emperors and multiple coup d’états.”
Imperial Rome continued to do fairly well because of its bureacratic apparatus. Emperors came and went, but it was the bureacracy that kept Rome chugging along. The bureacracy didn’t change much; they kept the wheels of gov’t running fairly smoothly. It was one actual example where the bureacracy proved very useful in keeping the ship of State on an even keel despite a continual stream of emperors good and bad, and many of them overthrown.
“Then and now the allure of the low life has destroyed the reasonable social consensus that made Rome and America great.Since the 1960’s a majority of people have embraced the decadence that Justice Scalia and Hanson have noted. Widespread drug use,sexual promiscuity and deviance, abortion, the expectation of entitlements and endless “rights” without personal accountability, loss of work ethic, and a decline in even basic learning ultimately destroyed Rome and has weakened America.”
Exactly right!
George Washington said, “It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.” America has been on a rapid path of moral degeneration since the early 1960’s.
Will they praise pedophilia next? Will they applaud bestiality, encouraging those who engage in the practice to stay committed and fight for social equality? Will they affirm necrophilia, sado-masochism, polygamy, and other sexual perversions?
The Bible is still relevant and true today after thousands of years, and homosexuality is still a sin and only leads a nation further into moral degeneration. When a nation has declined enough, it will eventually be destroyed through war, disease, famine, invasion, etc. Looking throughout the pages of world history we see this is true.
RE: Gibbon thought AD 200 to be a Golden Age and the beginning of Rome’s ineluctable decline. What VDH is suggesting if I understand it correctly is that we are enjoying our own Golden Age and that our successors are likely to view it with regret and resentment for those who valued it so little.
_______________________________________
Well, if the parallel holds, that means the USA has ways to go before we see its fall. Hopefully, I won’t be alive to see it....
The Sixties radicals who have taken over our institutions and are guiding public policy have less than a generation left. They produce few children. Even among those, they have even fewer ideological heirs. Their destructive Communist impulses will die out with them, even if their successors retain an excessive fondness for the welfare state.
This situation - right now through 2017, under Obama - is as bad as it is going to get for the US economy. In a decade, the idea of using Federal Departments to destroy large parts of the economy in pursuit of ideological goals will be widely reviled as the madness it is. The need to repair the Little Bosnias which will have sprung up in a dozen major cities by then will take precedent.
The pendulum will swing back. America may have passed its peak, but there are still many pendulum swings left before we end as Rome did.
The accumulated wealth and infrastructure of that period lasted centuries. By the time the wealth and infrastructure needed replenishing, the non-natives who ran things did not have the knowledge or energy for renewal.
Our wealth and infrastructure is dissipating much faster. A few election cycles after this amnesty and we will BE Mexico, which will still look fairly good compared to the rest of the Third World.
Astute observations.
The governor (Lupicinus) and dux (Maximus) that Emperor Valens put in charge of the Goth operation were disastrously incompetent, corrupt and cruel. Which was a significant part of the problem that developed - and led to Adrianople - and the destruction of the Army of the Eastern Empire.
All this improvement in communications will just make the end faster. Watch as China Folds up fast—when the peasants rise up. Watch as cell phones help Revolution—riots and in time a new socialist state where the “Rich” will be killed and the wealth taken—there gated communities will not keep out the masses of rebels. Think Russia not France. Welcome to the workers paradise.
I’d point out that Rome didn’t actually collapse until after the Empire converted to Christianity, and Edward Gibbon actually blames the switch to Christianity for the collapse.
A lot of people have a vague, ill-informed notion of what Rome was like, and the timeline of the collapse and why it occurred, that they roll out to push whatever axes they want to grind about America today.
........
recent scholarship has dated complete collapse of the western roman world to about 640 ad. about the time the moslem armies destroyed the roman world in north Africa and Spain—apparently they did the same by raiding on the north side of the Mediterranean too.
I’d point out that Rome didn’t actually collapse until after the Empire converted to Christianity, and Edward Gibbon actually blames the switch to Christianity for the collapse.
A lot of people have a vague, ill-informed notion of what Rome was like, and the timeline of the collapse and why it occurred, that they roll out to push whatever axes they want to grind about America today.
........
recent scholarship has dated complete collapse of the western roman world to about 640 ad. about the time the moslem armies destroyed the roman world in north Africa and Spain—apparently they did the same by raiding on the north side of the Mediterranean too.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.