Whoa. Very interesting and insightful, as we have come to expect from the Twilight Patriot. (A thought: were we in our period of ascendancy, rather than in our period of decline, would we get equivalently-good analyses of events from you, and others? Or does it take the signs of impending collapse to stimulate deep insight?)
People who sense what is happening in America and the West generally almost always analogize the process to the end of the Roman Empire. But actually, the more relevant episode is the (extended) end of the Roman Republic. Wonderful movies could be made about that period, but of course will not be.
I'm glad you enjoyed my thoughts here. And I do agree with the idea that most of the really insightful historical thinkers appear in ages of decline. Not only that, but a lot of them were exiles from their own countries, starting with Herodotus of himself, who fled Persian-ruled Hallicarnasus, wandered all over the Hellenic world, and eventually settled in Athens. It seems to me that there is something about watching the society you love coming unglued that prods people into trying really hard to understand how that society worked in the first place. Arnold Toynbee talks about this theme a bit, near the end of his "Study of Civilization;" he concludes that the effort to make sense of the catastrophe of World War I was what stimulated the best historical works of his own generation.
Now, as for the Roman Republic/Empire thing, you've got to remember (especially because I've devoted at least one whole post to it)...
...that there was no formal change that marked the boundary between the Republican and the Empire. Legally, they were the same thing. The Caesars and their successors used titles like "Imperator" and "Princeps Senatus" because they originally sounded humbler than "Rex." And the Senators, Consuls, Tribunes, Praetors, etc. continued to be elected on schedule. They just didn't have nearly as much power as they used to.
I don't think that America's future is going to include a formal transition from Republic to Empire, either. To begin with, it would not make political sense to formally abolish the Republic, when nearly all of the people here love the idea of a Republic, and hate the trappings of monarchy. (And one could argue, quite convincingly, that our republican institutions have ALREADY been stripped of most of their power by the New Deal bureaucracy, the Warren/Burger Courts, and an increasingly independent war/foreign policy apparatus. Of course very few people ever call these events "the End of the Republic" because elections are still happening on schedule. But elections were also happening on schedule when Augustus ruled in Rome).
On the other hand, I do not think we're quite in the "Fall of Rome" stage either. More like the situation in AD 180, in the last year of Marcus Aurelius. The empire has enjoyed a long period of orderly succession and internal peace, but there are also big problems: real economic productivity is in a slow but steady decline, the population is shrinking, the borders are growing porous, and with the old republican institutions badly atrophied, the empire has no way to prevent a series of weak leaders from causing so much anarchy in the coming century that Roman civilization will barely make it to even the year 300. (Not that anyone was imagining this yet, since Rome under the Antonine dynasty was extremely stable, and pretty-much everyone who mattered took it for granted that Rome's rise to world domination had been a one-way process).
I think we're going to see something similar with the United States in the 21st century.
Whoa. Very interesting and insightful, as we have come to expect from the Twilight Patriot. (A thought: were we in our period of ascendancy, rather than in our period of decline, would we get equivalently-good analyses of events from you, and others? Or does it take the signs of impending collapse to stimulate deep insight?)
Okay, now read the recent biography of the first Caesar, Adrian Goldsworthy's AUGUSTUS -- FROM REVOLUTIONARY TO EMPEROR [ https://www.amazon.com/Augustus-Revolutionary-Emperor-Adrian-Goldsworthy-ebook/dp/B00JZVKVBI/ ] and comment on that.
People who sense what is happening in America and the West generally almost always analogize the process to the end of the Roman Empire. But actually, the more relevant episode is the (extended) end of the Roman Republic. Wonderful movies could be made about that period, but of course will not be.
Doug,
I'm glad you enjoyed my thoughts here. And I do agree with the idea that most of the really insightful historical thinkers appear in ages of decline. Not only that, but a lot of them were exiles from their own countries, starting with Herodotus of himself, who fled Persian-ruled Hallicarnasus, wandered all over the Hellenic world, and eventually settled in Athens. It seems to me that there is something about watching the society you love coming unglued that prods people into trying really hard to understand how that society worked in the first place. Arnold Toynbee talks about this theme a bit, near the end of his "Study of Civilization;" he concludes that the effort to make sense of the catastrophe of World War I was what stimulated the best historical works of his own generation.
Now, as for the Roman Republic/Empire thing, you've got to remember (especially because I've devoted at least one whole post to it)...
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/revolution-within-the-form-it-can
...that there was no formal change that marked the boundary between the Republican and the Empire. Legally, they were the same thing. The Caesars and their successors used titles like "Imperator" and "Princeps Senatus" because they originally sounded humbler than "Rex." And the Senators, Consuls, Tribunes, Praetors, etc. continued to be elected on schedule. They just didn't have nearly as much power as they used to.
I don't think that America's future is going to include a formal transition from Republic to Empire, either. To begin with, it would not make political sense to formally abolish the Republic, when nearly all of the people here love the idea of a Republic, and hate the trappings of monarchy. (And one could argue, quite convincingly, that our republican institutions have ALREADY been stripped of most of their power by the New Deal bureaucracy, the Warren/Burger Courts, and an increasingly independent war/foreign policy apparatus. Of course very few people ever call these events "the End of the Republic" because elections are still happening on schedule. But elections were also happening on schedule when Augustus ruled in Rome).
On the other hand, I do not think we're quite in the "Fall of Rome" stage either. More like the situation in AD 180, in the last year of Marcus Aurelius. The empire has enjoyed a long period of orderly succession and internal peace, but there are also big problems: real economic productivity is in a slow but steady decline, the population is shrinking, the borders are growing porous, and with the old republican institutions badly atrophied, the empire has no way to prevent a series of weak leaders from causing so much anarchy in the coming century that Roman civilization will barely make it to even the year 300. (Not that anyone was imagining this yet, since Rome under the Antonine dynasty was extremely stable, and pretty-much everyone who mattered took it for granted that Rome's rise to world domination had been a one-way process).
I think we're going to see something similar with the United States in the 21st century.