Americans have become increasingly fond of comparing the United States to ancient Rome.
Usually this happens shortly after someone cuts them off in traffic, Congress passes another 4,000-page bill no one has read, or a billionaire launches himself into orbit wearing sunglasses shaped like democracy’s final warning.
Personally, I blame cable television.
And history.
Mostly cable television.
Still, the comparison lingers because deep down many of us suspect something strange is happening to the Republic.
Rome once dominated much of the known world with disciplined armies, engineering genius, enormous wealth, and enough confidence to build roads straight through mountains simply because mountains were being uncooperative.1
America has interstate highways, aircraft carriers, trillion-dollar tech companies, and six streaming services devoted entirely to documentaries about serial killers who collect decorative spoons.
Civilizations evolve.
Unfortunately, so do empires.
The great historian Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not merely as a chronology of emperors stabbing one another in creatively educational ways, but as a study of what happens when a civilization slowly loses confidence in itself.2
That was the genius of Gibbon.
He looked less at isolated disasters and more at national exhaustion.
The barbarians did not destroy Rome overnight.
They merely arrived after Rome had spent centuries arguing with itself, overextending itself, corrupting itself, taxing itself senseless, and entertaining itself into a semi-conscious state.3
Which, admittedly, sounds uncomfortably familiar.
Modern America increasingly resembles a civilization attempting to govern itself through outrage, pharmaceuticals, and password recovery emails.
Every day we awaken inside a gladiatorial arena powered by Wi-Fi.
Romans once gathered at the Colosseum to scream at men fighting lions.4
Today we gather on social media to scream at strangers holding different opinions about electric cars, gluten, or Batman casting decisions.
Progress marches on.
Rome had bread and circuses.5
America has food delivery apps and unlimited broadband.
The Romans distracted themselves with chariot races.
We distract ourselves by watching billionaires argue with podcasters for three straight hours while astronauts, influencers, and elected officials simultaneously sell nutritional supplements.
Again, civilizations evolve.
The Roman Senate became increasingly theatrical near the end.6
That may explain why modern congressional hearings sometimes resemble unsuccessful auditions for a legal drama called Law & Disorderly Conduct.
Everyone speaks.
Nobody listens.
Several people appear moments away from requiring medication.
And yet — despite all this — America is not Rome.
That distinction matters.
Rome eventually concentrated power so heavily that everything depended upon the competence of whichever unstable individual happened to be wearing purple and declaring himself partially divine.7
America, by contrast, distributes power among states, courts, agencies, corporations, billionaires, activist groups, social media mobs, and at least three men broadcasting geopolitical analysis from lawn chairs in Florida.8
This creates confusion.
But confusion can be healthy.
A rigid civilization snaps.
A chaotic civilization sometimes adapts.
Rome also depended heavily upon conquest, extraction, and slavery.9
America, for all its flaws, still possesses an astonishing engine of invention.
People continue arriving here from around the world believing they can build something better.10
That matters enormously.
Nobody risked crossing shark-infested waters to become assistant manager of a collapsing civilization.
The deeper danger may not be military decline or economic collapse.
It may be exhaustion.
A growing sense among ordinary citizens that the system no longer belongs to them.
That the game is somehow fixed.
That laws apply differently depending on wealth, influence, or ideological usefulness.
Late Rome suffered from precisely that feeling.11
When citizens stop believing institutions are fair, they slowly withdraw emotionally from public life.
Empires often die spiritually before they die physically.
Still, America retains one enormous advantage over Rome:
We criticize ourselves constantly.
Endlessly.
Sometimes professionally.
Romans tended to view criticism of Rome as disloyalty.12
Americans treat criticism as a national hobby.
We complain about the country while eating tacos invented by Korean chefs in Los Angeles while arguing online using phones assembled from minerals mined on three continents.
That chaotic self-awareness may actually save us.
Or at least delay the barbarians.
Who, incidentally, already appear to own several hedge funds and a podcast network.
History suggests civilizations rarely collapse in one dramatic explosion.
Usually they drift.
They become distracted.
Comfortable.
Performative.
Their citizens slowly lose confidence in institutions, leaders, and eventually one another.
Then one day historians begin writing books with ominously long titles.
At which point it is generally too late.
Still, there is hope.
There is a major difference between ancient Rome and modern America.
One that historians from Gibbon’s era barely noticed because in their world it scarcely existed as a political idea.
This time women can vote.13
Rome ruled much of the known world without ever asking women what they thought.14
Modern America cannot survive a single election cycle without women shaping the outcome.
That may not guarantee wisdom.
But historically speaking, it is one hell of an experiment.
Notes
1 Rome’s period of greatest territorial expansion occurred around AD 117, during the reign of Emperor Trajan.
2 Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776. The final volumes appeared in 1788.
3 Historians usually place the decline of the Western Roman Empire between the 3rd and 5th centuries AD, ending symbolically with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in AD 476.
4 The Colosseum was built mainly between AD 70 and AD 80 under Emperors Vespasian and Titus.
5 “Bread and circuses” comes from the Roman satirist Juvenal, writing around the late 1st or early 2nd century AD.
6 The Roman Senate lost much of its practical power after Augustus became Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC.
7 Roman imperial rule increasingly concentrated authority in the emperor, especially from the 1st century BC onward.
8 The United States Constitution was ratified in 1788 and created a system of divided powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, as well as between federal and state governments.
9 Slavery was central to Roman society and the Roman economy throughout much of the Republic and Empire.
10 Large-scale immigration to the United States accelerated dramatically during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially between 1880 and 1924.
11 The later Roman Empire faced repeated crises involving taxation, military pressure, corruption, inflation, political instability, and declining civic confidence.
12 Roman political culture allowed satire and complaint, but direct criticism of imperial authority could become dangerous under many emperors.
13 American women gained the constitutional right to vote nationally with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
14 Roman women could exercise social, familial, and sometimes financial influence, but they had no direct vote in Roman political assemblies or elections.
