Rome Didn’t Fall In A Day

April 2, 2020 9:09 AM

“ The popular story version of this particular falling empire might focus on a twice-divorced serial philanderer and bullshit artist and make him the villain, rendering his downfall or ultimate triumph the climax of the narrative. But it’s far more likely that the real meat of the issue will be found in a tax code full of sweetheart deals for the ultra-wealthy, the slashed budgets of county public health offices, the lead-contaminated water supplies. And that’s to say nothing of the decades of pointless, self-perpetuating, and almost undiscussed imperial wars that produce no victories but plenty of expenditures in blood and treasure, and a great deal of justified ill will.” How Do You Know If You’re Living Through the Death of an Empire? (Mother Jones) Patrick Wyman, host of the Tides of History and The Fall of Rome Podcast, goes on Trashfuture to discuss late antiquity, measuring imperial fall by letter circulation, western senatorial families as multi-national corporations, and possible future political organizations. (1:17:00)
posted by The Whelk (47 comments total)

jinx!
posted by Freelance Demiurge at 9:17 AM on April 2, 2020

thank you Whelk! I cannot wait to dig into these later!!!
posted by supermedusa at 9:47 AM on April 2, 2020

Just to add one more thing to the cost of war, military research has used a tremendous amount of both money and inventiveness.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:55 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think illth is the right encapsulation here. Or as coined by fellow travelers in my previous field, 'the empty pork barrel'.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:42 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

> Historians will look back at some enormous disaster, either ongoing now or in the decades or centuries to come, and say that it was just the icing on the cake. The foundation had already been laid long before then, in the text of legislation nobody bothered reading, in local elections nobody was following, in speeches nobody thought were important enough to comment on, in a thousand tiny disasters that amounted to a thousand little cuts on the body politic.

I'm just gonna nominate Citizens United. Corporations are people too, and limiting the size of their political donations is limiting their free speech!
posted by egypturnash at 10:57 AM on April 2, 2020 [22 favorites]

CU is bad, but the US survived the Lochner era, which granted corporations a truly extraordinary set of rights under the 14th amendment.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:08 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Do we get a North American equivalent of the Byzantine Empire after the inevitable split?
You think your politics are complicated now?
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:10 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Do we get a North American equivalent of the Byzantine Empire after the inevitable split?
DC moves to the West Coast and California survives for another thousand years?
posted by TrialByMedia at 11:16 AM on April 2, 2020 [12 favorites]

Yaaay trashfuture (and also Well, There's Your Problem)

CU is bad, but the US survived the Lochner era

Former Judge Resigns From the Supreme Court Bar
In a letter to Chief Justice John Roberts, he detailed why he’s lost faith in the court.

The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.

...

It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.

I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.
posted by snuffleupagus at 11:19 AM on April 2, 2020 [47 favorites]

The state religion is QAnon but there's a schism over whether the truth emerges from 4chan or proceeds through 4chan.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 11:21 AM on April 2, 2020 [20 favorites]

DC moves to the West Coast and California survives for another thousand years?

We wouldn't even have to change our flag! It already says California Republic right on it.
posted by sideshow at 11:28 AM on April 2, 2020 [10 favorites]

I'd be tickled pink (future pun intended) if the model for US collapse was the Roman Empire. Which took over a thousand years for it to finally go down.

I think a better model is the much faster collapse of the Soviet Union. A insular bubble of power parasite apparatchiks sucking away the wealth of an entire nation, a nation with a crippled economic model, a spy state, a bloated military, and a disenfranchised, disinterested underclass. A collapse that happened in less than a decade leaving behind an entrenched despotic oligarchy.

I think we're already in the early stages of the oligarchy part.
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 11:59 AM on April 2, 2020 [22 favorites]

The structure of the US is completely different than that of the Soviet Union.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:04 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

The structure of the US is completely different than that of the Soviet Union.

I was thinking more in terms of timeline.

But if the model for collapse is the Roman empire, then great! Only 600 years or so more to go.
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 12:06 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

I think we will go Mysterious Lost Civilization of Easter Island. "Look on my works and ... geeze, what the heck are these things anyways?"
posted by Chitownfats at 12:11 PM on April 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

EETSI - that 600 years you postulate would only be true if we had lasted (thus far) as long as the Roman Empire. So if we say it started to fall after 1500 year, using roughly the same math, we’re maybe in the midst of about a 40 year fall. I figure we’re 10 years into it, optimistically.
I’ll see myself out.
posted by dbmcd at 12:14 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

'Corruption and the Decline of Rome.'
great book.
the court resignation is interesting but given courts in Roman times were for wealth and power, the people had to rely on another, but in a pattern of dependence which paired private power to public politics.


"From early times the praetor as a civil administrator issued an edict stating the procedure by which he would be guided. About 67 BC, he became bound by law to follow his edict. Ultimately, the edict, as modified over centuries, became one of the most important factors in molding and adapting the Roman law to new conditions and to the principles of equity and good faith. Under the emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century AD a “perpetual edict” was codified and published. By that time, however, praetorian jurisdiction had been circumscribed by the emperor. In the late Roman Empire most praetorships disappeared, but the praetor urbanus remained, with the responsibility of providing the public games.

so, the praetor makes a deal, no more.
posted by clavdivs at 12:31 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Roman empire from 6 b.c.e to 293 C.E is 303 years.
(Augustus to Diocletian establishing Tetrarchy)
posted by clavdivs at 12:40 PM on April 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think you know when a man tries to sink a hospital ship by ramming it with a train.
posted by srboisvert at 12:47 PM on April 2, 2020 [17 favorites]

I am not a historian and have not RTFAs, but couldn't a decent argument be made that the 'American Empire' is just an offshoot/last gasp of the British Empire? That would put us at about 500 years (and mess around a bit with Roman Empire analogy, if you then look at American hegemony happening through what has already been the decline of the British Empire).
posted by aiglet at 12:51 PM on April 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

I am not a historian and have not RTFAs, but couldn't a decent argument be made that the 'American Empire' is just an offshoot/last gasp of the British Empire?

No more than one can make an argument that Rome is an offshoot/last gasp of the Hellenic Greeks. While Rome had close cultural ties to Greece and was certainly influenced by Greek cultures, it also had its own interests, characters, and different cultural continuities. The British Empire might have given rise to the USA, but American imperialistic drive has happened on a different timescale to British colonialism and imperialism, and American imperial and interventionist ambitions have risen and fallen as a function of American political and social shifts rather than British or even more broadly European ones.
posted by sciatrix at 1:08 PM on April 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

Or, well, longer me: look, the USA broke off as part of interventionism and encouragement of civil war among European powers, but the loss of the nascent USA didn't stop English colonialism and imperialism, since that kept rolling strong right up through the end of WWII. Upon breaking from the British Empire, the new US nation focused its imperial ambitions on seizing and occupying geographically contiguous regions in a way that was vastly different from the British model of colonialism with relatively few British citizens composing its military. US expansionism was historically driven strongly by slavery politics, and with the exception of the Spanish-American War and a brief spurt around the turn of the twentieth century, post-Civil War the US has generally not opted to exert colonial rule in any way remotely similar to the British colonial model.

I'm not saying they're not both shitty nations which have done a lot of harm, but broadly speaking the US has historically tended to oscillate between "this is ours, forever, let's move our people into it in large numbers and completely disrupt the people currently living there" and "let's engage in covert operations designed to manipulate the leaders of foreign nations into running their own countries in ways beneficial to us, while not otherwise paying much mind to their affairs." By contrast the British empire typically took control of the states it conquered, but tended to use the people living there as part of a serving class or caste rather than engaging in outright genocide in the same way the US was prone to.
posted by sciatrix at 1:25 PM on April 2, 2020 [8 favorites]

Settler-Colonialism

Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism which seeks to replace the original population of the colonized territory with a new society of settlers. As with all forms of colonialism, it is based on exogenous domination, typically organized or supported by an imperial authority. Settler colonialism is enacted by a variety of means ranging from violent depopulation of the previous inhabitants, to more subtle, legal means such as assimilation or recognition of indigenous identity within a colonial framework.
posted by Rumple at 1:27 PM on April 2, 2020 [6 favorites]

Rome Didn’t Fall In A Day

or as the graffiti (circa 1985) put it:

ROME WASN'T BURNED IN A DAY

And America is Rome by the way, extrapolated, of course. I know this because I was high on acid the third time I saw Gladiator, and it suddenly struck me: since when was the Roman Empire worth saving? By a slave yet?

What a dumb movie! But not as dumb as I was the first two times I saw it.
posted by philip-random at 1:47 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I just finished threading through contemporary articles chronicling the rise in unemployment and the impending mortgage crisis and comparing it to the Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s and 1990s that the Bretton Woods Institutions put the sub Saharan economies through - massive layoffs, massive privatization, massive offshoring i.e. imports killing off small businesses.
posted by Mrs Potato at 1:55 PM on April 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'm trying to plug the "Dust bowl' into current events and the metrics are wrong. But I'll admit, that local, state, and federal governments powers are greater then at anytime in U.S. history. A docile congress makes a weaker Senate thus the federal government could be given the Roman equivalent of powers of dictator.

"A dictator could be nominated for different reasons, or causa. The three most common were rei gerundae causa, "for the matter to be done", used in the case of dictators appointed to hold a military command against a specific enemy; comitiorum habendorum causa, for holding the comitia, or elections, when the consuls were unable to do so; and clavi figendi causa, an important religious rite involving the driving of a nail into the wall of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, as a protection against pestilence."

I don't see that happening for now. for example the governor of Michigan exercised powers rarely used to help the people for which i am one. and the federal leader did what he did. and look at the results. local municipal and private action also brings faith in what is left of the polity in this country.
posted by clavdivs at 2:26 PM on April 2, 2020

Upon breaking from the British Empire, the new US nation focused its imperial ambitions on seizing and occupying geographically contiguous regions in a way that was vastly different from the British model of colonialism with relatively few British citizens composing its military.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand (US-style successes) and South Africa and Rhodesia (failures) before World War One, demographic transition and cheap AK47s left us without enough people or power to continue.
posted by alasdair at 2:30 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Empires cast long shadows. Countless civilizations and societies throughout history seem to... just end. If we even know of them before their disappearance. But empires leave trails big and small. Sometimes literally. Much of the Strada Statale 1 still follows the route of the ~240 BC Via Aurelia. Istanbul is still a formidable city of ~15 million souls and remains a crucial gateway between Asia Minor and Europe. You can still find SPQR stamped on Roman manhole covers. While Voltaire famously said "The Holy Roman empire is neither holy, roman, or an empire", still Charles V trekked to Italy in the 16th century to be crowned by the Pope, and this... thing, the Unholy Unroman Nonempire, or whatever it was, lingered on until ~1800. After which the notion was revived in the 20th century by the Nazis as the Drittes Reich. It's even interesting to consider, over too many beers, how many of the tensions & fissures within the EU kind of sort of echo the conquests and limits of Roman imperial power, and the closely related schism between the Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox church. And of course the eagle, symbol of American prowess, arguably originated with the Romans. Specifications and bureaucracies live forever.
posted by dmh at 2:49 PM on April 2, 2020 [13 favorites]

you had me until "over too many beers"

like that's even a thing
posted by elkevelvet at 2:59 PM on April 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

The structure of the US is completely different than that of the Soviet Union.

Australia is a federation, like the USA, but if you had asked me a year ago I would have scoffed at the idea that our various States would put up barriers to prevent travel between them. And yet here we are, and American politicians have suggested doing the same thing. Also, while there have often been differences between State and Federal policy, the present contradictions seem more urgent. I wouldn't say that the US is going down the route of the former Soviet Union, but the gaps exposed between the various States and between the States and the Federal Government makes the USA look more like a union of republics than it did before.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:36 PM on April 2, 2020 [6 favorites]

but the gaps exposed between the various States and between the States and the Federal Government makes the USA look more like a union of republics than it did before.

The whole premise on founding the United States is that the states hated George III more than each other. That's why the constitution is an undemocratic monument to all the states being out for themselves.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 3:41 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

The thing about this is that the United States has always been collapsing. There's Millenarian paranoia baked into it from the beginning.

It's just the logical outcome of exceptionalism.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:54 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

The United States has had one piece of exceptionalism that has probably allowed it to survive so far. It has pretty much grown by a constant influx of an underclass it could sacrifice for the benefit of capitalism. In the '70s much of what was aspirational work for the underclass (manufacturing) shifted to Asia and the US shut the doors. Nixon stabbed US manufacturing in the gut and Reagan struck the coup de grace.

From there where is the underclass supposed to go? It's pretty much been retail front line and food service. They make up something like 20% of the jobs. Largely no unions, barely above minimum wage, little to no benefits. What is there to aspire to? What is there to make your life better? You work 80 hours a week at minimum wage and you still are eligible for food stamps in just about every state in the union. Even college doesn't guarantee success. Hell, we have PhDs in working class professions.

The United States for the past forty years has turned that exceptionalism into hubris and arrogance and it has squandered its hegemony for it. It's like the country decided once they had won the cold war they were invulnerable. Except for the sleeping dragon that was busy working their citizens like slaves to build up both a massive economic war chest and an economy the likes the world will have to construct a new rules system around.

Let's face it, the US traded its hegemony for 4 for $10 t-shirts at Walmart and a false sense of superiority of whites.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 5:18 PM on April 2, 2020 [10 favorites]

I'm very fond of John Michael Greer's posts about the American Empire; he spent several years discussing how empires collapse (and being patiently told that no, it wouldn't happen THIS TIME because reasons...)

Since capital tends to increase steadily over time, but resources are always subject to natural limits, every civilization sooner or later finds itself with more capital than it can maintain, and that tips it into a maintenance crisis: basically, a loss of capital, usually made worse by conflict over who gets to keep how much of their existing shares. If the civilization relies on renewable resources, it simply has to shed enough capital to get down below the level that it can maintain with the resource flows it has available; this is what drives the sort of repeated collapse and recovery rhythm that can be seen, for example, in the history of China.

If the civilization relies on nonrenewable resources, though, the depletion of those resources triggers a downward spiral—catabolic collapse—in which each round of crisis is followed, not by recovery, but by a brief reprieve before the declining resource base forces another maintenance crisis. Rinse and repeat, and pretty soon the capital you can’t afford to maintain any longer amounts to everything that’s left. That’s the extreme form of catabolic collapse, and there’s good reason to think that we’re already seeing the early stages of it in modern industrial civilization.

He's also pointed out how the US is well on its way to becoming a third-world country:

Third World nations import most of their manufactured goods from abroad, while exporting mostly raw materials; that’s been true of the United States for decades now. Third World economies have inadequate domestic capital, and are dependent on loans from abroad; that’s been true of the United States for just about as long. Third World societies are economically burdened by severe problems with public health; the United States ranks dead last for life expectancy among industrial nations, and its rates of infant mortality are on a par with those in Indonesia, so that’s covered. Third World nation are very often governed by kleptocracies – well, let’s not even go there, shall we? [This post was from 2010.]

There are, in fact, precisely two things left that differentiate the United States from any other large, overpopulated, impoverished Third World nation. The first is that the average standard of living here, measured either in money or in terms of energy and resource consumption, stands well above Third World levels – in fact, it’s well above the levels of most industrial nations. The second is that the United States has the world’s most expensive and technologically complex military. Those two factors are closely related...

posted by ErisLordFreedom at 5:39 PM on April 2, 2020 [18 favorites]

Oh, this is great. Yes, this is my take on history as well, thanks to listening to The History of Rome podcast, The Fall of Rome podcast (Now Wyman's Tides of Fate), and the Revolutions podcast.

People never lose. Countries lose. Countries survive when they can drum up yet another round of recruits. Revolutionary armys win when they can somehow find another shipment of food and guns. Politicians win when they can find a new big old bandaid and ducktape the economy back together.

Perfection has never been as good as bloody-minded determination.
posted by rebent at 6:38 PM on April 2, 2020

The end stages of the roman republic feel like a more apt historical analogue for our current time period than the end of the Latin speaking half of the Dominate. The presidency would seem like a natural candidate to grow into a Caesar, especially given the dysfunctional and insular nature of our current legislative branch, but presidential term limits kind of limit that. The seeds are there, though.
posted by eagles123 at 7:11 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Also good! The Early Middle Ages, 284—1000 (Paul Freedman, Yale Courses)
posted by dmh at 7:22 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Comparing the "American Century" to Rome feels vain, at best. At this rate, the United States is going to be the greatest flash in the pan in human history. We are struggling to survive our adolescence.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:43 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is the start of an era I call the great American humbling. China will emerge as the dominant power and we will be forced to accept our role; still a great power but forced to take a secondary role. China has 4x the population, a rising middle class and a has already become the center of manufacturing. I hope we can learn to enjoy our retirement and go gracefully; but we won’t.
posted by interogative mood at 9:56 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I appreciate how our hosts took the time to elaborate how understandings of the 'Fall Of The Roman Empire' are inexorably linked to contemporary political projects (Justinian, Gibbon, the John Birch society) and then they went on to talk about how elite disconnection and diminished state capacity are the real etc. etc.

You can't escape it! It's gonna get you!

The JMG process that ErisLordFreedom mentions above is catabolic collapse, where it's more profitable/easier/simpler to let eg. the bridge fall apart than it is to do necessary boring, routine maintenance.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:13 PM on April 2, 2020 [6 favorites]

exactly what Agrippa saw going on.
posted by clavdivs at 8:26 AM on April 3, 2020

Jared Kushner is definitely a bigger horse's ass than any of Caligula's consul appointees.
posted by benzenedream at 9:32 AM on April 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

Hic tamen vivit.
posted by snuffleupagus at 9:37 AM on April 3, 2020

At this rate, the United States is going to be the greatest flash in the pan in human history.
posted by snuffleupagus 18 hours ago [2 favorites +] [!]

Um, no, that would be Napoleon's empire. I learned such a great appreciation for how things have gone at the national level for so long thanks to the revolutions podcast, especially the season on the French revolution.

I hope we can learn to enjoy our retirement and go gracefully; but we won’t.
posted by interogative mood 16 hours ago [1 favorite +] [!]

When I was a kid I learned that some people in my parents church prayed for God to strike down America for its sin, to humble the country and teach us to follow him again.

But I knew other people at the church who prayed for things like salvation and protection, forgiveness, and for God to reveal his love

At nine or so, the seeds of my leaving the church wer planted. Doomsaying makes me as nervous as folks who smile too much.
posted by rebent at 2:05 PM on April 3, 2020 [3 favorites]

bigger horse's ass than any of Caligula's consul appointees.

Hey, now.
posted by clavdivs at 5:28 PM on April 3, 2020 [5 favorites]

As an outside observer, I would have scoffed at this 20 years ago.
Now I scoff that it is even a question.
FWIW, I don’t think this means an ascendant China will replace it, like the US after the British, much more likely there won’t be globe circling empires for a long time, just nations and federations like the EU that wield some power within their border, but have limits to their ability to project power internationally.

The vast cost of empire is hitting diminishing returns, very clearly at the edges, and I would argue also clearly in the centre as a growing number of Americans see no benefit to international domination in their personal lives.
posted by bystander at 1:43 AM on April 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

Many Americans are not directly aware of the benefits they receive from international denomination, but they certainly don't want to give up cheap gas, 1-2 cars per household, cheap computers, a variety of foods, cheap clothing.... basically everything that's part of everyday life is cheaper for the individuals if your nation gets to set the terms of trade.

Medical services are the exception, because it's not like the empire avoids extracting wealth from its own citizens for the benefits of the ones on top. So we get 3-for-$10 t-shirts and go bankrupt over a broken hip.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:36 PM on April 5, 2020 [5 favorites]