Parallels between the collapse of the Roman Empire and America

[Underseer]

[YOUTUBE]o7ZEY_c1e8Q[/YOUTUBE]

The author is appearing on the above show to promote the following book about the fall of the Roman Empire:
https://www.amazon.com/Mortal-Republic-Rome-Fell-Tyranny/dp/0465093817

A basic outline of the process:

1. A small number of people become incredibly wealthy while the majority become poorer.
2. A strongman comes along promising to bring back the days when everyone wasn't so poor. Rallies tend to feature shouting and threats of violence from the leader's rabid followers.
3. Nature of discourse is permanently altered. Violence is now a normal part of political disagreements.
4. Major institutions erode. Nation-state switches from the rule of law to the rule of men, in which things are much less predictable for most because outcomes are based on the whims of the powerful.
5. Along comes Augustus promising to restore order and make everything sane again, provided everyone gives up their freedom and agrees to live under totalitarian rule.

We're currently at step 2.

 

[RVonse]

Nation-state switches from the rule of law to the rule of men, in which things are much less predictable for most because outcomes are based on the whims of the powerful.

If you look at Citizens United and how corporations and the banksters have completely taken over the rule of law and political system in general, I would have guessed we were at #4 already. But that would mean the US Roman Empire was at #4 a long time before Trump was even a candidate.

 

[Trausti]

The parallels are eerie.

To sum up, far from the homogenization of what the Constitutio Antoniniana called the patria communis, that is, the population of the Roman community, internal, social divisions became stronger. Ironically, however, the refinements of status distinctions and social divisions served as a more effective vehicle than any legal measure to allow immigrants to integrate at all levels. What mattered was not whether you were a citizen but whether you could attain equal social or economic status. In this respect, the Roman Empire of the fourth century was the reverse image of the nation-state in the nineteenth century. The juridical personality of the citizen was almost eliminated as frontier controls relaxed and as immigrants were accomodated in ever greater numbers….

 

[Trausti]

Very eerie.

But the attention of the emperor was most seriously engaged, by the important intelligence which he received from the civil and military officers who were intrusted with the defence of the Danube. He was informed, that the North was agitated by a furious tempest; that the irruption of the Huns, an unknown and monstrous race of savages, had subverted the power of the Goths; and that the suppliant multitudes of that warlike nation, whose pride was now humbled in the dust, covered a space of many miles along the banks of the river. With outstretched arms, and pathetic lamentations, they loudly deplored their past misfortunes and their present danger; acknowledged that their only hope of safety was in the clemency of the Roman government; and most solemnly protested, that if the gracious liberality of the emperor would permit them to cultivate the waste lands of Thrace, they should ever hold themselves bound, by the strongest obligations of duty and gratitude, to obey the laws, and to guard the limits, of the republic.

But the most experienced statesman of Europe has never been summoned to consider the propriety, or the danger, of admitting, or rejecting, an innumerable multitude of Barbarians, who are driven by despair and hunger to solicit a settlement on the territories of a civilized nation.

Eerily familiar.

The prayers of the Goths were granted, and their service was accepted by the Imperial court: and orders were immediately despatched to the civil and military governors of the Thracian diocese, to make the necessary preparations for the passage and subsistence of a great people, till a proper and sufficient territory could be allotted for their future residence.

Refugees, migrants, caravan, whatever.

The imprudence of Valens and his ministers had introduced into the heart of the empire a nation of enemies;

Indeed. They ended up killing him.

 

[Derec]

The author is appearing on the above show to promote the following book about the fall of the Roman Empire:
https://www.amazon.com/Mortal-Republic-Rome-Fell-Tyranny/dp/0465093817

A basic outline of the process:

1. A small number of people become incredibly wealthy while the majority become poorer.
2. A strongman comes along promising to bring back the days when everyone wasn't so poor. Rallies tend to feature shouting and threats of violence from the leader's rabid followers.
3. Nature of discourse is permanently altered. Violence is now a normal part of political disagreements.
4. Major institutions erode. Nation-state switches from the rule of law to the rule of men, in which things are much less predictable for most because outcomes are based on the whims of the powerful.
5. Along comes Augustus promising to restore order and make everything sane again, provided everyone gives up their freedom and agrees to live under totalitarian rule.

We're currently at step 2.

Are you even aware of the difference between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire? Octavian stood at the beginning of Empire, not its end.

As to your Step 2, I guess there are a few very wealthy people, but most other people are doing fine. We are doing so fine, we are being told, that we are morally obligated to accept unlimited numbers of Central American and Middle Eastern fakefugees. How do you square saying we are so badly off we resemble the decaying Roman Republic and yet so well off we can absorb unrestricted mass migration with no problems, either economic nor societal?

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

The riches of the world flowed through Rome. Until the capitol of the Roman Empire was moved to Constantinople. Under Diocletian, the Empire was divided into the Western Roman Empire and the Eastern Roman Empire. The Western Roman Empire degenerated and became a shell of itself until Alaric, a general mistreated by the Eastern Roman emperor revolted and sacked Rome. The West soon had emperors who were militarily successful barbarians. Waves of barbarians from the East swarmed over the remnants of the Roman empire. While Africa and Arabia and Persia fell to the Moslems. Islamic jihads and conquests plagued the West for centuries. With Charlemagne and the Catholic church, feudalism came to Europe. The emperor and nobles owned everything, everybody else was a serf with little more than the rags on their backs. Europe was a basket case for centuries after the capital of the Empire left Rome, and Rome and the West became back waters over run by barbarians. From the days of Charlemagne to the Reformation and days of the religious wars, the Roman Catholic Church was a power and not necessarily for good.

 

[lpetrich]

Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny: Edward J. Watts: 9780465093816: Amazon.com: Books -- that's the Roman REPUBLIC, not the Roman Empire.

... A basic outline of the process:

1. A small number of people become incredibly wealthy while the majority become poorer.
2. A strongman comes along promising to bring back the days when everyone wasn't so poor. Rallies tend to feature shouting and threats of violence from the leader's rabid followers.
3. Nature of discourse is permanently altered. Violence is now a normal part of political disagreements.
4. Major institutions erode. Nation-state switches from the rule of law to the rule of men, in which things are much less predictable for most because outcomes are based on the whims of the powerful.
5. Along comes Augustus promising to restore order and make everything sane again, provided everyone gives up their freedom and agrees to live under totalitarian rule.

We're currently at step 2.

That's how the Roman Republic became the Roman Empire. It became top-heavy with aristocrats, and they started fighting among themselves. Some of them, the Gracchi, got some extra support by going the populist route. The Republic became a battleground for ambitious generals, with Julius Caesar famously crossing the Rubicon river with his army and dooming the Republic. He defeated his former colleague and now rival Pompey, but he was in turn assassinated by some conspirators who wanted to restore the Republic. His successors, Mark Antony and Octavian, ruled together for a while, but after they tracked down the conspirators, they split up, with Octavian defeating Antony and becoming Augustus Caesar. He held onto power, and he died of old age. He was succeeded by his chosen successor, Tiberius.

Though the Emperors continued to present themselves as servants of the Senate, it was clear who was the real ruler -- them. The Roman Republic had become a monarchy, the Roman Empire.

 

[lpetrich]

Peter Turchin Secular Cycles - Peter Turchin

Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations—what the authors call secular cycles.

PT and SN discuss in their book the Roman Republic and how it became the Roman Empire.

Peter Turchin War and Peace and War - Peter Turchin

Like Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to make a highly original argument about the rise and fall of empires.

Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society’s capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.

Peter Turchin Ages of Discord - Peter Turchin

Historical analysis shows that long spells of equitable prosperity and internal peace are succeeded by protracted periods of inequity, increasing misery, and political instability. These crisis periods—“Ages of Discord”—tend to share characteristic features, identifiable in many societies throughout history. Modern Americans, for example, may be disconcerted to learn that the US right now has much in common with the Antebellum 1850s and, even more surprisingly, with ancien régime France on the eve of the French Revolution. Can it really be true that our troubled age is nothing new, and that it arises periodically for similar underlying reasons? It can. Ages of Discord marshals a cohesive theory and detailed historical data to show that this is, indeed, the case. The book takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride through American history, from the Era of Good Feelings of the 1820s to our first Age of Discord, which culminated in the American Civil War, to post-WW2 prosperity and, finally, to our present, second Age of Discord.