I recently heard on Fox News that a second Great Depression is one we would never recover from. The panel also said that the problems we had were akin to the Romans in many ways. Obesity became a growing problem with them as it has with us; We’ve also overstretched our military, as the Romans did. The Roman Senate also was full of Senators who thought only of themselves, not of what their jobs mean. Our Congress people nowadays do what ever they have to to keep their kushy jobs, and that even means passing whatever laws the Welfare Class want passed so that they can continue to sit home and let the Government take care of them. There was also a growing gap between rich and poor, and given the recent debacle of Rep. Anthony Weiner, a heavy addiction to pornography. These were the problems that the Roman Empire faced at their decline, and they’re a lot like our problems. Is it fate? I know that “nothing gold can stay”, but can’t America last a little while longer?
The fascination with End Times apparently extends beyond the fanatical Biblical prophecy crowd.
Yes, there are many similarities between America and Rome. Of course America will eventually not be the dominant power. The two statements aren’t causally connected, though.
What does “we could never recover” even mean? America would be permanently devastated after another another big recession? This recession is worse than the Great Depression in many ways, notably unemployment and property value decline. Do you really think we’ll never come out of it?
It’s all true. The Huns are due ramsacking D.C. any time now.
Well, there’s your first problem.
Yeah, the Welfare Class is the class that’s running things. Yup.
Fox News is 100% bullshit. Stop watching it.
I don’t think that the comparison works. Are they talking about the fall of the Roman Republic during the time of Julius Caesar or the fall of the Western Roman Empire some 500 years later.
You can’t really blame the Senators for the fall of the Empire since by that time the Senate was essentially useless and all power was concentrated in the hands of the Emperor. The Emperor was more concerned with keeping the army happy as they were the ones who picked the Emperor and who decided if he would keep his throne. I can’t think of an Emperor who overthrew another Emperior who was solely a Senator and not associated with the Army as a general.
Fox News is 100% bullshit. Stop watching it.
What does that even mean?
That tens of millions of people would die of famine and disease provoking revolution and civil war and the US becoming a collection of Balkanized third world dictatorships?
That the US would be economically and military only 9 times more powerful than its nearest rival, rather than 10 times as it is now?
Something in between?
Obesity in Rome was a trait of the ruling classes. It was viewed as being a good thing and a sign of prosperity, as it has always been and still is in all subsistence economies.
Obesity in the US overwhelmingly afflicts the lowest classes. It is a trait of poverty, and if you need to choose between the traits of poverty in ancient Rome (blindness, stunted growth, cretinism, disfigurement etc) and obesity, which are you going to choose?
What does that mean? When was the US military *not *overstretched? How can you tell that it is more overstretched today?
“I desired that the Senate of Rome might appear before me in one large chamber, and a modern representative, in counterview, in another. The first seemed to be an assembly of heroes and demi-gods; the other, a knot of pedlars, pick-pockets, highwaymen, and bullies.” Jonathon Swift, 1726
So “senators who thought only of themselves” is hardly a new phenomenon is it? Since the western democracies have managed to soldier on for the past 250 years despite that being the standard of senators, it hardly seems likely that the current crop is going to end the world, does it?
And isn’t it odd how there can be two directly contradictory viewpoints about the Senators of Rome? Of course the truth lies somewhere between. Some Roman senators were great men, most were trying the best they could in a shitty system and a many thought only of themselves. Exactly like today.
Thus it is and thus it ever was.
So the governments passed laws bailing out massive corporation and extending copyright to over a century, for example, to benefit the “Welfare Class”?
Can you explain how this works?
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, when was there not a growing gap between rich and poor?
So taking photos of one’s penis is going to result in the end of the world, whereas Jefferson raping slaves, Kennedy having innumerable affairs, Clinton sticking cigars into an intern’s twat, or Hoover wearing women’s clothes is not the kind of sexual perversion to be concerned about.
Gotcha.
No, they were problems the Roman Empire always faced. Just as they are problems the US always faced.
I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you are asking an honest question.
First of all, stop listening to Fox News. They spread ignorance, they don’t fight it.
Second of all, the comparison is invalid because we are nothing like the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was basically a terror state. 80-90 percent of its population was enslaved. It expanded via military conquest. At its greatest extent it was ruled by dictators who had no limits on their power (I’ve been reading ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ and it was the military who decided who the dictators would be. The Christians took over the Empire at its zenith and ran it down over the course of several hundred years. I’d argue that the old pagan Romans were more suited to running an empire based on military conquest. Americans don’t have an empire, we don’t even have colonies. We don’t tax anybody in Europe and Asia. We’re strictly a trade empire. I think what might ultimately destroy America is the Chinese discovery that you can have a totalitarian government running a capitalist economy. Very bad news for democracy. But that is far down the road.
Obesity wasn’t a growing problem during the Roman empire. Starvation was. Rome was constantly worried about food supply and on the verge of famine, and repeatedly wracked by one famine after another.
I wouldn’t agree with that. By the time the Empire became Christian, it had already been through the Crisis of the Third Century and post-tetrarchy civil war. While it’s true that the Christian emperors didn’t do much to stop the slide and that, as a rule, most of the Christian Emperors weren’t all that good (exceptions being made for Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian I, Heraclius, John Komnenos and Manuel Komnenos), but it was more that they weren’t able to reverse its decay rather than being responsible for the decay in the first place.
I would be very cautious about generalizing any historical lessons from pre-industrial times to any situation after the Industrial Revolution. Our society is as different from Rome’s as Rome’s from a stone-age tribe in New Guinea.
American primacy will last nowhere as long as Roman.
All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans and us have in common?
I always thought a comparison to the Roman Republic was more apt.
Esp. with regards to capitalism run wild, agressive foreign policies and a circus democracy.
We still have to wait for the function of president to truly become for life and/or hereditary.
Although the function does already have some godly aspects, in how he is revered .
Well, that’s what Phil Dick thought, kinda.
You need a constitutional monarch to attract the people’s adoration and deflect it from the ones with real power. Royalty is rather expensive in castles and jewelry and fine ships and clothes, etc. but apparently good for democracy. If you want, you can borrow one of ours to start your own line.
Revered? I have a hard time seeing that, considering how viciously an American president of either party is attacked by the other party. In any case, mocking our political leaders, presidential or otherwise, is a longstanding American tradition. May it always be so.
Well we are agreed on the basic point that the Christian Romans didn’t really do much to extend the Roman empire’s reign, so I won’t debate the point.
We had one of those. It wasn’t that expensive. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, so I don’t know why we didn’t replace him when he died.