Like the Ancient Roman Empire

Like the ancient Roman Empire, this world is doomed to fall...
...People scorn the things our leaders do...
Just take a look around and see the writing on the wall...

--Merle Haggard, "Jesus Take Ahold"
(Capitol Records, about 1970)

Although I hate to find myself agreeing with reactionaries or political naifs, I think Merle has a pretty good point here, despite his mixing historical analogies a little. This country today bears a striking resemblance to the declining empire dissected in Gibbon's great study,* and despite this theory's great popularity among fundamentalist Christians, there's little doubt among knowledgeable observers that our empire is going down like a sack of coal falling off a shelf. The only unanswered question is "How long will it take?" Rome took a long, long time sliding into final collapse -- a couple of ticks longer than 300 years, from the advent of Emperor Septimius Severus, in whose reign Gibbon finds the first instance of catastrophic misrule indicative of future disaster, to the unseating of the last feeble remnant of the moribund office by Odoacer, the barbarian king of Italy, in 498.

One such knowledgeable observer, Chalmers Johnson, said in one of his numerous books or articles (I can't find the quote) that Rome collapsed when it was finally overwhelmed by the multitude of enemies it had made as it grew and accumulated power. He also points out the role of insolvency -- in their case and ours -- resulting from endless wars as the primary cause of an empire's inability to defend itself against the enemies it has created.

Another parallel between them and us -- one that's unmistakable and obvious -- is the preservation of traditional forms of republican government by the empires that succeed them, along with an emptying out of their content, producing a government that's a hollow shell of its former self. Thus Augustus, the first Roman emperor, preserved all the offices and forms of the old Republic, most especially the Senate, to whose rule the military dictator paid elaborate lip service. "After a decent resistance," Gibbon says of him, "the crafty tyrant submitted to the orders of the Senate; and consented to receive...the well-known names of PROCONSUL and IMPERATOR." Likewise, our own "imperators" have made a formal show of respecting the powers and dignity of Congress while accumulating more and more power to themselves over the past 60 years, with periods of counter-push from the legislature, as occurred during the Watergate era. This process culminated with the Bush administration's blatant and open subversion of the Constitution and their successful establishment of a "unitary executive." The refusal of Barack Obama to moderate the prosecution of endless war, or to curb the power of the financial corporations, and his usurpation of the Constitutional powers of the Justice Department indicates that the trend will not be reversed, that there's no going back, and that the days of the American Empire are numbered.

But what's the number? How long will this declining empire survive? There's no way of knowing, but I'd say don't hold your breath.

We do know enough, however, to adapt to this changed reality. It's time for the citizens -- the people -- always the forgotten element of the calculus of empire, to move beyond politics, for there is no political solution to the problem of the dying monster. What we need to do now is construct dignified and self-sustaining lives, as independent of the empire in whose belly we reside as possible, and henceforth give it as little time, thought, money, or allegiance as possible.

*Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, usually 3 vols., first published 1776--1788.