Maybe not. Then again, maybe so.
Added to greed, avarice, and incompetence was a mix of climate change, unstable borders, and an elite population soaked in corruption. All told, you have a basic understanding of what destroyed the Roman world.
Yes, the history of this civilization often sounds like our own. But then, it sounds like most every other civilization that has existed in any part of the world at any time in history. There is something consistent and familiar everywhere you travel in human history.
Believe it or not, this is where the good news is found. Yes, America is a republic, but it is not, by any means, Rome. This observation was made in correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1819. Jefferson wrote,
I ask myself What was that government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, & the ambition of Caesar to subvert?…I do not say to restore it, because they never had it…if their people indeed had been, like ours, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. ‘restore independance (sic) to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do it’s will.
What is important here is that the American Founders were not naïve about the weaknesses of Rome. In particular, they despised the emperors and sought whatever good they could find in the old republic.
The American Founders admired the Roman virtues of citizenship and piety, and the Roman government balanced by the citizens, Senate, and magistrates. However, there was no idea of “rights” among the Roman citizens. Only power.
The Romans would never have created a “Declaration of Independence” in which these beautiful, high-minded words would be announced: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This sort of thinking could only have emerged after the prohibition of the gladiatorial bloodlettings of the Roman world, or the imperialistic greed of the emperors. It could never have been written by a society that believed the enslavement of human beings to be the norm. While some signers of the Declaration, like all humans, struggled with hypocrisy, their ideals have made America great in a way that Rome could have never imagined.
America, like all republics, has freedoms that allow citizens the right to go insane. No free nation will be free of human nature. The current internal and external threats to America do not have to bring, out of necessity, its destruction.
The good news is that America has stronger foundations than Rome ever knew, and those foundations not only seem to be holding, many Americans are rediscovering those foundations in the midst of a modern contest for the soul of the nation.
And the bad news is, with the rise of an insane, despotic Left in our very midst we now find ourselves obliged to cope with the selfsame struggle the Founding Fathers faced in their own time, a battle waged in one sense or another since the emergence of Western Civilization itself: the neverending struggle between Liberty—ie, Good—and Tyranny—ie, Evil.
The essential nature of our Leftist Enemy is that it MUST rule, that it MUST conquer, that it will countenance NO dissent or disagreement whatsoever. It can leave NO ONE alone and unmolested, to live out his life according to his OWN wishes and beliefs. Thus is our essential problem at once as unneccessary as it is utterly insuperable.
I commend to y’all’s attention my Notable Quotes section over in the right sidebar, NC Reed’s immortal summation in particular: Ain’t no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it. Which, when all is said and done, means that we cannot live peaceably among them. Not for long, we can’t. There can be no comity, no accomodation, no compromise with tyranny. It is a binary solution set: one side must win, and one side must lose. There is truly, literally nothing more to it than just that.
We MUST NOT lose.
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The difference between Rome and our “republic” is Our God. The roman gods were just people not a Creator. The founders attributed all rights to being given by the God of the Bible NOT any state.
The left hates our God, and by proxy us. They hate Him because He makes His creation ACCOUTABLE. They cannot do their perversions without guilt and that is torturing them.
God wins take that to the bank