The Decline and Fall of Home: Part Two

Unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation.
“The Lessons of History,” Will & Ariel Durant

When one considers the full extent of the Roman cataclysm leading to the inevitable fall — the plethora of corrupt and self-promoting politicians, the exposure of unwanted infants (open-air abortion) and the consequent decline in the reproductive ratio, the deterioration of road systems and infrastructure, the degrading of a once-mighty military, and the evident degeneration of sexual morality (as the fifth-century Christian historian Salvian declaimed, “Be ashamed of your lives, no cities are free of impurities”) — one cannot help but note the affinities and correlations between the Roman Empire and the American Republic.

Related: The Decline and Fall of Home: Part One

Both have suffered what has come to be known as the Polybius trap, named after the second-century Greek-Roman historian Polybius, who expounded the notion in his “Histories.” The idea is that once the political equilibrium between the three branches of government — in Rome, the Consulship, Senate, and Tribunate; in America, the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial — is shattered, decline is inevitable. It is as if the various units of the political engine have seized with improperly distributed or stranded energy. The concept of a malign disequilibrium also applies more generally to the entire complex system of social, political, and economic organization of state or empire. Rome and America may be historically distant from one another but there is little doubt that they are ideologically intimate and civilizationally aligned.

The old question unavoidably arises: What is to be done? In The Path to Tyranny, Michael Newton suggests the only possible (if fanciful) answer, the response of a desperate optimist: “How do we fight and oppose the approaching tyranny? Obviously, we must vote in elections and support those in politics who defend our liberty and Constitution… Most important of all, each of us must act as a modern-day Samuel, Solon, Socrates, Cicero, Cato, James Madison… persuading people of the advantages of liberty and informing them of the evils of big government.” A pretty tall order. Newton wrote in 2010, before the plummet in snowflake literacy, the censoring monopoly of the digital platforms, the oppressive COVID mandates of an autocratic government, the advent of Wokeism, the complete DEI annihilation of the University, and the advanced machinery of electoral fraud.

As our greatest political historians have told us, from Polybius to Giambattista Vico to Edward Gibbon to Alexis de Tocqueville to Arnold Toynbee, societies tend to sink into destitution and various forms of tyrannical governance, having failed what Toynbee called the Challenge-and-Response test. Instead of arriving at new solutions, decaying nations and empires are prone to fall back on tired and unavailing practices. “Old errors are easy to repeat,” James O’Donnell concludes in The Ruin of the Roman Empire, “as fading empires, bereft of self-awareness, struggle again to use their old power to preserve themselves, and in so doing risk weakening beyond repair.” One might say, along with Toynbee, that they have failed History’s challenge-response CAPTCHA test, proceeding in robotic rather than responsive fashion.

Niall Ferguson crowns his “Civilization: The West and the Rest” with the suggestion that “Maybe the real threat is posed not by the rise of China, Islam or CO₂ emissions, but by our own loss of faith in the civilization we inherited from our ancestors, [and] by our own pusillanimity—and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.” Is the culture too far gone to allow for political recovery and a true social awakening? Was philosopher Martin Heidegger, despite his unsavory past, right when he said in a Der Spiegel interview, “Only a god can save us.”?

Here, it is necessary to introduce a countervailing view. Edward Watts argues in a polemical tome “The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome” that there was no one decline and fall, but a sequence of such historical declivities. “Rome declined many times,” he writes, “it recovered many times, and, therefore, it seems to offer lessons to people facing similar challenges in less successful or durable states.” In other words, all is not lost. If there is always decline, or rather a skein of linked declines, there is always the possibility of renewal. What, then, could be the problem?

Watts’ analysis cursorily resembles Cullen Murphy’s cheerful conviction in “Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America” that “improvement…invention and reinvention” are facts of American life. The difference is that Watts writes as a passionate and erudite neo-Liberal (or is it neo-Marxist) advocate and victimology maven who dismisses the theory of Roman-American decline for sponsoring a facile, conservative recommitment to so-called “basic values.” He compares the traditional impetus to cultural restoration after a real or perceived fall to Mussolini’s fascist rhetoric and project. “The rhetoric of decline and renewal is a dangerous idea,” he asserts. Why? Because it promotes the wrong sort of renewal, instinct with “disruptive potential,” blaming the victims of its original triumphs for its ensuing decline, and because others in the future — the marginal, the excluded, the racialized, the forgotten, the poor, the innocent — must suffer in the conservative quest for renewal and recovery. Left-wing renewal, good. Right-wing renewal, bad.

The latter, Watts claims, entails an imperial rhetoric “that uses the decline and fall from an idealized Roman past to destabilize existing orders.” Simply put, the story of Rome’s decline is “a ready-made narrative… to justify taking the lives, rights, and property of rivals.” Thus, “various ‘falls of Rome’ were invented to justify wars of reconquest” and to ensure “the birth of new imperial dynasties.” Watt’s thesis is so fantastic and contrived that it survives solely on the basis of credentialism rather than on impartial insight, objective research, and, most importantly, common sense.

No serious scholar denies that there were upticks of renewal in the downward slope of imperial decline — the period of the Five Good Emperors, for example. As Geoffrey Blainey writes in “A Short History of the World,” “Rome was influential during so many centuries that its time of vitality in one field coincided with slumber or sleepiness in another.” But the fact is that Rome ceased to exist except in transformed and miscegenous form as the Holy Roman Empire and in the ghostly evolution of Western civilization with its Judaic, Hellenic, Roman, and Christian hauntings. Watts is beating a dead donkey.

The real problem is that Watts is a progressivist ideologue, a “social justice” academic, who cannot see that the evils he deplores — “the taking of lives, rights and property” — largely constitute the modus operandi, not of genuine conservatives (or classical liberals) but of the Socialist and Communist Left, exemplified by the current Democrat administration in the United States. Its functionaries are not like the later Antonines whom Watts recommends as models of wise stewardship, leaders who “bring society together rather than tearing it apart through recrimination and violence.” They are the very opposite of the Antonines, part of a world that a Left historian like Watts himself inhabits.

Decline is real, for us as it was for Rome. Newton summarizes, “The government’s increased intervention in the economy, including high taxes, price controls, and inflation, which were a direct result of the populace’s demand for wealth redistribution and a central government to administer it, were the main causes of Rome’s decline and ultimate destruction.” The lesson is there to be learned. As the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures if the downward trend is to be slowed or turned around, and such measures are precisely those conservative-inspired initiatives that the Left affects to deplore: small government, lower taxes, protected borders, onshore industry, self-sufficiency, competitive education, judicial reform, free market access, the abolition of censorship, maintenance of heritage, the principle of meritocracy rather than diversity, the sanctity of the family, and the celebration of historical achievements as a counterbalance to the pro forma denigration practiced by Cultural Marxists and Critical Race Theorists. By all means, let us strive for the hard-won, reality-grounded, humanist renewal that, for all we know, may remain unattainable. Let us do what we can to preserve the blessings of liberty and prosperity now under sustained attack. But it’s an uphill battle. It’s far from certain whether another electoral cycle or two can begin to reverse the great declension.

Here the analogy with Rome breaks down or grows somewhat attenuated. In the present context, the prospect of a “New Byzantium” carrying on the traditions and political structures of the Republic for an extended historical period is obviously a geopolitical non-starter. There is no “eastern half” of the American Republic as there was for the Roman Empire with its 1,100-year lease on life, no American Constantinople. It may be conceivable only as a kind of inward or fractal phenomenon in the form of individual states declaring secession from a faltering union, and reclaiming an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, including the practice of fair elections, a responsible media, a sanely regulated free market economy, and genuine representative government. If nothing changes in the grand scheme of things, this may be the only way, however improbable, that what we call America can survive, that is, as a loose amalgam of independent states or as a de facto alliance of self-governing provinces. The idea, once floated by Alan West and Ken Paxton in Texas, still hovers.

As John Haldon writes in “Byzantium: A History,” “the Byzantines actually called themselves Romans” and their “political ideology was founded on [their] identity with the Christian Roman Empire.” Seeing themselves as citizens of an essentially Christian culture is a pregnant homology for a New America, whose people can call themselves Americans and who have returned to their traditional foundations.

Admittedly, these are speculations treating of a problematic future. Be that as it may, we are now witnessing and experiencing what our mentors have foreseen and studied, and what, barring the unforeseen, may be unstoppable, namely, the decline and fall of home.