American decline is real, the only question is whether it’s terminal
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.”
-Plutarch
Of all popular pastimes in American political punditry, comparing modern events to those of Ancient Rome has to be among the most cliched. Ever since Edward Gibbon published his definitive works on the Roman Empire in the 1790s, Rome has been the baseline for all great empires to compare themselves to. Google Ngram reveals that British publishers in the 19th century went through a phase of comparing themselves to late Antiquity. Americans adopted this legacy in the 1940s and have continued the habit into the present day. In many such books, America is compared to the early Roman Republic, skillfully beating its opponents through industrial power and advanced engineering, only to be corrupted by wealth and political infighting. The parallel portends that American democracy will inevitably come to an end and be replaced by some kind of imperial superstate. This same trope has been conjured up by science fiction writers like Orson Scott Card and Harry Turtledove. Its enduring popularity means that political pundits are constantly on the lookout for a Julius Caesar-like figure. The same analogy was made by New York’s Public Theater a little too obliquely in 2017 by having Caesar depicted as a large blonde man with a red tie during his assassination.
Even without reference to Roman history, there are plenty of obvious reasons why American decline is not just a popular fiction story. Recent headlines about ‘de-dollarisation’ aside, economic analyses can trace the very real slowing of American growth rates from the 1950s onwards. As well as the decline in foreign reserve dollars, and the country’s replacement by China as the world’s trading partner in the 21st century. Historians may also notice that America reached the height of its territorial expansion in the 2000s after the takeover of Iraq and Afghanistan, before ceding territory in the 2010s. Domestic statistics paint an even more depressing picture, outlining declines in literacy, university rankings, and demographics. Other signs of social malaise are a steady rise in divorce rates, homelessness, drug addiction, and of course school shootings, which have increased 565% since the year 2000. The icing on the cake is a President with dementia who has to be constantly hurried away from the media lest he is caught on camera uttering inane babble.
Impartial observers may be entitled to ask; if this does not qualify as an empire in decline, what exactly would? The January 20th riots were just the most dramatic example of problems that have beset the old Republic for decades, with few political reformers even attempting to offer solutions, comparisons with the end of ancient Republics start to seem rather less far-fetched. Historical parallels themselves are often a kind of astrology where one reads into them whatever one wants to see, but if one is forced to make comparisons with modern America, one may actually be focusing on the wrong Rome.
The Byzantine Empire, quite different from its Western counterpart, was beset with a host of problems that are remarkably similar to the modern US. It too was a conservative Christian nation that was hugely successful in spreading its political and cultural systems to other civilisations. It had to deal with mass migrations that fundamentally changed its culture and political system, and it was even ravaged by a deadly plague that the emperor himself caught and survived. Like modern America, the Byzantines began to confront a legal system that – as more and more settlers adopted its legal code – had become increasingly complex, contradictory, and well… Byzantine. The result of this legal disarray was that more powers came to be centralised around the emperor who wielded his authority in an increasingly arbitrary way. A side effect of this was hyper-partisanship, where the main two political factions (the Blues and the Greens) vied for influence over the imperial office and began to use whatever legal tricks they could to wrestle power away from him.
Like the Byzantine Empire, the United States also had to deal with the erosion of powers of its elected congress and the increasing centralisation of power under the president because of the need to fight the Cold War and the War on Terror. It is also beset with a saturated legal system where laws are passed through corrupt omnibus packages and filibustered compromises that often in no way resemble original proposals.
Another striking comparison is with the demographic changes that took place in the 8th century in Byzantine politics. The threat of Islam meant that large numbers of non-Greek-speaking migrants began to make up the empire’s territory, many of whom held high positions which came to include the emperor himself. Amidst a war with the Umayyad Caliphate, the newly crowned Syrian-Byzantine emperor interpreted a volcanic eruption as a sign that the end times were near. He then embarked on a campaign of what we now know as iconoclasm, where hordes of militant Christians went around smashing statues and paintings of Jesus or his disciples, lest they offend the eyes of God when the day of judgement came.
It is not a coincidence that as the United States has become demographically more Latin American in the 21st century, its politics have also followed suit. Contested elections, rioting, and legal stalemates are mostly par for the course south of Brownsville, the only difference being that America’s iconoclasts come in the form of radical socialists rather than devout Christians. None of this is to say that migration northwards has not been beneficial for both migrants and host nations, South America has experienced rapid improvements in political stability and standards of living, and Latin migrants are – according to Pew data – fairly well integrated. As the Byzantines also discovered, however, large multi-ethnic populations inside a state’s borders can be a source of significant unrest. Pogroms against Latin merchants in the city encouraged the fourth crusade to sack the city in retaliation in the early 13th century, and ethnic communities were often used as political tools by various factions just as they are in the current US of A.
One way that America does resemble the Roman Republic rather than its later descendant is in terms of business culture. Statistics show that the antitrust laws – designed to break up monopolies – have largely fallen out of use since the 1990s as it was designed for commerce within the US rather than outside it. This lack of antitrust use has also coincided with growing corruption in the American political system. Rather like Roman Generals amassing fortunes abroad and returning home to buy off senators, American capitalism has also become a victim of its own success.
But however dire a story these statistics show of the Land of the Free, things start to look a little rosier when compared with the other world powers that the world currently has to offer.
Russia, which is currently busy sacrificing its demographic future in the fields of Bakhmut, has a divorce and abortion rate that ranks among the worst in the world. As well as an economy that looks to be on the verge of collapse by the end of the year. China meanwhile, which has finished imprisoning its citizens for the last three years is now facing economic stagnation and one of the worst demographic crises in history, largely of its own making, and has recently started implementing Maoist-style collective farm policies in an attempt to (written with no sense of irony) ‘increase food security.’ Its policies on auditing and tech crackdowns have led to an exodus of foreign businesses and declining export revenue. The result of these policies is that America seems on track to win the new Cold War by doing absolutely nothing.
If one really had to pick a rising power from among those on offer, the only real candidate would be India. With half of its population under 25, and thousands of foreign businesses opening manufacturing there, India’s economy is now larger than China’s was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2008 and has this year surpassed China’s population, meaning for the first time in probably over 2000 years, the world has a new most populous country.
What this partly reveals is that the story of the 21st century so far is not so much the decline of the West as it is the rise of the rest. Large economies that rival the West are now present in South Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and soon, even Africa.
Recorded history also shows that decline is always relative rather than linear. America could have been said to be in decline during the recession of the 1990s, the stagflation of the 1970s, the great depression of the 1930s, and of course the 1860s when it almost ceased to exist as a unified country. Cyclical theories of the rise and fall of great powers have been around since Herodotus invented historical comparison, but all of them need to account for the obviously non-cyclical features that exist among states.
The problems that beset the United States are concerning, but like other powers that faced crises in their history, they are likely solvable. Worrying features like laws that prevent third parties from competing fairly, the uselessness of anti-trust, centralisation of presidential powers, and above all hyper-partisanship, all need to be addressed for reform to occur, and the priority should be ensuring electoral integrity and faith in the court system, all of which is necessary to prevent Byzantine America from becoming a reality.
The final fate of American democracy will rest on whether its fundamental system is robust enough to accommodate the enormous changes that have taken place in its population and economic situation. America’s federal system means that states can compete with each other and offer competitive advantages to both companies and voters. This is reflected recently as more businesses relocate to Florida and Texas, something that also proved instrumental in ending covid restrictions and rescinding vaccine mandates. The inability of the president to impose legal restrictions arbitrarily on states is central to American democracy, and stands in sharp contrast to China where no such limitations exist, with the result of an incredibly wasteful zero-covid policy for three years. All of these features mean that the US is still well-placed to be the global leader in technology, science and entertainment in the foreseeable future. Even as more of the world catches up with the innovations of the Western world, they may find it is not so easy to copy its political culture.
John Martin