My Take | A fallen American republic may just well unleash a naked empire
Non-Western intellectuals and strategists have often wrongly equated domestic dysfunction and division in US democracy with imperial decline
If you think TikTok is useless or dangerous, it sometimes helps uncover social trends not otherwise suspected. In 2023, for example, it was revealed that many American men – but not women – thought a lot about the Roman empire. For older men, it’s even more frequent than sex! Edward Gibbon over Pornhub.com?
Unfortunately, the 18th-century British historian skipped the entire Julio-Claudian dynastic line that marked the transition from republic to empire, so there was none of that juicy stuff on Tiberius, Caligula and Nero.
Perhaps contemporary Americans have an intuitive sense that Roman history might have something unsettling to offer them. Foreign misadventures, civil wars, political corruption and dissension might have killed the republic but that eventually gave birth to the greatest empire in the ancient world.
The death of the republic was accelerated by Caesarism; or in the case of Rome, it was literally by Julius Caesar as dictator, and then by first emperor Augustus who kept up the veneer of republicanism while delivering the coup de grace to its half-dead institutions and norms. His imperial heirs didn’t bother to pretend the republic still existed.
I am not American, but am starting to think about the Roman empire quite a bit, especially after reading an intriguing essay in Foreign Affairs, titled “The strange triumph of a broken America: Why power abroad comes with dysfunction at home”.
“By all appearances, the United States is a mess…,” wrote Michael Beckley, a political scientist at Tufts University. “Yet such undeniable American dysfunction has had remarkably little effect on American power, which remains resilient and, in some respects, has even grown … This is the paradox of American power: the United States is a divided country, perpetually perceived as in decline, yet it consistently remains the wealthiest and most powerful state in the world – leaving competitors behind.” Perhaps it’s no paradox at all. America has long been torn between democratic republicanism and empire; between domestic welfare and foreign warfare.
