END OF PAX AMERICANA

It’s hard to watch what’s going on in America today without thinking of Rome.

Watching the Superbowl, it’s hard not to picture gladiators in the Coliseum. Injured warriors carted to the locker room on motorized gurneys while women in revealing outfits lead the cheers.

Junk culture, mindless violence, torture as entertainment, necklines plunging, obesity soaring, gangster children, families under financial siege.

Military tasks outsourced to business corporations. Weapons delivered to enemies. Blackwater protecting the State Department. You have to ask, how is Blackwater different from the Praetorian guards?

Democracy perverted, endemic corruption in a plutocratic state. Cooperation unheard of, fundamental problems ignored, glossed over, or kicked down the road.

Like the Romans, U.S. politicians have discovered the dole. The nation is in debt to anyone willing to lend, but as even the Chinese are beginning to realize, the debt will never be repaid. Inflation is coming. The standard of living is declining. The Pax Americana is over. The United States has had it’s day.

The U.S. Senate could just as well be sitting in Rome.

Times are changing. Populations are in motion. White anger increases as white hegemony erodes. Terrorists blow up markets and hotels and airplanes. Look a little like the Germanic migrations, no? The barbarians nibbling at the edges of the Empire? The Angles and Saxons and the Vandals and the Goths?

When the history books are written, they’ll say there were many reasons for what happened to America. They’ll point out that American supremacy was an accident of history to begin with; that the United States was the only major nation to emerge from World War II unscathed; that Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, and Japanese reconstruction created a highly favorable currency regime and trading environment. They’ll point out that this environment was bound to change as global industrialization occurred. Indeed, they’ll say the system had come under strain as early as 1971, when Nixon was forced to close the gold window, and America started printing fiat money without inherent value.

My guess is, they’ll date the beginning of the decline to the War in Vietnam.

Vietnam will be seen as important not for its own sake, but as the hallmark of a wearying series of military engagements that divided the nation and drained it of blood and treasure. These wars will be seen as a sign of hubris, of the arrogance of power, of a mercantile society’s desire to control raw materials, of a consumer society’s addiction to possessions, of a conqueror’s fear of uprising, of a military’s insatiable need for control. With the benefit of hindsight, these wars will be seen as a monumental waste; as a squandering of the nation’s potential, as a series of misguided adventures that ultimately resulted in no gain at all. They will probably also be seen as inevitable.

There are a lot of theories about why Rome fell. Some, like Toynbee and Burke, say the empire was rotten to begin with, based on plunder rather than production. They say that it was doomed to fall after it ceased to expand militarily. J.B. Bury also points to military factors – the decline of the citizen soldier and the enrollment in the army of large numbers of undependable barbarians. Radovan Richta contends the invention of the horseshoe in Germania in the 200s fundamentally altered the balance of military power in favor of the barbarians and away from Rome.

Other historians, like Vegetius, point to economics. The Empire was overextended, they say. The enormous budgets necessary to maintain the roads and the aqueducts and the bureaucracy and the armies required that taxes be raised to such an extent that land was eventually driven out of cultivation, causing a decline in agricultural production. Even then, Ludwig von Mises points out, tax revenues became inadequate, so the Empire was forced to debase its currency, resulting in rampant inflation.

Still other historians, like Edward Gibbon, point to issues of morality. Gibbon, who wrote what is probably the most famous book on the subject (published, appropriately enough, in 1776), lumped the qualities necessary to sustain a society under the heading, “civic virtue.” He believed that the decline of the Roman Empire was ultimately a result, not so much of the particular challenges the society faced, as of a decline in the values on which it was founded. In his opinion, it was the decline in these “civic virtues” that ultimately resulted in the fall of Rome.

Hard work, self-control, fair play, bravery, charity, personal responsibility, respect for the rights of others – these are the values on which the United States was founded.

So what happened, America?