04-27-2021, 01:23 AM
(04-25-2021, 10:17 AM)David Horn Wrote:(04-24-2021, 10:31 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: There is no timetable for the demise of political systems. The United States of America is already one of the most durable political orders to have ever existed. It now has the second-oldest political order without an unconstitutional or forcible exchange of power...
Yes, I know about the Roman Empire, a valid comparison to the USA for maximal size and influence.... but the Roman Empire was rotten from its inception and lasted over 500 years. The USA keeps redefining itself, usually in positive ways. Donald Trump was the worst redefinition, and it is safe to say that he will not be back politically.
The Roman Republic may be a better comparison. It wasn't perfect -- far from it -- but neither are we. At least conceptually, we align there better than with any kingdom, empire or similar authoritarian structure.
It is telling that the Founding Fathers had little use for the Roman Empire except for monumental architecture. Many knew their Latin, and with the learning of Latin comes a side benefit: one learns the warning signs of a social order (the Roman Empire) f---ing up badly. A model of an American leader was the Roman republican leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who got the powers necessary for saving the system yet stepping down when the danger subsided, as Washington would do in resigning his military commission at the end of the American Revolution. They knew the Bible well, and as one can expect in a society in which the names of Old Testament patriarchs were much in vogue, they knew the political system of ancient Judea well. Although the King James Bible calls the leaders among the Jews "kings" those "kings" were elected. They knew well of the Greeks, but they saw the virtues and vices of both Athens and Sparta and chose the best of both. (The checks and balances that prevented the concentration of power came from Sparta, if without the social regimentation and the militarism). The bicameral legislature was a Venetian touch, the Republic of Venice having had great durability. (Paradoxically the Republic of Venice would not long 0outlast the founding of the United States, Napoleon delivering the death blow to it). Surprisingly the Dutch Republic did not figure much. The Swiss Confederation largely imitated the USA, and not the other way around.
...Maybe some spammers would like to compare the USA to the Third Reich, the Japanese thug Empire, or the Soviet Union... we are clearly nowhere near that evil, and the United States has outlasted all of those by a wide margin. Judeo-Christian ethics are the norm, and those are good for ensuring that when the United States wins a war the defeated power has little cause to strike back. It may be paradoxical, but the era of peace with Germany, Italy, and Japan, when multiplied by three, is rapidly approaching the length of the existence of the USA.
Influence compares to the Roman Empire, Egyptian and Chinese dynasties, and the Caliphate. The British Empire? We just have too much in common for comparison. A historian like Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History found the British Empire and the USA difficult to discuss because they are going concerns. He got to study empires that had gone through their entire lifetimes. He saw a final stage for a civilization when that civilization intertwined with one political system that encompassed the civilization in full, standardizing everything and repressing anything that violated the standards that the system had adopted. That is his "universal state", the final stage of history of a civilization and an empire before its sudden, swift, and catastrophic demise. The system loses its flexibility, its ability to innovate, and its responsibility toward the masses. The barbarians who overthrew the Roman Empire found that the destitute toilers of the great landed estates saw the barbarians as liberators. Give people who have nothing more than their chains, in essence the responsibility to make their irresponsible masters already filthy-rich even more filthy-rich or to indulge their lusts for sybaritic excess while enduring great humiliation, and they will be delighted to tell barbarians where the luxuries are and where the elite wives and daughters of the elites are hiding. For the serfs of the latter decades of the Roman Empire, the barbarian conquest was a great liberation. Sure, we see the laments of the elites -- losing everything, wives and daughters being raped by the conquerors... but the illiterate peasants' tales go unrecorded. Becoming freehold farmers as were their ancestors five hundred years earlier was something to celebrate.
We are far from Toynbee's Universal State, the end stage of a civilization and an empire that controls everything. The imposing edifice of the Universal State barely conceals the internal rot. There can be good times within the Universal State, as Toynbee sees in the era of the four good Antonine Emperors. What would have been the fifth was Commodus, who put an end to that political equivalent of an Indian summer.
The West has had several offers of a Universal State, from Inquisition-era Spain to Napoleon's Empire to the Third Reich to the Soviet Union, all of which offered some dubious perversion of a commonwealth that had terror, repression, and exploitation as norms. All have failed.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.