And Rightly So

June 16, 2008

Thomas Madden is an academic historian who came out of his ivory tower after September 11th to set clueless reporters straight about the Crusades. (No, they were not wars of religious aggression by Christians against an innocent Islam.) A Concise History of the Crusades was written to debunk one historical myth; Empires of Trust, our current Main Selection, was conceived to combat another one. Madden was tired of hearing predictions that America was decadent and headed for decline just like the Roman Empire and that George W. Bush was a dictator comparable to Julius Caesar. Knowing that this parallel was absurd (after all, Madden points out, GWB would be another Caesar only if he’d come into office by threatening Washington, D.C., with the U.S. Army –- and if he’d been the second U.S. President to seize power in this manner!), Madden set out to write a book debunking the America-Rome comparison -- only to realize how much America does have in common with Rome. But not with the late, decadent, falling Roman Empire; instead, with the vigorous and successful Roman Republic.

Madden draws a series of fascinating comparisons between Rome and America. Romans and Americans both started out as simple farmers who’d rather mind their own business than run the world. Greeks thought of Romans just the way Europeans think of us, as unsophisticated rubes so stupid we still take religion and morality seriously. Our conquered enemies trust us to treat them with rare justice and even magnanimity. Their indignant complaints when we fall short of our own high standards testify to that trust (just imagine what protesting an Abu Ghraib would get you, from Ghengis Khan or Stalin); Madden has found some startling parallels in Roman history.

And in the process of laying out these comparisons, Madden suggests an answer to a question that’s nagged at me since childhood. My grandmother, a "great lady" of the old Southern school, used to issue dire warnings against slouching at the table. After all, she reminded us, the Romans lay on couches eating peeled grapes, and (she suggested the causal connection was obvious) the barbarians overthrew the Empire. In the course of my formal education, I learned that the Founders consciously modeled the American Republic on the Roman one. Classical political philosophy suggests that monarchies tend to give way to republics, republics to democracies, democracies to tyrannies, and tyrannies to collapse. The Founders were well aware of this historical pattern, and they did their best to make the American Republic proof against decline and fall. But nothing lasts forever in this world. Is America, many conservatives wonder, already in decline? In danger of collapse?

Or, to put the question in the form suggested by my grandmother’s view of things: Just how far along in Roman history are we today? If George W. Bush isn’t Caesar, how long do we have before we should expect a Constitutional crisis, of the sort that Caesar took advantage of, to arise in our Republic? Signs of Roman-scale decadence are not lacking in America today. But one of the most interesting bits of evidence in Madden's book is that the Romans were already complaining about very real decadence (not just sexual immorality, family breakdown, and a collapsing birthrate, but public corruption, metastasizing bureaucracy, and an out-of-control welfare state) -- and confidently expecting that decadence to result in the imminent collapse of Rome -- for hundreds and hundreds of years before those fears were, ultimately, vindicated. Empires of Trust is that rare book that offers an entirely new perspective on an important perennial question.

--Elizabeth Kantor

andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub.com