Decline, this consciousness of a past greatness that somehow we may be falling short of. Politicians have capitalized on this vulnerability, but they’re missing the point. The narrative of decline and fall of Rome that has prevailed in America’s
Minds has assumed that the fall was both the end of the story and the bad part. What if after the fall is the time we should be concentrating on as modern Americans? There are many theories of what went wrong. There’s corruption, there’s slavery, there’s overextension.
The simplest theory involves a string of military losses that chipped away at its borders. Finally a barbarian defeated the last emperor to rule from Italy. Historians consider this the end of the Western Roman Empire. The part that tends to get all the attention.
After the fall you have the bubonic plague, you have the dark ages, and then eventually you come to the Renaissance. Scholars call the era in between “late antiquity.” This time of transformation gave rise to new systems of government, a new state religion, and artistic experimentation.
And it can be a case study for America. when Rome went away some things were lost, but other things were created and became possible. The idea of modern corporations and business organizations, some concept of individual rights, the first glimmer of what became universities. There was a
Kind of experimentation which was the necessary precondition to the flowering of the Renaissance and onwards. How does the U.S. of today compare to the Rome of the past? Over the last generation there’s almost nothing the national government system seems capable of. You have more and more
National politics becoming a matter that you call tribal or like sports rivalries in a really nasty way. The Empire might be fading, but cities and towns tell a different story at the local level. 80% of Americans across the country and of all different ethnicities and income levels consider the community where they
Lived to be an excellent or quite good place to live. 70 percent of Americans said that they trusted the people in their own neighborhoods. Just as the fall of central power in Rome made way for new possibilities, a weaker national government could lead to stronger local initiative. In almost any area of
Public policy you can think of there are cases of where communities, states, and regions are taking the lead where national policy is not. We’re seeing things like that in western Kansas, little farming town of Spearville just outside Dodge City. Wind turbines becoming a major source of income for farmers.
In every city of the United States you can see city-based activity to plant more trees. It may be the single most effective short-term step to deal with carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. The end of America as we know it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of America.
When a tree falls in the forest there’s suddenly sunlight for the saplings that have been struggling to rise Modern Americans should be thinking about how to avoid the decline and fall of the American Empire, and also, what might come next. Thanks for watching we hope
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