Trading the Constitution for Bureaucracy: Rome’s Fall Came from Central Administrators, and so could America’s
In eras of unrest, the scope of politics changes, as subjects once considered outside power’s scope get drawn into contests over who holds it. A subtle but significant example of this shift surfaced two months ago in The New York Times, in an opinion article that politicized history without acknowledging that the historical lens it used was far from definitive. The article, titled “America is an Empire in Decline. That Doesn’t Mean it Has to Fall” by political economist John Rapley, used an interpretation of the Roman Empire’s dissolution to endorse policies favored by the Washington establishment.
As Rapley describes it, Rome’s history with the barbarians who eventually conquered it matches America’s 75-year relationship with countries like China, which have used “growing markets and abundant supplies of labor” to begin to exert political force. But, Rapley argues, unlike Rome, America has an “out” provided by the free market. “Western countries … still retain an edge in knowledge-intensive industries” and “will require workers,” which means that “migration … [is] what stands between the West and absolute economic decline,” as long as we avoid “an unnecessary, [wealth-draining] conflict” with China. In Rapley’s concluding recommendations, Americans should “give up trying to restore [our] past glory through a go-it-alone, America First approach” and work with China on “pressing dangers … such as disease and climate change” while maintaining our global position through our currency, our capital, our military, “the soft power wielded by [our] universities,” “the vast appeal of [our] culture,” and alliances with “a coalition of the like-minded.”
Rapley’s piece supports the social, economic, and foreign policy favored by the Democrats and centrist Republicans who have largely, though not exclusively, guided Washington policymaking for the past 75 years. But its use of Roman history makes it a sharper version of a more recent political trend on the rise since at least the early 2000s: political prognosticators reading America through an interpretation of Rome favored by prominent scholars like Peter Heather, who argue that Rome’s fall came at the hands of foreign barbarians forming powerful new confederations, entering the empire’s domain, and then combining into larger groups the empire could not defeat. In the view of these analysts, Rome’s lessons for America involve harnessing our national government to prevent this fate of outside takeover from present-day threats ranging from Islamists to the Chinese—whether by addressing a “chronic manpower deficit” in our army, attending to national physical health, encouraging migration to boost the workforce, or projecting “soft power” abroad.
But recently, a more subversive academic interpretation of Rome’s fall has developed which justifies a very different politics in America: that of constitutionalists, de-centralizers, and believers in reducing the power of the national state. According to academics who adopt an alternative interpretation, the Roman Empire’s decline came not from the outside but from within. In fact, the story of barbarian takeover was a fiction invented by the very people who really destroyed Rome: imperial bureaucrats who concentrated power under the false justification of protecting the empire from “barbarians,” which in practice was a political label deployed against dissenters. This is a historical story that both rewrites major aspects of Roman history and has serious implications for America today.
Read more at Law & Liberty.