Decline and fall | 8 November 2018

For a millennium and a half now, one of the great pleasures of being a commentator on current affairs has been comparing a political crisis to the fall of the Roman Empire. Nothing recently has quite so turbo-charged this perennial trend like the presidency of Donald Trump. The flamboyant egotism, the patent amorality, the porn stars: all seem conjured up from the reign of a peculiarly depraved Caesar.

The vague sense that Rome fell because its rulers were decadent — no matter how divorced from historical reality such a myth may be — still lurks in the public imagination. Bill Kristol, one of the most prominent Republicans to have joined the Never Trump movement, summed up the mood with a single dyspeptic tweet: ‘The speed with which we’re recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive. What took Rome centuries we’re achieving in months.’

Anxieties like these, of a Capitol humbled into the dust, of an America that will never be made great again, are nothing new. Today, in the wake of midterms that have demonstrated just how effectively Trump has weaponised immigration as an issue, the New York Times can describe his brand of identity politics as something that ‘has metastasized to states and districts across the country’; back in 1919, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, it was the New York Times that was fretting about Huns and Vandals. ‘The Roman Empire and its civilization,’ it sternly warned then, ‘were destroyed by barbarian hordes.’

Today, Americans fret that Trump’s critics dwell on his claim that the ranks of white nationalists include ‘some very fine people’; back in the decades before the Civil War, opponents of slavery cited the fall of Rome as a warning of what might happen to a society founded on societal injustice.