Normally I dismiss all talk of an American Empire, modelled somehow on Roman experience, as seriously ahistorical analogizing. Not only are contemporary circumstances vastly different in the political and social spheres, the pace of technological development - driven in part by our economic structure (another huge difference) - changes us from generation to generation in ways that are unprecedented in human history.
However, we now have a cabal among our rulers that actually seems to have studied their ancient history - and are looking forward to it.1
Anticipating the Empire, our clever historians realize that the British model will not be palatable to Americans. Ideologically, Americans will vigorously resist assuming the "White Man's Burden". Our national arrogance runs in different channels, less noblesse oblige, rougher and more "practical" and, of course, the necessary overt racism is not palatable any longer. A "British" empire also requires far too large an expenditure of blood and treasure for far too little visible gain. Finally, the British model remains a democracy at home, where policy is still subject to electoral result.2
No, the visionaries who see the glorious future of America shrouded in purple do not imagine that an Empire founded upon the British experience has any chance. Their only hope toward an American imperial agenda is to return to Rome.
Rome, city of spectacle and stoicism, deeply conservative and rudely decadent, hated for its hegemony and its homogeneity and attracting all the other nations of the world in their immigrant hordes. Beautiful, violent, mad, and glorious, Rome subjected half the world to the will of its Senate and People and shaped the rest after its image. Brazen eagles marched across the globe, promising a thousand years of peace, constantly warring in order to keep that promise: Rome's borders, patrolled by ever fewer of her distracted citizens and ever more of her greedy allies, were never secure. And her frightened people, held on the knife's edge by this decade's threat (Gauls, Carthaginians, Germans, Persians, Egyptians, Christians...), eagerly gorged themselves on the sight of blood spilled not by their own hands but most definitely in their name, telling themselves that an unsqueamish eye was what kept the sedentary strong, made the coddled brave, and uplifted the rabble beside the powerful.
Our visionaries expect that difficult times will encourage stern measures and strong leaders. Whether or not the new American Empire is also ruled imperially does not matter so much (though a ruling family, influenced by their new intellectual Praetorians, might serve to hold at bay one or two potentially troubling aspects of democracy). It is enough to foster the ambitious and to fuel their lust with offers from the mountaintop. The rest of the population can be dealt with through adroit class warfare: bind the rich with chains of anxious loyalty through tax-cuts and the threat of the angry mob; use every slanderous wedge to split the workers off from and set them against their allies among the intellectuals; drive the poor to true desperation; actively induce civil seizures similar to those of first century BCE Rome.
An economy in ruins, unemployment rampant, and the well-primed mob eager for blood are all in the works. As the economy crumbles and more and more people are forced out of work, forced to the margins of society where the options are few, we will see the hand of the state reach out magnanimously. All other functions of government starved and crippled, the one arm of the state that remains strong will be the military, a military in constant and desperate need for manpower to police the far flung lands where our legions struggle and die - and win the Empire's true gold: glory.
This is one fractured vision of a future America. But before this, there is still a Rubicon to be crossed . . .
. . .
1 Edward Luttwak, influence on the neocon movement's obsession with strategy, authored what seems to me an increasingly important book for understanding today's shaping world: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. I seem to pick on Luttwak, but I actually find him to be the most thought provoking - and therefore most entertaining - of the current crop of government employed conservative thinkers. He's also a bit of a trickster with a biting sense of humor.
2 Unsurprisingly, British commentary is rather partial to their own experience. Niall Ferguson accurately describes exactly why America is unsuited to British Imperialism. He thinks this is a bad thing, that America must ape the British. He seems to miss entirely that (a) America would fail if it tried the British model, and (b) that is exactly why the Roman model is preferred. Ferguson even points out that the British model was influenced by an explicit rejection of the Roman model.
Posted by MartialI am not like other bloggers. Or, at least, it usually seems that way.
I've been sketching this piece for several months - as can be seen by the link to Niall Ferguson's piece from April. I decided to finish it last night and it took me two hours of hard editing to pare down four times as much polished text as I finally included. For example, I had three separate paragraphs about our contemporary image of the city of Rome, all of them pretty good, one of them humorous. " The American popular imagination has been conquered by spectacular visions of the death of the Republic: the time of Caesar, Antony, and Taylor. "
I also intended to discuss both civil unrest and a politically passive populace, two items I thought necessary to carry the framing analogy the distance. So, I had several paragraphs more or less saying the same thing in different ways about provoking unrest, as well as several paragraphs about bread and circuses. I realized that I couldn't simultaneously have a mob rioting in the streets and a spoon-fed, spectacle-led electorate without a lot more connecting exposition. And exposition would ruin the rhetorical flow of a piece like this. I chose to leave out the bread and circuses, figuring that most of my readers already have that particular image of Rome in their minds and have made the easy connection to our own circumstance. I left in the violence of the mob in order to offer a conspiracy theory about the current state of the US economy.
As for my writing style, I appear to have no shame about dropping in unexplained, unexamined - and barely tethered - references from the Bible. However, I don't think I put in quite enough of them, or quote them fully enough, to clue in my readers that they should be on the lookout. " It is enough to foster the ambitious and to fuel their lust with offers from the mountaintop. " Are people aware that this is a reference to Satan's tempting of Jesus in Matthew 4:8-9 and Luke 4:5-7? Such things leap off the page at me, but I can't be sure that others are not confused. Oh well, I blame an upbringing where such references were common currency, and not all of them ironic.
Do I "believe" the theory I suggest? I am not writing history and I don't claim to be. I am not writing journalism, neither reporting the facts nor spinning them. We are living in crazy times and I think that the only way to make some reasonable sense of the world and our place in it is to use as many different tools of interpretation as we can. It is my hope that in my longer pieces, in addition to entertaining, I am offering a variety of different lenses for people look at the world through, while never claiming that the view is the only - or even the best - one (I have a really good view of the Boston skyline from my apartment, but from the roof the view is fantastic; if you go up the hill behind us and around it to the east side, the view from street level becomes positively sublime . . . ).
No, I don't believe that the intellectuals thinking about policy in our government halls give much thought to the shape of the tiger they are riding. (all tigers look unique when you're holding onto their tail). That doesn't mean that we shouldn't.
Posted by: Martial on June 25, 2003 03:57 PM