Avoiding America’s decline starts at home

By JAMES P. PINKERTON

LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY

Are we Rome? Is America like the Roman Empire — you know, Declining and Falling, and all that?

No less than the comptroller general of the United States, David Walker, answers yes, citing “striking similarities” between America today and Rome then. And while it’s tempting — at a time of falling bridges, faltering currencies and failing foreign wars — to spot ominous parallels, one huge difference exists, which happily is still in our power to control.

Financial deficits

Walker, head of the federal-watchdogging Government Accountability Office, has been warning for years against unsustainable financial deficits. But he went much further this month when he described Washington, D.C., as a “burning platform,” adding to the litany of woes: “declining moral values and political civility at home, an overconfident and overextended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government.”

So yes, the idea is in the air — as it always has been in the West. Why? Because the Roman Empire was the greatest politico-military achievement of all time. For the better part of six centuries, one city in Italy managed to control much of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Given that historical footprint, it’s little wonder that Rome is always popping up in culture, as well as politics. A just-opened movie, “The Last Legion,” recounts yet another tale about the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in A.D. 476.

American Revolution

And it was exactly 1,300 years later, in 1776, that two Rome-inspired events took place. The first, of course, was the American Revolution and the subsequent establishing of a new republic. The founders were English-speakers, but as they looked around for political inspiration, they settled on the ancient Roman Republic, even dredging up such Latin-derived official titles as president, senator and supreme court justice.

Secondly, 1776 brought a wistful note, as well. By coincidence, that same year, Englishman Edward Gibbon published the first volume of his monumental series, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” Gibbon’s erudition and poetic pessimism had a massive effect on Western historical consciousness, bolstering an already powerful human instinct: to search the past for clues about the future.

The latest such past-as-prologue effort comes from Cullen Murphy, whose new book, “Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America,” argues that then-now comparisons are indeed valid. Reflecting the times in which we live, Murphy emphasizes the issue of military ambition; the Romans in their day, he observes, believed that they were uniquely destined to manage the world. And they were — for a while.

Similarities

OK, so there are many similarities, of which we should be mindful.

Now here’s the big difference: As with any empire, the Roman Empire was always a multicultural construct. That is, for all those centuries a few million Latin-speakers managed to conquer and control other populations, who outnumbered the Romans by perhaps 25 to 1.

And when Roman military might failed, the empire fell. It was only natural that the various conquered peoples — Britons, Germans, Egyptians — would all then go their separate ways. What was left of Rome, politically, was the idea of Italy as a distinct entity. And so today, 16 centuries later, there’s an Italian state, with its capital in Rome, composed mostly of Italians. Multicultural empires may fall, but unicultural countries endure.

Lesson for America

So what’s the lesson for America? What is it that’s still within our power to control? Our overseas military prizes will come and go; it’s this country that we must keep. To be blunt, we are better off having let go of the Philippines and Vietnam, and will be soon enough with Iraq.

Because the fate of America will be determined right here, on this continent. For as long as we can protect our border and our sovereignty, while preserving our language and culture, there will always be an America.

X Pinkerton is a columnist for Long Island Newsday. Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service