When conservatives draw parallels to the fall of the Roman Empire and America's future, they invariably invoke moral decline as the key commonality. Here, for example, is conservative columnist LaShawn Barber running down the list of depravities (growing tolerance for adultery; abounding feminism!) in which she finds Roman precursors to our decaying nation today. I confess that I have not yet read Cullen Murphy's new book, Are We Rome?, which examines the parallels between the two empires. But I was struck by something I heard historian and best-selling author Thomas Cahill -- who has a much deeper grip on Roman history than Barber -- tell Bill Moyers recently: "I think, for instance, why did Rome fall? Because of things interior and exterior. The interior part was less and less just taxation. More and more it was the poor and the middle class that bore the burden of taxation. And the wealthy and very wealthy pretended to pay but didn't. And I think we're in a very similar situation with regard to that." (The exterior part, said Cahill, was Rome's xenophobic fear of people trying to get into their city, to which he drew parallels to some American's current reaction to Hispanic immigration.) So yes, conservatives, there are imperial parallels. But the moral outrage crowd so eager to decry America's declining values -- and which uses that complaint as a Thomas Frankian ploy to exacerbate economic equality -- happen to be the same folks whose policy values lead to the very economic circumstances that actually contributed led to Rome's fall. Talk about irony. --Tom Schaller
