The Trump sequel to Rome's decline and fall
Where 'civilizational erasure' comes from
One day in the late 1440s, the Italian scholar Poggio Braccolini climbed Rome’s Capitoline hill with a friend. Before them stretched the ruins of the ancient empire’s capital city.
Writing three centuries later, Edward Gibbon recounted what they saw: The hill “was formerly the head of the Roman Empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and tributes of so many nations.”
“Cast your eyes on the Palatine hill, and seek among the shapeless and enormous fragments the marble theatre, the obelisks, the colossal statues, the porticos of Nero’s palace: survey the other hills of the city, the vacant space is interrupted only by ruins and gardens. The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of pot-herbs or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.”
The columns of Rome’s magnificent buildings, “founded for eternity, lie prostrate, naked, and broken, like the limbs of a mighty giant.”
To this day, visitors to the ruins of Ancient Rome marvel at the destruction of an empire so powerful — and wonder how it happened.
When Edward Gibbon visited the Eternal City, he too was awed — and inspired. He wrote in his memoirs, “it was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the capital, while the barefooted Friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.”
The first of the six volumes that would become The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (not just of the city of Rome) was published in 1776.
The enormous influence of Gibbon’s treatise endures today. You can read hints of it between the lines of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, with its warning that Europe’s economic decline “is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.”
You can hear echoes of it in the predictions by President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon that wide-scale immigration could doom the American empire, as well as utterly alter the character of Europe.
Perhaps the clearest expression of this view came 10 years ago, just after the Bataclan attack by Islamic State terrorists in Paris, in the form of an op-ed by historian Niall Ferguson. He wrote, ”Like the Roman empire in the early 5th century, Europe has allowed its defences to crumble. As its wealth has grown, so its military prowess has shrunk, along with its self-belief. It has grown decadent in its malls and stadiums. At the same time, it has opened its gates to outsiders who have coveted its wealth without renouncing their ancestral faith.”
Real harm
If the story of Rome’s fall was used purely to fuel debates in academia, it would be mostly harmless. Nostalgia for a golden age, for the glories of the past — combined with despair over what younger generations are doing — is an occupational hazard of growing old. But there is also a tradition, going back thousands of years, of leaders and agitators exploiting the narrative of decline to justify radical power grabs and even violence.
At the turn of the first century BC, the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla used it to murderous effect. Forced by a rival’s maneuvering to leave the city, Sulla struck back, leading his army as it captured Rome.
The historian Edward J. Watts explained what happened next:
The following morning, Sulla summoned an assembly of the people at which he “lamented the condition of the Republic, which had been so long given over to demagogues” and explained that his attack on Rome had been done “as a matter of necessity” to correct populist abuses of the political process by ambitious rabble rousers.
Sulla later promulgated a list of 40 senators and 1600 knights who “were to be executed without trials and their property confiscated,” wrote Watts, in his book The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea.
Sulla saved some of the most stomach-turning violence for the senate meeting in which he announced what form his restored Republic would take. He summoned the stunned senators to a temple overlooking the Circus Maximus and then timed his speech so that he delivered it while 6000 prisoners of war screamed in the circus below as they were executed.
The world has seen many Sulla-like tyrants over the following two millennia. Not least was Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy. “Mussolini saw the fall of the Roman Empire as temporary and reversible,” Watts wrote. The fascists reorganized the military along the lines of Rome’s ancient legions.
“Following Italy’s brutal conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini told the new ‘legionaries’ to ‘salute, after fifteen centuries, the re-appearance of the Empire on the predestined hills of Rome.’ Nearly 800,000 Ethiopians are estimated to have died in the conflict that created this reborn empire.”
Fascinated by Rome
Edward Gibbon was not alone among 18th Century intellectuals in his fascination with the fall of Rome. As historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote in his introduction to the Everyman’s Library edition of Decline and Fall, these thinkers wondered if anyone in Rome “could have foreseen that the civilization of Antiquity would disappear, destroyed by despised Barbarians? Who could then have imagined a Dark Age of 1000 years? And yet it had happened; And if it could happen once, who could guarantee that it would not happen again?”
“This was the problem that haunted the more thoughtful philosophers of the Enlightenment,” wrote Trevor-Roper.
Gibbon came up with his own theory of what destroyed Rome. It’s more complicated than the diagnoses made by the Trumpian theorists of “civilizational erasure,” but it’s still a blunt instrument, outdated by what we know today.
Two hundred and fifty years after Gibbon wrote his opus, experts have learned a lot more about why Rome fell — and recent research demonstrates that the true story is not the one told in the marvelous prose of the Decline and Fall.
Gibbon
Born in 1737, Gibbon was mostly raised by his aunt. His mother died in childbirth and none of Gibbon’s six siblings survived childhood. His father, a Tory MP, sent him to study at Oxford University’s Magdalen College shortly before he turned 15.
In his memoirs, Gibbon would describe his 14-month stint at Oxford as “the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life.” The one consequential product of his time at the university was to become acquainted with Catholic theology, which led to his conversion to Catholicism. (J.D. Vance was another young man who converted, but he did so at 35.)
Gibbon’s conversion risked a scandal that could have forced his expulsion from Oxford and blocked his inheritance. But his father sent him to Lausanne, Switzerland, where a Protestant pastor not only re-converted him but tutored the precocious 16-year-old in the classics.
“If my childish revolt against the religion of my country had not stripped me in time of my academic gown,” Gibbon later wrote, “the five important years, so liberally improved in the studies and conversation of Lausanne, would have been steeped in port and prejudice among the monks of Oxford.” It’s a mark of his devotion to the culture he encountered in Lausanne that he wrote his first book in French and only switched to writing in English at the suggestion of his friend, philosopher David Hume.
It’s good to be the emperor
To Gibbon, the reigns of five successive Roman emperors over an 84-year period formed a kind of golden age.
“If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation, name” the period that began with the accession of Nerva in AD 96 through the reign of Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180. “The vast extent of the Roman Empire was governed by absolute power, under the guidance of virtue and wisdom.”
That sunny description doesn’t hold up, according to Edward Watts. “Anyone who actually looked at what life was like under the Five Good Emperors would hesitate to name it the most happy and prosperous moment in human history. The Age of the Five Good Emperors was an age when it was good to be an emperor. It was a pretty bad time to be almost anyone else.”
There were widespread revolts in territory controlled by Rome and a vicious plague that killed as much as 10% of the empire’s 75 million population.
It is true that things went downhill under Marcus Aurelius’s son and successor Commodus. As Watts notes,
He became increasingly unhinged as the 180s gave way to the 190s. He compelled senators to turn up at the Colosseum to watch him fight as a gladiator and engage in wild beast hunts, at one point twirling the severed head of an ostrich before a group of senators who could barely stifle their laughter. He styled himself the “Roman Hercules” and issued coins and official portraits showing himself draped in the lion skin associated with that hero. He had months and legions renamed in his honor and even proposed that Rome be called Colonia Commodiana to commemorate his refounding of the city.
Rome was beset by famine, disease and civil strife. Gibbon wrote that “every sentiment of virtue and humanity was extinct in the mind of Commodus,” that he maintained a harem of “300 beautiful women and as many boys,” that he resorted to rape, was the first emperor who was “totally devoid of taste” for the arts and preferred “the sports of the circus and amphitheater, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting of wild beasts.”
Fearing for their lives, members of the emperor’s inner circle poisoned Commodus, and to be sure of his death, sent a wrestler to strangle him.
Such was one “decline” of Rome. The empire would experience other tumultuous ups and downs over the centuries that followed.
Four reasons
Near the end of his sixth volume, Gibbon cited four reasons for the fall of Rome. The first was natural causes: fire and floods. The second was the “triumph of barbarism and religion,” namely Christianity, which Gibbon blamed for weakening Rome’s civic culture. The third was the theft and exploitation of Rome’s treasures. And the final factor: internal conflicts among the Romans.
“To Gibbon, the toxic combination of Christianity and Eastern influences deprived the empire that remained of the dynamism that Rome at its peak had once possessed,” wrote Watts.
Gibbon devoted nearly 20 years of his life to the Decline and Fall. It was the product of prodigious research. But its historical conclusions could only be as solid as the classical sources he based them on. And more recent research has cast doubt on Gibbon’s arguments.
“For some Western commentators, Gibbon’s diagnosis of Rome’s fall offers an obvious solution,” wrote Peter Heather and John Rapley in their book Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West, “The West is losing its identity in a tide of foreign, especially Muslim, migration; it must shore up its defences, and reaffirm core cultural values, or it is destined to tread the same path to imperial Armageddon. Roman history as it is understood in the twenty-first century, however, offers some startlingly different lessons for the modern West.”
Blaming Christianity for weakening Rome’s martial spirit makes no sense, particularly in light of the church’s involvement in the Crusades and the Inquisition, Heather and Rapley wrote.
And, the notion of Rome’s economic decline after the “five good emperors” is also flawed. In what Heather and Rapley called “a staggering discovery,” researchers conducting a labor-intensive project of counting pottery shards in the empire’s former territory found “that the trajectory of Roman macroeconomic development was exactly the opposite of what the narrative of decline had supposed.” Economic output reached its highest point in the fourth century, roughly 200 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius.
“Gibbon was wrong,” wrote Heather and Rapley. “The Roman Empire did not endure a long, slow decay from its second-century Golden Age, until its fall became inevitable in the fifth. Imperial prosperity peaked right on the eve of collapse.”
Decline of the West
So then, what to make of the narrative that the West is now in decline? In 1999, Bill Clinton could boast that “the promise of our future is limitless,” with the West consuming 80% of the world’s economic output.
Ten years later, that proportion would shrink to 60%. And Western economies continue to grow more slowly than major parts of the developing world, according to Heather and Rapley’s 2023 book.
But in the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, the concern about Europe’s future is focused more on cultural rather than economic concerns.
It forecasts that “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.”
It’s not clear what “non-European” means; is it code for “non-white”? And if that is the concern, the U.S. is on a path to become “majority minority” sooner than Europe.
What killed Rome
What ended the Roman Empire is far more complex than the barbarian/Christianity explanation.
Heather and Rapley argued that empires like Rome (and the West in the past 75 years) inevitably “create new wealth” in their colonial possessions and other far-flung outposts. Over time, those colonies develop political and military power which they can use to challenge the imperial core. Such a fate befell Rome in the fifth century when the migration of the Huns from eastern to central Europe set in motion two military confederations that challenged Roman troops: the Visigoths and the Vandals.
Like the West does with China, Ancient Rome had a superpower rival: the Persians. And so the Romans had to fight a two-front war against its northern and western adversaries, while opposing Persia in the east.
Rome was an agricultural economy, dependent on taxing landowners. As it lost territory, its tax base contracted, choking off the resources needed to fight off enemies.
An overstretched empire, led by feckless and often illegitimate emperors, collapsed in shame: first, in the Vandal invasion and plunder of Rome in 455 and then, finally, in 476, when the Germanic general Odoacer defeated the Romans and was proclaimed the king of Italy. The western empire of Rome was dead; the eastern empire, based in Constantinople, survived for nearly a thousand more years.
Why migration
By contrast to the Roman Empire, the modern West’s economy is multifaceted, and its confrontation with China’s economy is not a zero-sum game.
Mass migration now isn’t about “barbarians” conquering territory but about people being drawn to the West in search of jobs that can provide them a better life.
The West’s growing wealth has led to smaller families and much longer life expectancy. As a result, a shrinking native workforce has to support a growing number of retirees. The West has a labor shortage and immigrants are on the move to take advantage of the resulting opportunities.
As Heather and Tapley note:
In Britain, Nigel Farage made a career out of blaming the rising cost of Britain’s National Health Service on excess demand generated by immigrants. He’s right that the wards of Britain’s hospitals are filled with foreigners—but most of them are healthcare professionals! Over one-third of the doctors working in the NHS come from abroad, which is broadly in line with the OECD average.
Posting on X on December 7, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote, “Mass migration is theft of the American Dream. It has always been this way, and every position paper, think tank piece, and econometric study suggesting otherwise is paid for by the people getting rich off of the old system.”
It’s a stunning contention. All the available evidence suggests that the dynamism of the American economy — and its world leadership position — owes much to the contributions of generations of immigrants.
Vance is not only denying the truth about immigration, but also trying to inoculate the MAGA movement against rationality by insisting that any evidence contradicting his thesis is automatically suspect.
In other words: Don’t believe anything you hear from the people who actually have done the research.
It is more likely that JD Vance, an opportunist whose ambition is palpable in every comment, represents an attempted "theft of the American Dream" and not the migration he so fears. Thanks, Rich.
An excellent analysis of Gibbon's flawed conclusions and their useful appropriation by those in power.