How the Roman Empire collapsed: The American exemplar
By Uthman Shodipe-Dosunmu
As a scholar of classical antiquity and history of political thought, I believe I am well positioned to situate the current debacle in America with the eventual unraveling of the Roman Republic which was once the greatest democracy on Mother Earth before the Visigoths intruded upon the realm.
Once, the greatest boast on earth was “Civis Romanus I” – I am a Roman Citizen. Such was the dignity and reverence of Roman citizenship.
There is even an anecdotal exemplary about a Roman Ambassador who confronted a recalcitrant Barbarian monarch by drawing a circle around the ancient monarch insisting he should bow to the demands of the Roman Republic without which he could not leave the drawn circle. Trembling before the Roman might, the subdued suzerain naturally gave way to the Roman authority.
Such then was the pacific Roman dominance wielded with the balance of the sword and democratic pulchritude, magnified by the Augustan beauty that the great Johnson once spoke of “that it would have been better that Augustus was never born or Rome never existed.” In this very contradictory statement inheres the very decline of the American democracy.
Johnson spoke of a great Augustan era that spurred the parade of enlightenment, the recrudescence of commerce, the elevation of literature, the spurring of the Arts, the acclaim of wisdom and then the vitiating of the Republic through venomous populism, the antiquated divisionism, the baiting for blood and the rise of the authoritarian order. And then the eventual fall of Rome.
All human institutions are subjected to a rise and fall, to an effulgence and a withering of the clime, to a brightness and a dawn.
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Christopher Columbus “discovered” America through a navigational fault that eventually decimated the indigenous population, invariably transplanting a foreign composition.
The new conquistadors implanted their truths, their verities, their mores and imported norms. With brute force they wiped out the indigenous entities, enforcing a new order, from murder, slavery, liberative gradualism and the revered Lincolnian emancipatory democracy.
From FDR to Kennedy, America grew in enlightened might and democratic values, enshrining the rights of man in her compositional order.
It eventually grew into that beacon on the hill, the shining North Star upon which the world swoon and embrace with amazement and alluring attraction.
No more. America the beautiful now is adorned in ugly bewildering spectacle. It is now a frightening sight woven in racist divisionism emblematic of a fascist called Trump. The giant of old is thus diminished, crumbling into nothingness, dissolving into the dust, wasting into the vastness of a grim desert.
The world needs the core values of America which enshrine hope for the lost, justice for the deprived, and the reclaiming latitude for those who have lost the redeeming path.
How then to handle the Trumpian sickness. Alas, he represents a dark and unfathomable side of America. Trump and his MAGA crazies are now emblematic of an American demise, a dissolution of all that is righteous and fair, an avulsion and darkling of the brightness of old.
- Prince Uthman Shodipe –Dosunmu, the Oloriekun of Olowogbowo and Apesinola of Okolaba Ẹkun wrote in from the U.S.
