America's Future: Republic Or Empire?

[Joeve]

This is a transcript of Joe Vecchio's daily "Cup O' Joe Report" podcast, availaible via "screaming audio" here and posted with the permission of the author.

Last September, in an article I wrote comparing America to ancient Rome, I wrote that In giving up their power as citizens, the Romans asked only that the Emperors leave them alone; that the civil service would keep the roads in repair, that there was food enough to eat, plenty of entertainment, and that they could be free to live their lives in peace as long as they posed no threat to the elite class.

But of course if history has taught us anything, it's taught us that no matter how much money or power people have, they always want more. The Bush administration, the Republican leadership and their financial backers are a greater threat to the US than terrorists like Osama bin Laden because they're operating within the system in order to loot it. But the people who have forsworn politics are their enablers. They either don't know or don't care about what's going on, they just want to live their own lives and not have to worry about what's going on in Washington or elsewhere. And I doubt that any of us can convince them that they could make a difference if they wanted to.

What happened to Rome didn't happen overnight. Rome was a Republic many years before it became an Empire, and if America is going to fall as the Roman Empire did, it won't be any time soon. But if it does, it will only partly be because of the power of the corporatists who control the Republicans. It will happen because we allowed it to happen. As I've said before, we can be citizens, or we can be subjects. The choice is still ours.

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[kentuck]

1. Neither.

Third world opportunist. We will be competing with the third World countries for labor. NAFTA was the beginning.

[madrchsod]

2. in a classical sense we are not an empire

nor will we ever be one. if we don`t change direction we will become a second world country.

[400Years]

3. I think it's falling from empire now

[Greyhound]

4. While there certainly are many similarities, I don't think a comparison

to Rome holds up too well. We are a much shorter, faster time-line, Rome lasted over a thousand years, we'll be lucky to make it another hundred. Rome forbade the legions from entering the city for that entire time, right up to the end, we have blackwater and the military on our streets already. The Romans regularly killed their leaders and those that abused too much and it was tolerated as an expense of doing business, we protect them as if their deaths would really matter.
If you think about how much we have changed in just the last 20 years, and how much more it has changed in the last 5, I don't think we have the stability and systems of control in place to hold it together for very much longer.

[Joeve]

5. I agree

To be honest, our situation more resembles ancient Athens than Rome, but there are still enough similarities for a reasonable comparison.