Weekly Mind Dump: The Stench of the End of Empire

A democracy is only as good as its people and if they vote in bad leaders, they then must face the consequences. American civilization is in decline. Can it be saved?

Week of 6/22-6/28, 2025:

How Empires Fall: Rome and America

As the rot in a building’s foundation spreads, predicting its collapse is seldom easy. And you first must identify the decay. If you don’t, you’ll be caught completely off guard when the structure collapses. I watched the Soviet Union closely in the 1980s and early 1990s when working on Afghanistan (and Moscow’s intervention) and then on European affairs at the U.S. State Department. While the intelligence community and our diplomats singled out economic stagnation, corruption, an ossified leadership and social tensions, our government nonetheless was caught completely by surprise when the whole rotten structure imploded like a house of cards in 1991. While we could smell the rot, we missed just how pervasive and lethal it was.

I sense that same stench of rot in America today. The question facing us is whether we are capable and willing to salvage the structure and reconstruct it, or if it’s already too late. There’s a fin de régime gloom about it all.

British historian Arnold Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rise by successfully meeting daunting challenges under the stewardship of dynamic, creative leaders, e.g., George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, etc. And they fall under the misrule of self-serving tyrants and mediocrities, e.g., Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the president’s menagerie of unqualified cabinet misfits. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” Toynbee concluded.

Among the catalysts leading to the decline of the Roman Empire were economic inequality resulting in social unrest and political instability, corruption, a decline in civic engagement along with a focus on personal gain causing the erosion of traditional Roman values, overspending on the military, inequitable taxation, inflation and a debased currency, trade imbalance, pandemics and bad leadership — with Caligula, Nero and Domitian being among the worst.

America’s own bad leadership is both a symptom and a catalyst.

We have a delusional, erratic, corrupt and incompetent president becoming more manic by the day as chaos reigns. Mirroring the worst Roman emperors, he is obsessed with domination and pursues vengeance against those who take issue with him. His daily tirades betray an increasingly unsound mind, confirmed by hundreds of mental health experts. Congressional Republicans display obeisance in public, but in private question their leader’s mental stability — as all can see, for example, with his deranged threats to annex Canada and Greenland and seize the Panama Canal. There is no policy process to speak of. Decision-making is largely concentrated in our own Imperator Americanus and based on whim and grievance, and his misrule is enabled by a catatonic Congress and a subverted Supreme Court.

Job approval for Congress has been languishing in the low double digits for some time. Gerrymandering, voter suppression and unlimited dark money have brought us politicians largely choosing voters rather than the democratic inverse.

The upshot is rising tumult and disorder leading to distrust in their institutions by most Americans, as well as in America itself by just about all nations except tiny El Salvador with its eccentric leader. The big budget-busting bill Trump is now forcing down Congress’s gullet like a fois gras goose is a recipe for accelerating societal decline. A citizen of another country commented in social media, “You don’t live in a democracy. You live in a militarized oligarchy where the 40 richest people, who could fit on a bus, have more wealth than the bottom 60 percent.”

Add to this witches’ brew rising political violence, armed militias, growing racial intolerance, xenophobia, arbitrary arrests, muscling of opposition politicians, mass shootings, a balkanized media, an assault on science and education and a large swath of the population who believe in conspiracy-based superstition.

Weimar Germany

We saw a similar civilizational decline in post-imperial interwar Germany.
Saddled by a punitive peace imposed by its former enemies, Germany, under the Weimar Republic, slid into fourteen years of political gridlock, civil unrest and social and economic chaos.

German society was polarized between insiders and outsiders, or what German historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler describes as a “cartel of traditional power elites” vs “the onslaught of new forces,” comprising those frozen out of political and economic power who were then drawn to extremist factions, notably the Nazi Party. Corporate and labor leaders, the landed aristocracy and other interest groups shortsightedly focused on their individual self-interests at the expense of the nation’s. Wealth and income inequality grew. Hyperinflation and the Great Depression devastated Germans’ lives. Church leaders remained largely silent on the ugly racism that was taking hold.

Much like Rupert Murdoch in our time, media titan Alfred Hugenberg, who owned half of Germany’s newspapers, gave Hitler positive news coverage in his conservative-friendly publications. He also connected Hitler with wealthy industrialists and financiers who then helped fund the Nazi Party, key to its eventual ascendance to power.

Bogus “race science” took hold as Hitler and the Nazis exploited the hatred and divisions to build support for their movement. Charlatans and superstition-mongers gained wide followings.

While history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does often rhyme. What happened to interwar Germany may provide a looking glass into what is now befalling America. Donald Trump swept into office riding a wave of anger and resentment by those who felt disempowered by an out-of-touch political and economic elite. Media attention centers on the white working class, but, ironically, the median income of Trump voters in 2016 was $11,000 higher than that of Clinton voters. In Germany, “the typical Nazi voter was a middle-class, self-employed Protestant who lived on a farm or in a small community,” according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. MAGA voters are heavily rural, White, working class and undereducated.

Germany’s across-the-board political, economic and societal decline, of course, ultimately resulted in its ruination and dismemberment.

Slow Motion Self-destruction

What we are witnessing today is the slow-motion decline of the American empire. As with previous empires, the end will not be apocalyptic, but extended over time, uneven and under the weight, as in the Soviet Union, of our internal contradictions. The stench of decay is in the air. And it’s not just in our politics and economics, but in our collective psychology, a cultural rot. Americans feel more and more unanchored, adrift in a structure whose foundations are crumbling and a time in which hope in the future for themselves and their children is vaporizing. They have lost faith in the institutions that constituted the bedrock of American democracy for two-and-a-half centuries. Millions are then drawn to extremism and strongman rule. History has proven time and again that this results inevitably in catastrophe.

Americans have brought this upon themselves, as I noted in “The Moral Collapse of the American People.” With eyes wide open, they returned to office for a second term “a man who is a convicted felon, found liable for sexual assault and fraud, a prolific liar who attempted a coup d’état against his own government and whose moral comportment competes with that of the most depraved and soulless of history’s lowlifes.” A democracy is only as good as its people and if they vote in bad leaders, they then must face the consequences.

Now for the good news: it may not be too late to stanch the rot and reverse course. But as autocracy under a madman takes firmer root by the day, it may take mass mobilization of many millions and consequent disruption to turn things around, bearing in mind Benjamin Franklin’s counsel, “It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”