476 Rome, 2008 Washington D.C.
On the Dead End America Reached in Politics, and How the Way Out Has to Begin in Metaphysics
One of the many reasons why Ancient Greece was and remains the greatest among history’s great nations is the fact that Greek civilization never collapsed. It never died the kind of ugly death that Rome died during the 5th century, or the United States has been dying in our days. The Greeks fell in battle: they were defeated by the Macedonians, and later the Romans. Their culture, which was respected and admired by their conquerors, lived on as part of the Macedonian and Roman empires, and took centuries to gradually fade away. The name of Greece continues to ring clean and honorable in our ears because the Greeks never chose their own destruction. They never surrendered their greatness out of their own will.
If one looks at American culture as a whole, it is evident that the United States no longer has a chance to earn such an honor. Thanks to our military strength, there has never been the remotest possibility of our being conquered by a nation like China or the United Arab Emirates—nations that, like Macedon and Rome of old, admire the material fruits of our culture and seek to imitate some of its concrete aspects, but lack the fundamental spirit that made it possible—and more importantly, American culture, taken as a whole, has been rejecting that fundamental spirit.
The collapse of a civilization is a drawn-out process that does not happen within one day, nor even one year. Rome had been declining for centuries before Odoacer—the first Barbarian king—took it over in 476, and that particular year brought little visible change into the lives of the inhabitants of the empire, who continued to refer to themselves as Romans. Similarly, the United States has been adopting Socialist policies ever since the passage of the first “anti-trust” act in 1890; the 2008 election is just another step down a road we have been traveling on since before Ayn Rand was born. Assigning a date to the collapse of a civilization is …