The Right Loves the Roman Empire for All the Wrong Reasons

New York Times

02-04-2025

The ascendant right wing loves ancient Rome. Its adherents love its glories, they love its ideals of hard, unbending masculinity — and they love the idea that Rome pulled its own greatness apart from within. Building on a longstanding American tradition of tying its history to Rome, the right's leaders have embraced the aesthetic: a bust of Caesar for Steve Bannon, a pen name borrowed from a fourth-century B.C.E. Roman consul for the essayist Michael Anton, a glittering A.I.-generated image of himself as a Roman gladiator to go with the self-proclaimed title 'Imperator of Mars' for Elon Musk.
Those are the visuals. When today's conservatives — from the intellectual wing of MAGA to the so-called New Right — talk of Rome, however, their obsession is not with its glories, but with its decay. They speak of Rome's decline and fall with the zeal of prophets. We need look back only two millenniums, they suggest, for a window into our future. 'Anyone feeling late stage Empire vibes?' Musk once asked on X. The United States, JD Vance has said, is 'in a late-republican period,' referring to the period in which Rome transitioned to empire from aristocratic republic. In the 'best-case scenario' the neo-monarchist thinker Curtis Yarvin has postulated, America faces emulating the fall of the Roman republic. In the worst, she faces the fall of the Roman Empire.
As it was for Rome, so too will it be for America — unless, they suggest, we learn the lessons of history. Whether they focus on the fall of the Roman republic in the late first century B.C., or of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century A.D. (or a historically mash the two into one), the same culprits take the blame: declining morals and declining birthrates. These theories are distorted, but they are distorted in a peculiarly Roman way.
'Rome fell,' Mr. Musk argued in a 2024 podcast with Lex Fridman, 'because the Romans stopped making Romans.' A similar population collapse, he has repeatedly claimed on X, is the biggest crisis facing civilization today. Mr. Bannon, influenced by Edward Gibbon's 18th- century opus, 'The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' came to a different conclusion. Rome disintegrated, he argues, because its moral fiber — the 'Roman virtues of manliness, and service to the state' as he puts it — collapsed under the pressure of barbarian immigration and sensual excess among the elite. Mr. Anton agrees. 'Prosperity and ease,' he wrote, and the 'complacence and decadence' they bred, rotted the empire from within. Years of secularization, cultural war and national shame, these thinkers argue, are now doing the same to America.
It's a convenient intellectual starting place. An imminent political apocalypse naturally requires extreme solutions. The pressures on America, Mr. Anton has suggested, may necessitate the rise of a Caesar, whose 'authoritarian one-man rule' would be 'partially legitimized by necessity.' Mr. Anton is careful to specify that this is not a future he hopes for, but some in his orbit seem to dream of Caesarism as a coming golden age. A new Caesar, according to Mr. Yarvin, is the guarantee of 'cultural peace.' Maybe, Mr. Musk has proposed, what America needs is a Sulla — the military commander who, in the early first century B.C., marched his troops on Rome, became dictator through force and imposed his vision of old-school decency on Rome by slaughtering his political opponents en masse.
The Roman analogies the right uses to justify these conclusions are flawed. Quite apart from the problem of comparing modern America with a Mediterranean empire that flourished before the advent of Christianity, capitalism and mass media, advances in archaeology have now undermined the idea that there was a consistent pattern of population decline in the late republic or the late empire. In addition, decades of scholarship have demonstrated that even if moral malaise existed, it paled in comparison to the complex pressures Rome faced at those moments of crisis. In the first century B.C., for example, years of unbounded territorial expansion brought elite competition to new and violent heights; in the fifth century A.D., plague and grave economic mismanagement made themselves felt just as competitor states strengthened at the borders.
What the right has captured is a tradition established by the Romans themselves, creating an uncanny hall of populist mirrors that reflects millenniums-old contortions into our present. Even as Rome grew into a lush hegemony, the Romans spoke constantly of decline, danger and crisis. The historian Sallust attributed the political convulsions of the late republic to the vices he believed had spread through Rome like a 'deadly plague.' A few decades later, Livy complained that the Romans of his day could 'endure neither our vices nor their cures.' Toward the end of the second century B.C., the Gracchi brothers claimed to have seen Italian fields empty of Italian peasants — the good stock who had built Rome's success were dying out because they could no longer afford to raise families. Nearly 250 years later, the satirist Juvenal complained that rich, vain, selfish women were having abortions to avoid carrying children.
Why were these anxieties so persistent when, as far as historians can tell, they were not rooted in fact? Because they reflected instead the ethos of Roman culture and politics. Ancient thought had a tendency to view history as a story of decay rather than of progress. And more significantly still, those stories were useful.
The narrative of decline allowed politicians throughout Rome's history to claim at one and the same time that Rome was the greatest civilization on Earth and that it was in the sort of existential political crisis that required extraordinary and often unconstitutional political intervention. It suggested there was something special, something intrinsically superior, about the Roman national character that was doubly under threat, the argument ran — from a decline in the number of Romans and a vanishing culture of singular Roman virtue — and that the only hope of its restoration rested on the emergence of a strong leader to reset Rome's course.
Generations of Roman leaders found political weaponry in this fear of degeneration. The Gracchi brothers used their picture of a withering Italian people to call for land reform so radical that it ended in their successive assassinations. Sulla justified his decade of civil war and internecine bloodshed with the claim that he was fixing a dissipated political system.
The most successful player of this game was Rome's first emperor, Augustus. When he came to power after defeating Mark Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium in 31 B.C., he said his rule would be a temporary measure, lasting only until he had 'restored the republic.' He remained in power until his death 45 years later. Autocracy was by then securely established on the ruins of the Roman republic, and Augustus was succeeded without question by his stepson, Tiberius.
The same arguments currently being made by the MAGA right were key to the success of Augustus's regime. During the final struggle of the civil wars, he had claimed to be the protector of old-fashioned Roman values against the threat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's effeminate, eastern degeneracy. Ten years into his reign, Augustus enacted a slew of laws criminalizing adultery, restricting the sorts of partners the Roman upper classes could marry, penalizing the unmarried and rewarding those who had children. The moralizing agenda was key to the justification of his autocracy: Augustus was not a threat to the republic, it suggested, but its savior, here to restore the people and the virtues that had made Rome great. Meanwhile, the republic had ceased to exist.
President Trump is no Augustus — and unlike his allies, he doesn't dwell on Rome — but his strategy often seems strikingly Augustan. It is the promise to 'Make America Great Again' that has carried Mr. Trump to two victories, just as the promise of 'restoration' carried Augustus through five decades of autocracy. The American people, Mr. Trump suggests, are intrinsically suited to triumph. Their natural greatness is simply in need of revival.