SpacemanSpiff on Nostr: Tempting to think we are in the Commodus years. I doubt it. If we are Rome this is ...

Tempting to think we are in the Commodus years. I doubt it. If we are Rome this is Sulla vs the Gracchis (Trump). A populist goes against leviathan and goes down in a blaze of glory, cementing a toxic oligarchy that leads to a populist coup a generation later.

On the other hand, if you buy that Brittania was Rome and America is Byzantium, then the 20th century looks a lot like the 6th, a geographic lob of the dying culture to a more defensible location under one last great dynasty. The dynasty is steadily chipped away over dozens of generations as bureacrats, gangsters, allies, and enemies all extract pounds of flesh from the decadent corpes until eventually, they cannot even afford the obvious new weapons to defend themselves.

I see more clear parallels in the latter.