Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

From the publisher:
The rise and fall of ancient Rome has been on American minds from the beginning of our republic. Today we focus less on the Roman Republic than on the empire that took its place. Depending on who's doing the talking, the history of Rome serves as either a triumphal call to action or a dire warning of imminent collapse.

In Are We Rome? the esteemed editor and author Cullen Murphy reveals a wide array of similarities between the two empires: the blinkered, insular culture of our capitals; the debilitating effect of bribery in public life; the paradoxical issue of borders; and the weakening of the body politic through various forms of privatization. Murphy persuasively argues that we most resemble Rome in the burgeoning corruption of our government and in our arrogant ignorance of the world outside—two things that must be changed if we are to avoid Rome’s fate.

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Reviews

“In his provocative and lively Are We Rome? Cullen Murphy provides these requisite caveats as he engages in a serious effort to draw lessons from a comparison of America’s situation today with that of imperial Rome.”
~The New York Times, May 13, 2007

“Murphy writes that ‘Americans have been casting eyes back to ancient Rome since before the Revolution,” and goes on to interrogate the comparisons drawn both by ‘triumphalists,’ who see the world’s only superpower in terms of the Roman Empire at its height, and by ‘declinists,’ who see America as ‘dangerously overcommitted abroad and rusted out at home,’ like Rome before its fall. Murphy makes telling points about the solipsism of political élites and the impact of corruption and cronyism on civil society, but he stops short of predicting America’s fall. (Indeed, he argues that it is simplistic to say that Rome fell.) Instead, he points to a malaise exemplified by the debasement of the term ‘franchise,’ once associated with freedom to vote, and now with commerce: ‘Here, in miniature, is the political history of America.’ Murphy prescribes antidotes, and finds grounds for cautious optimism in the words of Livy: ‘An empire remains powerful so long as its subjects rejoice in it.’”
~The New Yorker, May 28, 2007

“Lurid images of America as a new Roman Empire—either striding the globe or tottering toward collapse, or both—are fashionable among pundits of all stripes these days. Vanity Fair editor Murphy (The Word According to Eve) gives the trope a more restrained and thoughtful reading. He allows that, with its robust democracy, dynamic economy and technological wizardry, America is a far cry from Rome’s static slave society. But he sees a number of parallels: like Rome, America is a vast, multicultural state, burdened with an expensive and overstretched military, uneasy about its porous borders, with a messianic sense of global mission and a solipsistic tendency to misunderstand and belittle foreign cultures. Some of the links Murphy draws, like his comparison of barbarian invaders of the late Empire to foreign corporations buying up American assets, are purely metaphorical. But others, especially his likening of the corrupt Roman patronage system to America's mania for privatizing government services—a ‘deflection of public purpose by private interest’—are specific and compelling. Murphy wears his erudition lightly and delivers a lucid, pithy and perceptive study in comparative history, with some sharp points.”
~Publishers Weekly, March 19, 2007

“Mr. Murphy has a gift for striking juxtapositions, whereby America seems to hover above the outlines of Rome like an image in a stereoscope. Hadrian's Wall, built to secure the Empire's northern border in Scotland, becomes a forerunner of America's border fence along the Rio Grande. The standardized architecture of Roman military camps, identical from Britain to Syria, reminds Mr. Murphy of Bagram Air Force base, a simulacrum of an American town built in the middle of Afghanistan. In one passage, Mr. Murphy jumbles up quotations from the e-mails of American soldiers with scraps of writing unearthed from the Roman army camp at Vindolanda. Two thousand years, he shows, have not made much difference in a soldier's daily life. Imaginative echoes like these make ‘Are We Rome?’ a book to muse over.”
~The New York Sun, May 16, 2007

“As Cullen Murphy stands on the west side of Capitol Hill, gazing in the direction of the Mall, he sees what the tourists around him see: the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian museums, the Washington Monument and, shining white in the distance, the Lincoln Memorial. But unlike the tourists, Murphy is imagining these things in ruins. The monument toppled, perhaps. Marble museums cracked and broken. Kudzu engulfing the temple to the Great Emancipator. And why not? The man has spent years mulling the American future and the ancient past. Murphy's new book -- titled, simply, ‘Are We Rome?’ -- is an extended examination of one of the most contested historical analogies around.”
~The Washington Post, June 30, 2007