America really isn’t the new Rome

America is not the new Rome. It really isn’t. You can have fun pulling distorted facts from the past together to push some biased politics. But it’s not meaningful to compare Bush to Caligula.

I’ve tried writing something on the lecture by Rufus Fears to the Heritage Foundation (text,video), which is a right-wing presentation of similar rigor but way more sincerity. However, it’s hard to take a classics professor seriously who says:

Lesson one would be that liberal democracies do not make for good neighbors. The liberal democracies of Greece led to constant war.

Sadly accroding to the transcript there was no the question: Can you name two Greek liberal democracies? I’m assuming you need at least two sides for an inter-state war.*

I could go through the eccentric readings of the past, like the Romans accepting Augustus as a military dictator. Most readings of Augustan propaganda are that Augustus tried to portray himself as refounding the republic. The ARLT blog does a much better job of tackling this than I could.

The video version has questions which were omitted from the transcipt, like the one answered by Fears, Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, which says the limiting of freedom by the Patriot Act could be a good thing. Being a historian of liberty doesn’t mean you have to be for liberty any more than being a historian of witchcraft makes you for witchcraft.

*Oh hang on. Around 44:57 in the video, Fears states Sparta was a democracy. 45:25 he notes that Hitler comes to power in a democracy. I suppose if Sparta and 1930s Germany can be defined as liberal democracies then he has a point.